I wanted to do a follow up to something that’s been on my mind for a while. What’s worth the money when you’re building a business, and what is a total, complete waste of it.
And I don’t mean the influencer version of this, the “here’s some free stuff. I probably wouldn’t buy with my own money” vain. I mean, real dollars, real regret, and real relief.
Without further ado: the things that were worth every cent and the things that absolutely were not.
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The Things I Wish I Never Touched
A $25,000 mastermind for business that turned out to be a full-blown lady cult. Matching outfits at the “retreat“, a fearless leader with her own catchphrases, grown women crying because they didn’t get called on. I didn’t learn a single thing. The entire curriculum was just: buy the next thing the fearless leader is selling.
A $300 Fivver website builder who ghosted me for two weeks. When the site finally landed, it looked like it was built by a kindergartener with a comic Sands addiction. I found out it was unusable 24 hours before my launch. I was rebuilding my entire funnel at 2 AM that night.
$40,000 in Webinar ads. Zero, and I mean zero, return. I watch my money disappear while the 24-year-old Media buyer told me to “trust the process“. I have hated paid ads to this day except on one very specific scenario, tide directly to Substack, which has been incredible… Drumroll… comment “SUBSTACK” and I’ll tell you the secret sauce.
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A “fancy“ $600 per month CRM. Everyone swore I needed in month one. I paid for the upgraded tier which had 100+ template for landing pages, connected to a calendar six months out for onboarding calls, basically it had a lot of fancy things in the upgraded tier, and I never want to use more than 10% of it. Meanwhile, I sold my first $100K using a stripe link, PayPal link, and a word document. I emailed people like it was a year 2000.
A $10,000 one on one Coach who spent every session picking my brain. I’d show up to learn and leave having explained my own strategy back to her and watching her nod and write it down. She was taking notes on my own freaking strategy!! By session 4 I realized I was being coached out of $10K by someone less experienced than me.
A $2000 “premium“ logo package just for PNG and vector files. What I got back look like complete garbage. My friend sketched a rough concept for free, and the guy at FedEx and I used his computer to render it into a clean logo for a whopping $66.21 to be exact. That $66.$.21 sketches a logo I still use today. The $2000 one never saw daylight.
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Things I Don’t Regret For A Single Second
1. Gmass. $20 a month. Even if your email list is just a spreadsheet right now, it lets you mass send without it feeling like a mass send to the people on the other side. Every email reads like I wrote it to one person, because in way, I did. Talking to my people instead of blasting them is the single biggest reason our conversion rate stays high, every single time we send.
2. A $10,000 networking event in Dubai plus the 4K flights to get there, all on a whim because a friend suggested it was the event of the year for entrepreneurs. I almost didn’t go. However, I’m glad I did. At the time I met a business partner who would help generate nearly half million dollars in revenue in collaboration, and four relationships with clients that have turned into multiple seven figures combined. I paid $14K to be in the right room. It’s paid for itself over and over again since.
Here’s my actual philosophy on this, and it’s the opposite of what everyone tells you. You don’t need a $25K mastermind. You need a coach who teaches you one specific thing and then you go do the thing yourself. What you should always invest in is being in the room, wherever the right people are, because the room either mentors you forward or hands you a client or the partner who changes everything. It’s not about what you know. It’s about who’s in the room with you.
3. My personal assistant. Hands-down, the best tire I’ve ever made. I trust her with everything, on my calendar, my inbox, opportunities coming in, decisions that don’t need to reach me at all. She’s the gate and the filter, protecting my time and my creativity, so I actually have space to think, create, and deliver. She saves me a good 30+ hours a week. I genuinely believe more money has been made from having her than from almost any other single investment in business.
4.My digital notebook, the paper tablet. $799. Sounds indulgent until you understand what it actually does. It keeps me off the internet, no doom scrolling, no notifications, just a blank page wherever I go. And when I’m actually creative, that’s when the real money happens. One time I took a walk with that pad and built an entire product from scratch, from a single idea to $300,000 in it’s first iteration—- delivered about 26 days after I scribbled on the pad. That’s not even the biggest number I’ve seen come from a walk in a notebook, but that’s a story for another day.
5.A Tempur-Pedic ActiveBreathe mattress. $8000. Felt a little ridiculous at the time. But being sharp, clear, and not foggy is the actual engine behind everything else on this list. With clients around the world and genuinely unpredictable schedules, this means whenever I hit that bed, an hour early, or at 2AM….I’m asleep, fast. There’s no dollar amount you can put on being able to actually think clearly. This is as close as it gets.
6. A registered trademark. Felt like a formality, and unnecessary box to check when I had 100 more urgent things to spend money on. Later, when the business multiplied past what I could’ve ever imagined, that trademark was the only thing standing between us and losing the name entirely. If I had had not done it early, before I thought it mattered, I would be sitting here crying.
7.A country club and golf membership. Cost: let’s just say… Undisclosed. If I put the actual number here, I think there might be a few people that would go berserk, and honestly, my younger self would probably faint too. But here’s what nobody tells you about golf. It’s not about the golf. You cannot play a good round if your mind is somewhere else, if you’re gripping the club too tight because you’re gripping your whole life too tight. Golf forces you in a complete presence or you play terribly. There’s no faking it.
The more I practice actually being in the zone of the course, the more I could access that same state everywhere else. Better decisions. Better negotiations. Sharp ideas. And that’s before the people. When I travel the membership gets me in a room with the exact caliber of people I would otherwise be trying to meet. I can attribute several million dollars directly to relationships. I can attribute several million more to the simple discipline of learning to stay present under pressure. Being good at business and being able to find your zone are the same skill wearing different clothes. I didn’t learn that from a book. I learned it on a golf course.
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Of course, now all I can think about is that I must be forgetting something. You’ll have to tell me.
What’s been worth every penny for your business? And what was a complete waste of money?
Tell me in the comments.
And, we don’t want any regrets this year right? Here is my invitation to you….
Is this your year to build something that actually pays off, instead of ending up on next year’s regret?
Join me and a special guest for a free three day training on exactly how to build a real client getting system on Substack. Join here»
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