A Strange Week, Strong Opinions, and Information for You
A Radical Alternative to College
Monday, December 1st, 2025
Writing to you from Punta del Este, Uruguay
The week started off pretty well…
I hit the benchmark goal for the Entrepreneur Cycle of The Preparation: generate one organic lead through marketing and convert them into a customer — generating 1 sale. This goes into the topic of the Entrepreneur Cycle itself (which we need to talk about) but I’ll get into that soon…
I generated the lead through Facebook ads a couple weeks back. He first contacted me a month ago and, for a little while, I thought nothing was going to come of the interest he initially showed. Then, all of the sudden, a date was set and I was prepping to head out to his property.
It wasn’t a big job by any means, and I now know that I could have charged much more, but it was a great experience. This customer had 4 hectares of tilled land that he wanted to seed with Sudan grass — 25kgs per hectare.
Piece of cake.
The Agras T40 drone can hold up to 50kgs, but I only poured 25kgs in the tank to be 100% sure we were hitting the mark. With only 4 passes with the drone (each pass being less than 6 minutes) we precisely spread 100kgs of seed over 4 hectares. If we’re counting the time it took to switch out batteries and add more seed to the tank, it was probably a 45 minute operation.
It begs the question…who wouldn’t want to get their seeding done in 45 minutes?
But, this customer did have an extra 25kg bag of seed that he wanted to spread. So, after switching a few settings, we distributed the 25kgs equally over the entire 4 hectares — adding another 20-25 minutes to the job, but he needed it done and it was a display of my desire to truly benefit people.
Well, I must have done good work because just one day later this customer called to ask if I could seed another 6-hectare plot of land he had.
Unfortunately, I had to decline because we were leaving the next morning to go celebrate Thanksgiving in Brazil. Yet, after having further communications with him, I have no doubt he will continue to be a customer going into the future…even after having a few poor misunderstandings with him before we actually met.
It’s amazing to see that even a beginner’s understanding of marketing — coupled with a genuine desire to render a service — can do.
Getting the Message Out
Quick update on this.
I created an ad to distribute by hand to farmers/ranchers in my vicinity a couple weeks back.
It’s been tough to figure out where to distribute the letters for my drone business because there are endless variables in terms of farming/ranching operations…number of hectares, number of cattle, whether or not they have a tractor, whether or not they want to seed land…the list goes on and on.
My services fulfill the needs of a very niche set of people around here. So, when I just have to drive around and guess who may need my drone services, I’m taking a shot in the dark with each letter I drop off. Either way it’s a great experience and I dropped off a few letters with my girlfriend and on the bike this past week before going to Brazil.
The Entrepreneur Cycle — Adding Some Detail
The idea of the “Cycle” was a huge breakthrough for us in creating the curriculum for this program. It simplified the complex framework we were trying to convey in early drafts of the book that frankly wouldn’t have been understood by anyone else because we were trying to piece together a loose arrangement of concepts.
Cycles were our “ah-ha” moment.
The theme behind each of the 16 Cycles came quick. We then not only knew how to better explain why and how people should spend 4 years learning new skills but we also created an easy framework to follow. Naturally, entrepreneurship came up and was added to the book as one of the Cycles.
Now that the book is publicly available we see that 1.) we could have done a better job at laying out the benchmarks of success in the Entrepreneur Cycle and 2.) that the Cycle is a popular first pick.
(We highly recommend that you do not start your Preparation with the Entrepreneur Cycle. It’s not a good first pick. Get some other Cycles under your belt first — the Medic, Chef, and Builder Cycles are much better to start with…but that’s a topic for another time)
The Benchmark of Success
Our description of the Entrepreneur Cycle in the book goes something like this (terribly paraphrased): “Come up with a product or service that is relatively easily created/rendered and try to make sales within the 3-month Cycle.”
