Passion Doesn’t Equal Profit (Why Your Idea Might Fail)

Sam Vander Wielen: So you decided to start a business because you’re really passionate about something, but now it’s kind of not working. You’re not making enough sales. Your email list isn’t growing, you’re not really getting anybody to engage, period. Or at least not as much as you’d like or as you need them to in order for you, you know, to survive.

Starting my own business will be so fun, you thought. Until, it kind of wasn’t. It might be because loving something doesn’t make it a viable or potentially good business idea. Just because you’re passionate about something, unfortunately doesn’t mean that it will be profitable. So when you have high passion mixed with low strategy, it can lead to some really unfortunate side effects like burnout, disappointment, hurt feelings and so much self blame all on top of a lot of financial stress. But don’t worry. That doesn’t mean that you have to throw your entire business in the garbage or your business idea, if you haven’t kicked it off yet. It might just need a little “zhuzh” that’s Yiddish for like kick it up a notch or like make a little adjustment.

And I am definitely not here advocating for you creating a business that’s profitable, but that you hate, like that’s never me. I don’t do that. I would never suggest that, you do that either. Today we’re just gonna talk about whether we can take something that you’re passionate about and make whatever shifts or pivots that you need to, so it’s actually a profitable business model.

I am trying something a little new around here today because you know I’m a big reader. I’m assuming you’re probably a reader too. I’m breaking today’s episode into three chapters where we’ll talk about how we got here and how to move your business idea towards a profitable one, you feel passionately about. These three chapters are Chapter one: The Perspective, Chapter two: The Letdown and Chapter Three: The Meet Cute.

Okay. Before we hop into chapter one, I need a little prologue for our listeners here who aren’t familiar with my story and my background. So I was a corporate lawyer. I left the law in 2016 to start a health coaching business That was really meant to teach people how to cook. That was gonna be the main like service I provided, and the courses were about cooking.

Everything was about food. The reason that came to be was because. I really, really love cooking. In my free time. I have always loved cooking. Cooking has always been my biggest passion and hobbies, and once I became a lawyer in 2012, it’s also how I started to escape from my terrible nine to five. So I thought like two plus two equals four. I love cooking, therefore, if I start a business on cooking, I will love my business. Voila, I have solved my life’s problem, but I did so many things wrong, and I ended up turning my passion into something that I resented for a long time. And the business wasn’t successful because I approached it in the wrong way. I did not approach it how we’re gonna talk about today. And I didn’t approach it how I ended up approaching my legal business, which was successful almost immediately. And that is why it, it didn’t do well. I know that now.

It was such a great opportunity and lesson that I’m going to weave this story of my first business and where it went wrong in as an example as we chat today.

Alright? Whether you are thinking about starting a business, about your passion, and now you’re listening to this and being like, uhoh, I wanna make sure I do this right, or you already have and you’re not loving it or it’s not going well. I wanna talk through these three chapters that we go through as business owners that lead to this problem and how we fix it.

Chapter one. The perspective. So here’s the conundrum that so many of us find ourselves in at some point or another in our adult lives. You hate your job. You resent driving to your nine to five. You are staring at the clock, waiting for the seconds to count down, to get out of there. You’re spending your free time researching this thing that you love on this side, right? You love something outside of work. For me, it was cooking. Maybe for you, it’s working out. It’s talking about health. It’s uh, crafts, it’s making art, whatever it is, right? And you do what I did and you’re like, let’s make this thing that I love my job, then I will love my job. I’m sick of sitting here at my job hating my job.

Why don’t I make the thing I love outside of my job? My job, right? That was me with the cooking business. I wanted to essentially shove my love for cooking down other people’s throats, like I just thought, like, I love this thing. Therefore, it’s like my pulpit. I’m just gonna like stand here and scream at everybody about cooking, and then they will love cooking, right?

Or I’ll check the people who also love that. Here’s the problem. That I made, the mistake that I made and that so many people who are starting businesses make. You’re taking the wrong perspective. When you start out a business that’s purely based on passion, oftentimes you’re adopting the perspective of yourself, right?

You’re thinking about it from your own perspective and what you love and what you wanna do, and what sounds fun to you, right? But we’re not thinking of the customer. We’re not thinking of traditional business principles of supply and demand and unique differentiators and testing to market and all of these kinds of things, right?

