I’ve been a freelance marketing and advertising consultant for about 15 years now and there’s a couple of traits of business owners or businesses that I’ve noticed that by themselves are totally fine, clearly innocuous, but when you put them together, there’s something about the combination of these two traits that have a tendency to be somewhat volatile or explosive. It’s kind of like that experiment back in in high school, sodium chloride and whatever the other chemical is that makes things go boom.

Now you’re probably wondering, okay, right. Just get to it. What are the two traits that you’re talking about here? These two traits when they’re completely separate are totally fine and it’s not necessarily that every time these two things come together you run into problems. It’s just in my experience more often than not, if you have these two things together, you’re less likely to succeed and for a very specific reason and the two things or this ready drum roll please. Budget and a big budget and no patience.

But if you have a big budget and you have no patience, the likelihood that you are going to jump from idea to idea from strategy to strategy, from employee to employee, trying to get what you want is much greater because this is the problem and I call this trust fund business on purpose. Think for a second. What are the stereotypes around a trust fund baby? They’re entitled. Usually they have no sense of reality. They have no context for the people around them. They have no real sense of right and wrong and they just expect everything to happen exactly the way they want it to happen and exactly when they want it to happen because that’s what they’re used to. They grew up with people following them around, giving them everything that they want because they have all this money which shortcuts them.

The process of learning how to make, keep and grow their own money. Now this same thing happens in business. People are successful in one area and they think I can take the cash that I have and I can dump it into this business idea and it will turn into something. Now by itself, a budget is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a very, very good thing and anybody out there who started a business will agree with me. Having a budget is a good thing, but when you combine having a budget with having very little patience, what you end up with, if we were to chart sort of the course of what happens, you run in one direction and then you run in another direction and then you run back in this other direction because things don’t work the way that you want them to.

Right out the gate. See when you have money and you don’t have patience, you get lulled into this sense of I can get what I want quickly by throwing money at it. Most of the time the effort that it took you to get so that you have that money has given you the ability to not be patient, which is the dangerous thing about this. You start out and you grunt and you grind for years, years, years. You get really good at business and now you’re in a position where you don’t have to be patient because you have cash and you can throw cash at problems and because of the time you’ve put in, you throw cash at it and it works. But when you start something new, you forget that when you start something you have to be patient because especially when it’s something new, if you have a different target market, a different audience, you don’t understand the way that they think.

I’m actually talked about this before this an article that I wrote at Com. I click up here, I’ll give you the reader’s digest version, but if you do want to go suffer through reading, my writing can click up here and I made a very specific point in that article which was if you have a business, it’s not a business until the business pays for itself. What that means is you should not give any of your personal cash to a business beyond a certain point. Sometimes their need, you need a little startup capital depending on what it is you need, but a lot of times you make the mistake of trying to go big budget, take all this extra cash that you have and dump it into this business because you think that cash is going to make difference when in reality it’s not. Research, understanding your target demographic and your target market and putting the time and effort into creating an offer that’s going to speak to your target audience, patience: Those are activities and things that are actually gonna make a difference.

If you’re starting something new and you have a bunch of money that you want to put towards it. My advice based on all the experience that I have, all the business that I’ve worked with is to not spoil your business like you wouldn’t spoil your kids. Don’t Spoil Your Business. Don’t give it too much in terms of cash, in terms of assets, in terms of expectations, treat it like you were treated when you got started. When you built your first business, when you built whatever was successful that gave you that cash, you had to start from nothing. So let the business prove itself by generating its own revenue, paying for its own bills and generating its own profit. The more you prop up that business with whatever cash you have, the less likely it is to be successful on its own. It’s the same thing with a trust fund, baby. Think about it that way. Don’t turn your next business venture into the Trestman business. Let it be street smart and let it turn into something that’s actually going to make you money instead of something you’re always going to be dumping money into. Always disappointed with never actually living up to your expectations.