The chicken or the money

Meet Cinnamon.

I asked her the age-old question, what comes first, chicken or the egg?

She answered, but my chicken is a bit rusty.

Now, let’s add a twist: What comes first, the chicken or the money?

Back when I was a W2 employee, I thought I understood business.

I had two business degrees, a successful career, and international experience.

But it wasn’t until I took the leap into full-time entrepreneurship that I truly grasped the question.

See, there are two types of eggs, fertilized and unfertilized.

When I was collecting a steady paycheck, I had plenty of ideas, but none of them were fertilized.

They were like Cinnamon’s daily eggs, useful, sure, but never creating more chickens (or in business terms, more income).

But add a rooster, and the game changes.

That’s what committing to a business does, it transforms dreams into something that can multiply.

I’ve been asked countless times:

“Why don’t you just get a job and keep construction as a side gig?”

But to me, side gigs are like collecting eggs while dreaming of a bigger flock

never quite committing to the rooster that makes growth possible.

When I first started, I had a dozen different ideas

O&G service company
Furniture-making
House flipping
Law school
Writing

All great ideas, all just unfertilized eggs.

It wasn’t until I put real investment behind one,

the rooster

that I saw real results.

The first rooster I invested in was the furniture business.

Let’s call him Bob.

Bob ate a LOT of chicken feed for 2.5 years,

but he never built the pipeline I needed.

He was too busy looking at Instagram, dreaming of beautiful chickens instead of actually growing the flock.

In chicken terms, he was capon,

All looks,

No action.

Moral of the story:

Don’t build a business based on Instagram dreams.

Get a rooster that knows how to cluck.

Find a real need in the market—and go after it.