We are just thinking about ourselves and I have so much compassion for, for you if you’re in this place. I have compassion for old, old me, 2016, me, or even like 2012 through 2016 me that was sitting at my job that I hated dreaming about getting out of it. And it just makes sense that you’re like, well, I love this thing. So if you hate the thing that you do, then if I just supplant that, I will love what I do.

Spoiler alert. If I, if I could really like wrap up so much of what I’ve learned and so much of what I wrote about in my book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy. It’s that, basically jumping from one like, uh, I guess assumption that your job is what’s making you miserable. Therefore, if you have a different job that will make you happy, it’s still putting the happiness in some like external thing that will bring you happiness versus where I think happiness actually comes from, which is more like connection with yourself and others being present, being in your community, um, being creative, like being present in your body and in your life, and all of these kinds of things.

I, I think contentment essentially brings you happiness, but that is often the mistake is that we’re still in this phase where we’re like looking for something else to blame or fix it, right? So from a business perspective though, the issue is that you’re thinking about it from your own perspective and not from the customer or the market perspective.

Now because you started a business like this, like based on a passion, you were maybe thinking about what sounded fun to you and what would feel like motivating to you. Unfortunately, that might have led to the business not taking off the way that you thought it would or you’re maybe even just spinning your wheels and not getting it off the ground period, because something’s not clicking. And that’s what leads to chapter number two.

Chapter two, The Let Down. Okay, so in chapter two, you’ve started the business and you’re probably really excited at first. Like you were really excited, you had some really good forward momentum. There’s definitely this like new beginner era of getting out of your job or even when you’re still in your job, like just starting something different can be so activating and so exciting, especially when you’ve been in a job that you really don’t like.

Like I was such a miserable lawyer that, when I thought about starting my own health coaching business, I was like, you know, learning how to set up my own website and like learning what email lists were and learning what landing pages were even like the fact that those are all pretty dorky, like dry things.

It was just so different than arguing in court and writing motions and writing briefs and going to client meetings, that it was exciting to me. And then it can be easy to then flip that into being like, look, I’m doing so much work. I’m getting this business off the ground. This is already going well because it just feels really exciting. It’s just a natural human instinct that we want to share about things that we love, that we’re passionate about. And when you get passionate about something, if you’re anything like me, you then want to share all those things with other people like it, you, you can’t help yourself, right?

It’s like you just feel so, even so passionately about other people now knowing it’s like you’ve stumbled upon something. So maybe you’re in this excitement phase. Maybe you’ve even left your nine to five, and then you start showing up on social media and you’re like, this is pretty fun at first, like I’m getting to talk about all these fun things, but then at some point it’s not fun anymore.

You are posting and posting and you’re not getting any engagement. You’re not making sales like you thought when you made your website live, you would just get all these clients. You thought when you posted that Instagram reel, that was really good that you would get a bunch of comments, but nobody other than your mom commented like, there’s always this point. I find, in the early days of business where you like show up to the party, super excited and then you’re just like, oh, like, it’s just, it’s kind of over. That is way, way, way more typical than starting a business that takes off really quickly, that is very rare.

And unfortunately what happens in most of these cases is that when you start out the business and you start from this passion place and you’re really excited and it, then the novelty wears off and it’s not really working, it leads to a lot of self blame. You start to turn inwards and think that it means something about you, about your abilities, about your product, about your ability to market, write, talk, create social media posts, like whatever it is, right?

You start to feel like a failure and you start to see that you’re not making any sales and you start, you know, naturally filling in the blanks of like, I’m not making any sales because I’m not good at this. Or even I hear this a lot as well. I heard this a lot yesterday. We had a live q and a call with my Ultimate Bundle® members. Someone said in the call yesterday, everybody knows social media doesn’t work, so I’m going to start running Facebook ads to my freebie. And I thought that was so interesting because I’m like well, social media works very, I mean, it works very well for me. It works very well for a lot of my friends. I mean, from a strategy perspective, mentally, from a mental health perspective, it’s a dumpster fire. But for, for me, like as a business, it works very well. I also understand what to do and how to structure things, and I have a really good, you know, social team that’s creating great social posts and all that kinda stuff, but social media works like period. It might not work for you because you don’t like it or something like that, but we have to be careful where this is a phase, in this chapter two, the let down where we start making up stories about like, no one’s engaging on this because social doesn’t work. Or you might be the kind of person that says, no one’s engaging with this because they don’t like me. You know, I’m not good enough, pretty enough. I don’t have the best background and aesthetic and all that kinda stuff.

