Thank you all so much for your good wishes for my health, it’s much appreciated!

Now to the topics that I could write about, which resonated the most with you…there is a clear winner as you can see.

(BTW I’ve replied to all comments on the post “I Got What I Wanted” which you can read here)

Joseph said “I would love for you to write about investing! 😜”

Wendy said “Thank you Nicola for sharing your news, wishing you a speedy recovery, i am also curious as to why you wouldn’t start a business.”

Denise said “I genuinely like reading your take on most subjects so please write away! Any investing info for those of us not there yet would be wonderful. Reinvention in later life also would be fascinating.

Paula said “Stepping off the treadmill would be an interesting one, but I’m always up for anything you write!”

Sophia said “I would love to hear about why you wouldn't start a business first nowadays. I'm curious to know what you have to say on that. I really enjoyed reading this.”

It’s Just An Analogy said “Write about whatever moves you in the moment. I always enjoy your content.”

So here goes!

Why I Wouldn’t Start A Business Right Now

When I was first getting started in business, I didn’t know the difference between being a freelancer and starting a proper business. I really didn’t know what that even meant.

I came quite close with ‘Waistcoat Wonderland” in the eighties, where I was making and selling New Romantic waistcoats to a designer shop in Brighton. I farmed most of the sewing out to my two sisters, but I didn’t really ‘get it’ about building a ‘real’ business in my bones yet.

Eventually, after some success and equal numbers of failures (I am not short of ideas and see opportunities everywhere), I started realising there must be a difference between how I was doing things and how most successful business people I was meeting were doing things.

I took 100% responsiblity for my results and after that mindshift, things started changing. I found most of the answers I needed in two books recommended by my first ever business coach Rachel Turner from Achieve Unlimited. She had a bit of a job persuading me to read them but when I did, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki and “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Gerber filled in most of the gaps and then Rachel and some great mentors supplied the rest of the information I was missing.

In his first Rich Dad book, Robert laid out the bare bones of the Cashflow Quadrant, which separates people out into four quadrants, two on the left, two on the right. On the left are Employees and Self Employed / Freelancers, while on the right are Business Owners and Investors.

I certainly didn’t understand what being a ‘business owner’ or ‘investor’ really meant and how huge the differences were. How dangerous it could be, being stuck on the left hand side.

As I read this back, I notice that it never really occurred to me to be an employee or freelancer AND a business owner AND an investor. Because my resources of time and/or money were so scarce, I somehow always felt that I should do one thing well ideally, then the next thing, then the next thing. I’ll show you why that was important shortly.

I learned why being on the left hand side of Robert’s Quadrant makes you so vulnerable, especially when inflation is booming, while being on the right makes you so much stronger and resilient in any wealth cycle.

I only found out about Wealth Cycles a few years ago, when watching Mike Maloney’s “Hidden Secrets Of Money” video series. If you can make it through Episodes 1-7 at least and then the “Wealth Cycles” video, you’ll be so much better informed about how real money works than most economists!

But let’s assume you already have a business or that you definitely want to start a business, how best to go about it?

In the photo above is my mate Philippa. She came back from Spain in a hurry when her Mum became very ill, and stayed with me for a few months. Like many others since 2020, she had no choice but to start a new business.

Philippa is an award winning film director/producer and while she was with me, she was considering possibly re-inventing herself. She is a highly skilled creative who can put an overseas documentary together from scratch, but knew nothing about marketing herself online and that’s where I was delighted to help.

Ironically, the business she initially started didn’t really take off (in spite of lots of interest) but as part of marketing that business she started a YouTube Channel for Wildhorse Films where she uploaded her previous work and that’s doing really well now.

She’s not far from getting monetised with YouTube, an income stream she hadn’t considered. Three of her horse documentaries are getting at least one, but as many as three views an hour (and that’s after six months), such is the power of a highly niche film aimed at a huge global audience.

At the same time, she was listening to me talk with my sister Sarah each Sunday about what I was learning about the commodities markets, what I had learned about wealth cycles. Although she thought it would take her ages to get started investing, focusing on building the business first, we found a couple of little pension pots she’d forgotten about and she invested in some of the bigger gold and silver miners. Her investment pot is also growing nicely now.

Back to business, the really life changing difference is when you step up and make the rather terrifying jump to becoming a ‘real’ business owner and hire your first employees, because you benefit from the following:

1. Not having to work IN the business delivering the goods or service all the time. If you do it right, and create some time-zoning discipline - you can carve out time to be the leader of the business, the visionary, the one pointing the way. Gerber’s book “The E-Myth Revisited” shows how this works very well.

