You Only Need One White Whale

Happy Friday!

Crazy busy week!

Remember my John McAfee story? Well I finally told that story on camera and had my editor make it pretty cool. I think you’ll enjoy it! You guys are the very first to see it! YouTube is a grind, man…

I changed the name of my show! It all happened when I saw one of your submitted responses of idea names, like 4 weeks after the fact. One guy said “Why not The Koerner Office?” and I couldn’t get that idea out of my idea.

Whenever I have a business idea that won’t leave my head, I know it means I need to launch it. Well that’s how this was. I wish I’d seen it sooner!

So I bought the domains and all the social handles and we are off to the races. I also finally swapped out the DALL-E generated cover photo with a much better one on Apple and Spotify, thanks to the help of my friend (and now office-mate) Sam. A different Sam than the one I talked about last week.

Anyway, let’s get to it!

Next month I am the keynote speaker at SMBash in SLC. It’s a conference for guys that either want to buy a business or guys that just bought a business. My topic will be YONOWW - “You Only Need One White Whale.”

I don’t know what made me think of this idea. I just love the idea of going “all in” on finding that one business partner, job, piece of real estate, revenue goal, customer, referral agreement, influencer, company to buy, spouse, or WHATEVER it is person, company or thing that will completely change your life.

It’s your white whale. Your McAfee. Your Buc-ee's.

You might not remember Moby Dick from High School, and I won’t spoil it for you, but it doesn’t turn out as Ahab, the whale hunter had hoped. His shipmate, Ishmael, got a front row seat to this relentless pursuit and tells the story from his perspective. Ahab is the guy in this pic:

That’s like most people, right? We don’t find our whale. But we can!

We’ve all heard the trite cliche “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” right? Or put even more eloquently by the great Miley Cyrus…”It’s the climb.”

It’s true! The best part about my McAfee story isn’t that I partnered with him, it’s how I partnered with him. How I found him. How I landed on his doorstep. How his first and final reactions to my pitch differed, after I’d shown my value.

I want people to break their frame that they should do crazy things just for the story, and then a whole lot of money or opportunity might come out of it.

Like Captain Ahab, every human on this planet has a white whale, but most aren't even chasing it.

Why don't we even chase that white whale? We're out here slangin' sardines.

The sea wouldn't look so vast if everyone weren't still on dry land. There's 8 billion white whales for 8 billion people but the sea looks empty to me.

Are we afraid of getting lost out there? Do we not have a map?

Or maybe we're afraid the harpoon won't land, so we don't even throw it? We’ve got a BOAT full of harpoons, man!

Enough with the soliloquy, here’s my YONOWW framework, in 6 steps:

1. You have to learn that your whale exists.

2. You have to learn that the whale is killable. If you’re a snow cone stand looking to convince Elon to be your 50/50 business partner, you are chasing after an unkillable whale.

3. You have to generate a thousand dumb ideas of how you can LOCATE that whale. Those dumb ideas will help spawn great ones.

4. Now you have to generate a thousand dumb ideas of how you can KILL that whale.

5. Execute on your plan until your whale is dead. If you can’t either find or kill your whale, repeat these steps until you do.

When it comes to love and marriage, there is no such thing as soul mates. There are millions of men and women on this planet that any given person is compatible with.

The same is true with whale whales. Don’t get discouraged if your whale sinks down to the depths, never to return. Go find another.

Ok, step 1: You have to learn that your whale exists.

I’m going to use the example of a small, dumb, “unscalable” business, a snow cone stand, so you can be sure that this concepts will surely apply to you.

Let’s say I have a single snow cone stand in Wisconsin that sits on a busy intersection. It’s a seasonal business that nets me $35k per year and I have no employees.

What could my white whales be? Some of these ideas will be dumb, but that’s the point, so don’t @ me:

1. $500k in funding to franchise the concept

2. A steady stream of operators that want to license my name and brand on their own dime in their own markets.

3. A business partner that scaled Subway from 1 to 10,000 locations.

4. A new viral product idea that goes massively viral on Tiktok and fills my inbox with people begging to partner or give me money.

5. A food influencer with 13m followers that could help me accomplish the above

6. Repurposing your stand into a different business opportunity that nets you $350k/year with an employee doing all the work. Coffee stands can make that much, why not something else?

7. You start a Tiktok account showing how you make snow cones and you quickly get to 1m followers and have people knocking on your door to give you money on a daily basis.

You get the point. Everything is scalable. Anything can be big. There’s opportunity everywhere. You get the idea. STOP THINKING SO GOSH DANG SMALL!!

If this whale exists, your whale exists

You have to learn that the whale is killable.

Let’s pick whale #5 above. You’ve seen this influencer feature other food products, why not yours.

Your scarcity mindset will say, “Oh well that other brand had a ton of money to pay her. Or they are probably a family friend.”

But stop that. You shut up with that. That’s not you. You’re a toxic optimist, remember? Just like me!

It’s no different when you’re on mile 138 of an ultramarathon (and basically dying) and you tell yourself “You feel great! Everything is fine. you got this.”

This is no different. This whale is killable, and if it isn’t, one of the other whales are.

Here’s a friendly tip: Almost every whale is killable. Usually the real problem is that you aren’t working hard enough. If I really wanted to reach Elon Musk I would drive to Starbase and eventually track him down at a local restaurant or something stalkerish. It’s possible.

If you can find their contact info and/or name then yes, they are killable. Let’s say you do. Now what? Now it’s time for step 3:

You have to generate a thousand dumb ideas of how you can LOCATE that whale.

If you’re really lucky you’ll simply DM them and they’ll respond. But that doesn’t usually work for white whales. And that’s ok, because these are skills you need to learn anyway.

That which is easily gained is easily lost. Full Lindy.

• Find this person on every single platform that exists on the internet. Including but not limited to:

  • Strava

  • Tiktok

  • Facebook

  • Pinterest

  • YouTube

  • Twitter

  • Myspace

  • TruthFinder

  • Venmo

  • Cashapp

  • Spotify

  • LinkedIn

  • GoodReads

  • Reddit

  • So many thousands of other places where we create an account or a username

  • Any random background check website

  • Any random reverse phone number website

  • Posting a job on Upwork for a skip tracer to find anything they can on this person for $20.

  • Make a huge google sheet of every name, username, handle, phone number, email, etc, that you can find on them, and then search for all of those things things everywhere, on all the platforms. If you know multiplication, you’ll soon learn that these are a lot of searches. Guess what? AS YOU DO THESE THINGS YOU’LL BE DEVELOPING SKILLS THAT WILL HELP YOU KILL ANY WHALE AT ANY TIME! That’s the point! It’s the freaking CLIMB, baby! Compounding, baby!

  • Mail them a letter to every address you found

  • Mail them a stupid thing from Amazon to get their attention.

  • Make them a customized video.

  • Send them $2 on Venmo with a note. Over and over and over again.

The best way to find unfindable people is to look for them on platforms where they aren’t well known or popular and contact them there. Like the dude who sent me Crumbl at 9pm. He gets it. I have like 450 YouTube subs. If you comment to me there I will for sure respond (eventually).

And how to do Step 4? I’m out of time. I’m sorry but I have to pull the “Part 2” card today. I haven’t pulled it in months, though! I will finish this email next Friday, for sure.

For now, come watch my show at noon CST today! It’s going to be a great one! Just find your way to my Twitter profile around then and you’ll see it. Not sure yet how to link it with this new video format we are doing.

If you ever wanna ask me a small biz question, either anon or otherwise, just fill this out.

Thx for reading! Stay tuned for part 2 next week.

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As always, thanks for reading!

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com