We should have said something like this instead:
Come up with a service you can render or a product (that you can easily create within 3 months) that you will try to sell
Go through the process of setting up a company (sole proprietorship or LLC)
Create a marketing campaign for your product or service to generate leads (do market research, competition analysis, copywriting, figure out how to run ads on social media…)
Complete the required reading and online courses
Benchmark of success within the Cycle: Generate one lead through marketing which leads to one sale of your product or service
That may sound easy to you, but as an entrepreneur you’re almost completely in the dark about whether your product/service will get any sales until someone actually hands you cash for your efforts. So, it’s entirely possible that you could work for 3 months to start a business and it not lead to a single sale
While one organic sale is the benchmark of success that doesn’t mean that if you’re unsuccessful in hitting that mark that it was a waste…You’d still be walking away with real experience, greater knowledge of your product/service, an understanding of how to legally set up a business, and a greater knowledge of all the skills that go into marketing and sales.
Those are skills that’ll take you places if you get good at them…
But, I want to make one thing very clear — and this goes for all of the Cycles — once you hit the 3-month mark (meaning the Cycle should technically be over) you should move on to the next Cycle.
There’s a huge temptation to want to keep doing what you’re doing, to stick with the current Cycle. Don’t give in to that temptation. Move on. Unless you see an overwhelming, obvious benefit to extending the current Cycle, move on.
Are these updates informative? Are they useful? Entertaining?
Leave a comment below if you’ve got any suggestions or questions for me.
And don’t forget to send this to someone who might benefit.
I’ll see you next week.
-Maxim Benjamin Smith
I am acting as a guinea pig for a program which is meant to prepare young men for the future. This program is designed to be a replacement for the only three routes advertised to young men today - go to college, the military, or a dead-end job.
All of these typical routes of life are designed to shape us into cogs for a wheel that doesn’t serve us. Wasted time, debt, lack of skills, and a soul crushing job define many who follow the traditional route.
This program, which we can call “The Preparation”, is meant to guide young men on a path where they properly utilize their time to gain skills, build relationships, and reach a state of being truly educated. The Preparation is meant to set young men up for success.
What appeals to me about The Preparation is the idea of the type of man I could be. The path to becoming a skilled, dangerous, and competent man is much more clear now. I’ve always been impressed by characters like The Count of Monte Cristo, men who accumulated knowledge and skills over a long period of time and eventually became incredibly capable men.
Young men today do not have a guiding light. We have few mentors and no one to emulate. We have been told that there are only a few paths to success in this world. For intelligent and ambitious people - college is sold to us as the one true path. And yet that path seems completely uncertain today.
We desperately need something real to grab onto. I think this is it.
I’m putting the ideas into action. Will it work? I can’t be sure, but I’m doing my best. I’m more than 60 weeks into the program at this point. So far, so good.
You can follow me along as I follow the program. Each week, I summarize all that I did.
My objective in sharing this is three fold:
Documenting my progress holds me accountable.
I hope these updates will show other young men that there is another path we can take.
For the parents who stumble upon this log, I want to prove to you that telling your children that the conventional path - college, debt, and a job is not the foolproof path you think it is.
Great post, Maxim! Your comment (that not making a sale does NOT mean it was a waste) is great. What can feel like failure is really just the chance to learn and improve. I don't think most people realize that even great marketers often miss the mark initially...but they keep refining until they get it right.
I also loved your encouragement to "move on" at the end of a cycle. I would not have thought of that. It's a bit counter-intuitive, but I see the wisdom in it. Not only does it help assure that you experience all of the cycles, but sticking to a TIME goal rather than an OUTCOME goal will tend to create healthy pressure for the current and future cycles, thereby increasing the chances that goals ARE met.
Great to hear about your first paid customer. There’s something special about that moment when you realize the revenue came from a business you created, not from building value for someone else’s company.
I agree with your thoughts on the Entrepreneur Cycle. Setting a few clear benchmarks makes a big difference; I did the same when I started mine. I also share your view that it is not the best starting point for most people. Young men usually benefit from a few grounding experiences first, especially cycles that require longer in-person commitments like the Fighter or Farmer cycles.
The Entrepreneur Cycle works well for my current situation, but I’m reminding myself to keep moving once my timeline ends. It’s easy to get comfortable just growing the business, but if it’s doing well, you can keep it running while moving into other cycles, as long as you stay clear that your focus is on the new cycle and the business becomes a side-hustle to fund the next steps.