So this is a really tough period. This is a period that a lot of us go through and it’s where we can start to conflate a lack of results with a lack of talent or ability, or we conflate a lack of results with the algorithm, you know? And we think like everything’s kind of out to get us, and like that’s why like things are working against us and it’s too hard. We start to build up this story, like I thought when I started my cooking business that I was a bad photographer and that’s why it wasn’t working and that I just needed to learn like everything I could about photography and if I learned about photography, then my stuff would be really good.

That’s where you’ll often also see people start going down all these rabbit holes of like, I need to become a better photographer, a better copywriter, have a better website, have a better social, something. And we go down these rabbit holes thinking that that’s the thing that needs to fix it.

Like in my example with the cooking business, I had just conflated something I love with a business idea. It wasn’t a business idea, it was a hobby, and that doesn’t make it a business. And I didn’t have any strategy. That’s why I didn’t work. Not because I was a bad photographer, not because I needed better copywriting skills. I just had zero strategy.

All of this can also reverb and zap your passion for the thing that you started out making your business into, right? Like my business not doing well started to zap my love and my passion for cooking for a while and that I was like, no, I’m not letting this happen ’cause cooking has been my thing since I was a child, since it was a single digits child , and I was like responsible for cooking for myself. Cooking became my passion. So I was not about to let this happen.

The other day I was listening to this episode of The Liz Moody podcast, and she had an incredible guest on named Katina Bajaj. And Katina is a creative health scientist, which, first of all, can we all just pause for like, that’s not, that’s like the coolest job title ever. Like imagine introducing yourself at a party and you’re like, hello, I am a creative health scientist. I would be like, tell me more, I need to know. But Karina, who studies creativity and how it impacts our health for a living had so many incredible takeaways on this episode, but one of the ones that I thought was so relevant for what we’re talking about today, she talked about whether, you know, if you’re somebody who makes your passion, your job, like there are many examples of where that is successful. And in chapter three, I’m about to talk to you about how you can combine these two things. How you can take something you’re passionate about, but also make it a really good business. So again, we’re not here to squash passion, but what you have to be careful about Karina says, is that if your passion becomes your job or your business, which you know is then your job, you have to then have two things, Karina says you need to have boundaries around that passion and you need to engage in what she calls mini-c creativity. That’s creativity that is purely meaningful to you. It’s stuff that you keep private. It’s not for show, it’s not for likes. It’s not something you’re creating content around. She breaks down. I would highly recommend listening to this episode after you listen to this episode, of course. But this episode was so helpful.

She breaks down what mini-c creativity has like three different types. So there’s creative expression, creative thinking, and noticing and appreciating beauty. So creative expression is like connecting your mind with your body. She said it could even be something as simple as like getting dressed in the morning, but that’s a way of expressing yourself and really taking the time to think about like, how do I wanna feel and express myself today in the world? And creative thinking is like learning something new, so like what you’re doing even here with this podcast, reading a book, all that kind of stuff. And then the third one, which is noticing and appreciating beauty.

I think, you know, it was pretty self-explanatory, but I was driving down the water near my house and there’s just like the most insane bright pink and orange sherbert sunset that I have ever seen. It was so beautiful. I actually, I stopped and pulled over on the water and took a picture. It was just so, so beautiful.

As she talks about in the episode, like the more that you tend to do that stuff, it, it kind of feeds and becomes a habit. And so those things are really, really important to continue to do for those of you who are listening, who are like, okay, I still wanna make my business about my passion, but like, okay, I am, I’m open to this idea of how do zhuzh it a little bit to like make it more profitable ’cause you, you need it to survive. This would be the thing to also focus on so that you protect your mental health in the process and maintain your creativity because you don’t wanna zap your creativity in the quest of like having your passion be your job. So I would definitely recommend checking that out.