2. A better tax and financial set up (limited companies are separate legal entities, you’ll enjoy better tax breaks and if it all goes wrong, you are more easily able to walk away financially and start again).

3. Better personal protection (limited companies are separate legal entities and you will enjoy more personal protection than you will being a freelancer).

But being a business owner is becoming increasinly complicated and our western govenments are making it ever more so. One reason is because younger MP’s have become career politicians, going stright into politics from university and never been out in the world of work and certainly have never been business people.

Peter McCormack (host of an excellent podcast) used to be a Bitcoin guy and for years had the world’s biggest Bitcoin podcast, but he’s also a successful local business owner in Bradford, owning the football team, a cafe and, until recently, a bar.

This new podcast is made even more interesting, as his right hand man is his twenty-something son, who chips in regularly with his thoughts (and those of his mates). Peter is on a steep learning curve as to how government and business really works and it’s fascinating to watch. Better guests recommend even better guests and Peter is open minded enough to listen hard and to do his own research too.

Even. more relevant to this post, while he’s trying everything he can as he wants to expand locally, but even he can’t make the numbers work for a new business - it just won’t pay right now. You HAVE to make a profit in business so you can smooth out the variations of cashflow and create a rainy day cushion. Your business won’t survive without those two things.

Just some of the contributing factors to making a new business not worth starting for Peter and many entrepreneurs right now are higher business rates (double or even triple for hospitality businesses), soaring energy costs and the homeless and addicts terrorising the town centre near his cafe. Worst of all though have been the additional bureaucracy, minimum wage and pregnancy / sick pay rights and accompanying draconian employee legislation (and the cost of implementing and then maintaining that) for small business owners to comply with. Not to mention Digital ID’s required to file a tax return.

I include independent landlords in this group as they are also being forced out of business by the rental market changes made recently. Every serious landlord I know is selling up as many rental properties as they can and getting their money into assets in the right part of the Wealth Cycle, that will not be so affected by the batshit bonkers policies created by short term thinking governments who are only elected for 4-5 years at a time. They want to please voters, not build a sustainable economy.

I digress.

But how do you know what to move your money into, once liberated from your property or business assets? That’s why you need to know about Wealth Cycles. Because money moves in waves, through different assets, and while some cycles are shorter, many are much longer and you can be positioned well when you know how it all works.

My mate Andy has written several detailed articles about this, and he lays out an excellent example here of a couple who are equity rich but cash poor and what they could do about that. If you are pension rich but cash poor, or business rich but cash poor yourself, you need to be thinking about these things. Another article lays out what choices young people under 30 have, if they are longing to own a property and start a family, but who can’t get on the housing ladder.

There were many times when I have made clumps of cash from commissions from my job, or when I could have legally taken money out of my business and put that into another asset class (even as a cash holding action) , making money from that second asset class as well, IF I HAD ONLY KNOWN ABOUT WEALTH CYCLES.

For example, just before everything collapsed in early 2010, I was the most cash rich I’d ever been.

When we had sold our newly renovated property in Worthing, I’d made some money which I put into my hotel, The Acacia. Then in 2006, I’d sold The Acacia, my hotel bought and renovated ‘no money down’, then in 2008/2009, my Money Gym business was still booming, we had a digital marketing company helping business owners build a personal brand online, I was earning commissions from recommendations, I was being offered paid speaking gigs… life was good.

If I had known then that the property wealth cycle was coming to an end, and that the commodities wealth cycle was on the rise, I could have taken chunks of cash and invested it in gold for example.

I could have taken the £60k from the property we sold in 2004 and held it in 294 x gold coins which I could have bought for £203.87 per oz.

Then when things went tits up in 2010, I would have been sitting on gold worth £714.12 per oz or a total of £209,916. Even if I had used a quarter of it to try and save the hotel, I’d still have had £157,437 to start a new life with, in January 2010. Compared to the ZERO I actually ended up with.

When things were great, in 2008, I took the kids on five holidays in two years (trying to make up for the many, many years of no holidays at all). Some were more expensive, some were cheaper but let’s allow for an average of £3000 per holiday, including spending money, so let’s say £15k in total.

If I had invested that in gold at £448 per oz, around January 2008, I’d have had 33 oz. When things went tits up in January 2010, that would have been worth £714 per oz, or £23,906 Not so exciting as the previous example, but better than the nothing I ended up with (bar some nice memories).