Let’s talk about where passion starts to meet strategy so that we can actually make this business a more viable one.

Chapter three, The Meet Cute. So the Meet Cute in my mind was where we get passion to meet cute strategy, and it’s that moment where it clicks, right? It’s that moment just like in a movie when there’s a meet, cute and these two things come together and they just start to click, right?

Again, we’re not zapping the passion, but we’re just zhuzh-ing the passion so that it actually is a viable business strategy. So what is a viable business strategy? How, what am I even talking about? How do you take your passion or the thing that you’re passionate about and turn it into something that could actually make you a living online?

So this is something I dive into in ton, like ton, ton, tons more detail inside of my book. When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy so if you haven’t read that yet, I highly recommend getting that it would be like a great companion to this episode if this is speaking to you and you wanna dive deeper on anything.

But as I talk about in the book, the very first thing that you need to focus on when turning your passion into a business or just starting a business at all period, whether it’s even about something that you hate is looking at demand, right? It’s a very simple, straightforward, economic principle in which we need to know is there demand for this product?

So if you remember, in chapter one, we talked about the perspective. The perspective is often off when somebody starts a business that’s purely based on passion and there’s very low strategy. That’s because they’re not looking for the demand. Demand is all about do other people want this, right? Like we really just need to know, are people already looking for this? Is it important to people to have this thing? Is there something missing already in the market? Right? So we’re really looking at demand first.

Now I like to think of demand in two ways because you might be creating a business where there’s enough demand for another product or another service to be created about the thing that people are looking for, and the product or service that you’re creating doesn’t really need to be that different in order to still have enough demand for it.

On the other hand, there could be opportunities with business where there’s a demand for something, because there’s a problem, right? People are having a problem and there actually isn’t someone who has created something that is resolving that problem. So therefore the demand is almost for like a gap in the market.

This is like your common typical examples you’ll see on something like a show like Shark Tank, where someone will come on Shark Tank and they will say like, I noticed this problem that people kept running into. No one was offering anything, therefore I invented it, right? So that’s like a way, one way to fill demand, but there are other ways to fill demand, like I would consider my legal business to have done this.

Because when I started that health coaching business about cooking and I started to get into the online world, I saw that there were so many people, like especially at that time in 2016 starting online businesses and there were so many people floating around questions about how do I start a business and do I need an LLC and what kind, where do I get contracts from?

And all this kind of stuff, right? And yeah, there were some lawyers who had jumped on early, even earlier than me. Who were already offering these types of, you know, this type of content, this type of like, uh, products or whatever, and yeah, there was more than enough demand though, like I just saw that there was this overwhelming need for more of us, and I had a feeling that I was pretty early on in the process, that there was going to be a tidal wave of new people coming in who would also need that stuff.

You really have to be plugged into the community or the group of people that would potentially buy this thing from you. So whether that’s literally talking to them in person, starting to ingratiate yourself in communities, whether in person or virtual reading, lots of things within their communities, like whether they’re all on Reddit or there is a group on threads or a Facebook community of moms, like whatever it is that you need to start getting yourself in that community and really understanding.

This is where it’s so important and ties back to chapter one about the perspective is that when you are talking to people or when you’re listening more, more, I should say more importantly, when you’re listening to people, you need to really hear what they’re saying and what they want. What are they looking for? What is the problem that they’re experiencing? What is the pain point? And go deeper. Even if, you know, they might not say this directly, but like kind of subconsciously, or you have to ask some follow up questions if they’re experiencing that pain point. What problem is that pain point causing in their life? What does that mean? What is that looking like for them? How is that showing up for them? Like keep going deeper and deeper and deeper on each level until you’ve kind of hit the bottom. But that’s really where so many people go wrong and this is the biggest difference between chapter one and this chapter is that you’re now shifting the perspective between what you thought was a great idea and you love cooking and you wanna tell other people how important it is to cook healthy food, to hearing like from other people. Are they looking to learn how to cook? What problems are they running into with cooking? What sounds like a resolution to them? What would they need to take action on that problem?

Like how would they want it even to be delivered? Right. I would ask so many more questions now because for example, when I started the cooking business, I was like, well, I’ll just create a course, right? And then that, that was the most popular thing at the time. If I had spoken to my ideal customer.

And I had heard about how busy they were. I would’ve also heard that they weren’t time rich enough to sit down and consume a course about cooking. And also, like there are a million like cooking shows and cooking YouTube channels and, and all these different cooking things, people were just going on blogs and cooking like that wasn’t the problem.

That wasn’t what they were struggling with. In fact, I, I didn’t really even know what the problem was like oftentimes when you talk about cooking, for example, it’s that people just don’t have time or they don’t like cooking or they don’t wanna like clean up, or it’s like hard to feed everyone in the family who has different preferences or picky eaters or something like that, right?

And it’s like, well actually I don’t really know how to resolve that. I love cooking and it’s not a problem for me. And I would never stress about that. And like. I don’t follow a recipe, I just like kind of go with the wind. So yeah, even talking about it now, I’m like, what the heck was I thinking? This wasn’t a business. This was me. This was me proselytizing. It really was. It was just like, I love cooking, therefore I’m gonna tell you how great cooking is, and that’s that. It’s like, but the ideal customer, they didn’t love cooking. That was the whole problem. So you can see where not going down. This demand rabbit hole really can lead you to creating an entire business and an entire suite of products that just don’t work.

Okay, so once we’ve done a lot of this demand research, and like I said, I do go into so much more detail about demand in my book because that’s, you know, a place where you can go into a lot more detail, so I highly recommend that, obviously I wrote it. But after we look at demand, we also want to consider supply.

And you don’t wanna be threatened by supply. If you look around, so supply is what else is already out there, what’s being supplied already, right? And so if you have competitors, you have competition, there are other people selling these services and products, fine, no problem. On the one hand, it serves as proof of concept, right?

So you know that somebody has created this thing, and if they are selling it, you know that that meant that they filled some sort of hole. Now the question is whether the demand is big enough that it warrants another supply, right? That would be you. Or is it that they are supplying something, that there’s also now a gap in the system where you know that people are looking for something different and you can go in and fill that gap.

So you’ve kind of proven that this group of people exist and that their problem exists, but you can come in and provide a different solution. I would, probably say that that’s what I did, uh, with my legal templates in that there was other, you know, there were other people offering it, but I did see a way that people weren’t offering it, that there was already demand for, people wanted a playbook, essentially like a step by step guide of exactly how to start an online business. They wanted to know like the ins and outs of what happens if somebody doesn’t pay me? What happens if someone copies my content? How do I do a trademark? All that kinda stuff. That’s how I created the Ultimate Bundle®. That’s my signature product. I’ve sold thousands and thousands of now. That gives you 14 legal templates and packs of trainings that teach you everything you need to know about how to legally run a business online. So that was where that idea even came from. It was really marrying demand with, yes, there’s some supply, but I see that there’s a gap. That was my unique differentiator in my product.

If you’ve read my book, you know that I talk about the fact that there can be a unique differentiator within your product, but also within you as a creator because of the kinds of businesses that we have with primarily being, you know, content driven and creating email lists and creating social media content and all that.

So my unique differentiator for my product was that nobody had packaged it and served it up in a way that I did. So I created that product and, and dish that out, and it went really well. But then for me personally, I mean, I didn’t think about this as a. Quote unquote strategy at the time. But I also knew that there was, just from conversations with people, I knew that there was some desire for a lawyer who was maybe pretty chill, uh, down to earth, like not in suits and, and like scary legal jargon, right?

And that fits my personality, so it was just kind of a like, oh, this is a great opportunity. That’s me. I would never be anything otherwise. Or if I did, I would be, I would be like acting, right? So this is just how I am. So that kind of works out for me. Like I’m not a very like lawyery lawyer, right?

So that is essentially how you need to approach this instead of just thinking, I love this, therefore I’m just gonna do this and I’m just gonna run off and create the course or the private podcast or the membership or whatever. ‘Cause I just see other people doing that. And that’s it. I want you to go through this step-by-step process of doing demand research. Doing supply research and looking at your unique differentiator from two perspectives. How is your product unique in the space and how are you going to show up and be unique in the space as well?