If I could have hung onto those 33 oz until 2020 when my next financial crisis hit (along with millions of others), they’d have appreciated in value to £1436 per oz for a total of £47,388. If I had hung onto them over the next few years, today they would be worth £3339 per oz for a total of £110,187.

Knowing that hindsight makes us all wiser, I do have to ask myself some stern questions here.

1. Being earlier in my wealth creation education, would I have made such good decisions at that time? Or would I have ploughed the gold back into trying to save a failing business, rather than pulling the plug and getting out with what I could salvage?
   

2. Would I have found it easier to hang onto physical gold coins, than fiat in the bank? I think I would have done as the act of going to sell each one for cash in Brighton then paying the cash into the bank manually, would have been more painful and less convenient, rather than just transferring digits around.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I’m just using these examples to show you how much smarter I could have been with learning about Wealth Cycles, asset management and not throwing ALL my eggs in a single basket.

Talking of hindsight, here’s my best story!

Why, in 2011, didn’t I go to that presentation in London when Max Keiser was explaining Bitcoin? I found out later my ex-business pertner Judith went but somehow, I didn’t hear about it. I would have definately bought some as a punt, maybe £100 worth, poor as I was at that time. At £0.73 per BTC at the time, I could have bought 136 BTC which would be worth over £7 million now.

But again, would I have used the BTC profits to prop up ailing businesses rarther then making the hard but necessary decisions?

Probably.

So let’s get to the point shall we?

Why would I not start a business now?

Because it’s not the right time in the Wealth Cycle for starting a business.

Because why would you take any of your money, and any of your time (which is worth money and memories) to invest in a business that is - due to external factors - increasingly likely to fail?

When you could invest in another asset class - commodities - which is much easier on you and is on the way UP rather than property or business ownership, both of which are on the way DOWN.

Who knows what’s happening in the USA on the business front right now but even there, where many states did not lock down, times were brutal for many businesses. In New York and California right now…even big tech and banks are leaving in droves, looking for a more business-friendly environment.

Even better, commodities don’t involve the investment of your time to manage, long lease premises, staff grief, client attraction / marketing efforts and investments and all the other nightmares that owning a business brings?

What about equities, you may ask?

Once you have watched the “Hidden Secrets of Money” videos, you will know why not equities.

They are about to peak, in the opinion of many more expert than me, with only the AI & Big Tech sectors propping up the markets. The latest earnings reports show that AI are a circle-jerk at best, passing revenue between themselves. And at worst they could be creating the biggest bubble of all.

Along with the ever-growing debt of most Western countries, not to mention the endless money printing, It’s only a matter of time before the inevitable plays out. No fiat money system has lasted more than 25 years and this one has gone way past its sell by date.

The equities market sector also affect everyone’s savings, pensions, mortgages, just think for a minute, if it all goes tits up soon, is your property value locked in? Is your pension safe?

If you started a business today, would it be directly affected by most of the population suddenly becoming much less affluent through the loss of their jobs, pension and plummeting property values?

Would it be affected by governments imposing another lockdown? You may have noticed the Ebola story being hyped hugely in the press just recently.

I’ve learned all this in the last six years. I was clueless about macro-economics in 2020 but I learned about wealth cycles and the potential for commodities, particularly gold and silver, in 2020 and I was ready to take action on what I learned.

Previously, In 2017 Andy wrote a small book about Bitcoin for his mailing list subscribers and I ‘got it’ instantly. I started buying tiny bits of Bitcoin, then learned to trade BTC (which means you can trade anything) mainly from free YouTube videos.

Then my brother suddenly died in Sydney in 2021.

He left a small but generous inheritance to be split between us three sisters, for which I will forever be grateful.

When the money came eventually, after a long time in probate, I felt like an athlete who. had been n training for years. I knew what to do, I knew why I had to do it and without hesitation, I did it.

I don’t need a business now. I’ve made the jump from the left hand side of the Cashflow Quadrant, to the bottom right hand side.

The ironic thing is that I could have done that years ago if I had not been so fixated on building a business. I thought that was my ‘Wealth Highway Lane’, as one of my first mentors called it. I even wrote in my first book ‘The Money Gym’ about having more than one vehicle in one lane at one time.

Even more ironically, to keep busy and my brain active and learning, I probably will start a business up again, when I’m ready and it will be probably based around my book ‘A Better Entrepreneur’ which chronicles my own entrepreneurial and business journey so far, along with sharing the 25 most important lessons I’ve learned along the way. So if I’ve intrigued you with the snippets of the story shared here today, you might enjoy that book.

Did I answer the question?

If not, I’m happy to answer your questions in the comments here!

Warm regards
Nicola