I think that my current business is a fantastic example to kind of wrap up today’s episode where, you know, I talk very openly about the fact that I am not passionate about legal templates, right? Like, I, I always say like, who, who would be, I don’t know. I didn’t wake up one morning and just say like, after I had my cooking business, I wasn’t just like, you know what my life’s dream is? To create contract templates because I just love them so much.

What I realized instead was that as I was running the cooking business, and even when I was leaving, being a lawyer and like getting into the early online business days for myself, I became really passionate about business, about marketing, about email lists. Like who knew that email list, email marketing would really light me up and as people started to reach out to me unsolicited and ask for help about starting their businesses from a legal perspective, I realized that what I got, like what really, really lit me up was helping people get their businesses off the ground.

You know, I, I joke about being like a business doula because we often are giving people the products and the support to be like, oh, now I can go out and start this business and I just felt like a business mama. When people would write to me and be like, I got the Ultimate Bundle® and then now I went out and created this money coach business and like look at how many people I’ve helped get out debt.

And I’m like, it’s a really cool ripple effect. That’s what I love. That’s still, I mean it has evolved. It’s been eight years and now it has evolved where like now I still really love, obviously helping people get their businesses off the ground. I also now love talking about email marketing from like an even different perspective. Not just like how to start, but like the fact that I’ve grown my email list to over 50,000 people, especially talking about legal stuff, or I love talking about like funnels and how I’ve created so much evergreen content that feeds my funnels and how this has allowed me to live my life. Right?

You know, it shifts over time and I continue to find the passion in what I do in different ways. It’s important obviously to find what lights you up and, and to keep coming back to that, but you kind of have to marry it with the strategy. You don’t have to think about it so linearly or so directly as like, I have to be passionate about the exact product that you sell.

You can also think about it as like, I’m passionate about the outcome and the result or the transformation that I bring to people, right? So, that can sometimes be what can shift the business that you are trying to make work and that’s not doing it for you into one that does.

That’s where I found a lot of passion and so I guess I just wanted to bring that to is like an alternative today and maybe take some of the pressure off. And I just also think you have to be a business person at the end of the day. Like, and I mean, less is just fun for you. Unless it’s on the side and you never wanna leave your other job, or you don’t need any money or anything like that, that’s fine if that’s what works for you.

But for so many people that I hear from, that’s not the case. They need this business to work or they desperately want the business to work so that they can leave their job and so I’m hoping that after listening today, maybe there’s just a little like do like little tweak that’s come to you that you’re like, ah, I see it.

And it might even just be in your marketing, like maybe you are offering the right product already, like maybe you have created a product maybe after listening to this episode today, just give some thought as to like how you’re talking about that product or how you’re talking to your ideal customer, making sure you’re always coming at it from their perspective and what they’re struggling with and putting it in their own words, not yours, right?

Not making it about just like the reason that they should buy this thing is because you really love that thing, or something like that. So yeah, I hope I gave you something to think about. I hope that this episode was helpful today if you haven’t already. First of all, I hope you get my weekly newsletter called Sam’s Sidebar. It comes out every single Tuesday. It’s where I write about marketing strategies that are chill and that work just like this one. Um, and I talk about how you know what I’m doing behind the scenes to run and build my multi seven figure online business. It’s also where I give you the latest legal news and updates you need. So if you don’t get that already, make sure you click the link in the show notes down below.

Send me a message. Let me know how you like today’s episode. Reply to my email, hit reply. I read all my email replies or DM me on Instagram @samvanderwielen. Make sure you’re getting my weekly emails so you know about these live events that are going on behind the scenes and it’s also how you’ll find out about new episodes here on the podcast.

Next week, i’m chatting with you all about what no one tells you about running a multi seven figure business. It’s like the juicy behind the scenes secrets, if you could see my texts with my friends about what it’s actually like, and I’m hoping that it can not only give you a dose of reality, but it can give you some stuff for you to focus on that you see what i’m focusing on and what my day-to-day looks like as a multi seven figure business owner and founder that you can apply to your business, I’m really hoping that that episode will help you like drop some of the things that aren’t working for you and focusing on what will help to get you to be a seven figure business, if that’s even your goal.

So with that, I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. Now go sign up for that class. I’ll see you there.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.