Accumulated Advantages, Opportunity Surface Area, and Time

(6 minute read) Advantages don't happen all at once. They are built slowly and meticulously over a lifetime.

Mar 06, 2025

clear hour glass — Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

👋🏼 Welcome to A Founder’s Life for Me (FLFM). I’m Alek, a repeat founder. I’ve built and sold one company so far. I share what I’ve learned in 5-minute reads.

Accumulated Advantages, Opportunity Surface Area, and Time

One of the most common questions I’ve received about my consulting business is, “Where do you find your clients?” Today on FLFM, I’ll give a full answer.

My clients have always come through first or second degree connections. I haven’t done any cold outreach. So, everybody I know is a potential client and everybody that they know is a potential client. If you know 500 people and every person you know also knows 500 people, you have 250,000 potential clients through your first and second degree connections!

The hard question isn’t “Where do you find your clients?” it’s “How do you get potential clients to want to work with you?”

Accumulated Advantages

I’m a big fan of Civilization VII, which is a turn-based strategy game where you build a civilization from scratch. In Civ, you compete against other civilizations for power and world domination. Imagine the board game “Risk,” but better.

Each game of Civ takes hundreds of turns where you build towns, manage cities, fight enemies, etc. On no one turn do you make “the one move” that wins you the game. You accumulate advantages slowly over time. If you have a slight military advantage, you lean on that advantage to capture a new town and acquire a food advantage. Now that you have a food advantage, you build larger cities with higher production output. And so on… The playing field starts off level but you lean on your minor advantages to build a lead over time. Whoever does this the best over the span of the game wins.

I’ve thought about building my consulting business in very much the same way. I’ve slowly accumulated advantages that have resulted in more clients wanting to work with me. The accumulated advantages that have earned me clients are brand and time.

Brand

When I starting my consulting business my brand was all I had. People reading this might think, “Well, Alek. You’re also very smart and good looking, that has to be an advantage too, right?”

Wrong! Yes, I am both of those things. But, at the start, it didn’t really matter what I was. People trusted me because of the skills they believed I had. The difference is subtle but powerful.1

I’m not saying you should lie about your skills or what you’ve accomplished. I am saying that being smart and skilled isn’t enough. For people to trust you to solve their problems, they need to confidently believe in your skills. This is your brand.

I’ve slowly built a strong personal brand that people trust through my work and accomplishments:

I start every one of these articles with my biggest claim to fame, “I’m Alek, a repeat founder. I’ve built and sold one company so far.”
- Outcome: People put more trust in me to solve their problems because I’ve built and sold a company.
I led off by saying that I’ve found all of my projects through people I know. So, when I’m talking about my “brand” I’m talking about how people I know think of me. It also helps that many of the people I know have succeeded on their own paths and earned themselves decision-making positions at their companies!
- Outcome: People I have long term relationships trust me to solve their problems, and made for great first clients.
Once I had my first clients, I worked hard for them to make sure they got great results.
- Outcome: The clients then helped build my brand by writing testimonials.
This blog has helped me build a brand advantage.
- Outcome: Increased awareness across my network of what I’m doing.

I started my most recent company with the advantage that I’d built a company before. That advantage earned me my first clients. My first clients earned me my first testimonials. My first testimonials earned me my next clients. Accumulated advantages don’t come all at once. They take time to build.

Time

Now, I also have the advantage of time. In a way, time is a subcomponent of brand. But, it’s worth discussing on its own.

Time contributes to brand

For better or for worse, people assume that if you’ve done something for a long time, you’re good at it. They’ll put more trust in you. As of March 2025, when I’m writing this, I’ve been running my own company for about 2.5 years. All else equal, people take me more seriously than someone else who is just starting out.

Time as its own advantage

Time gives you more surface area for luck to happen.

If you only give yourself three months to hit your revenue targets, you might not be giving yourself enough time to succeed. Even if you have a strong brand, sometimes the timing doesn’t work out. When selling consulting services, I often feel that the stars need to perfectly align for a client to say “yes” to working with me. Some sales conversations take months to come to fruition.

If I didn’t have the advantage of time, these never would have amounted to anything. The early clients that I acquired through my brand gave me this advantage. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but it was enough to keep me afloat. This gave me the advantage of time. And the advantage of time increased my surface area for other projects and opportunities to fall into place.

Accumulated Advantages, Opportunity Surface Area, and Time

I feel very fortunate to be in the position I am. I also feel grateful to “past Alek” for setting me up in this position. He identified his advantages and leaned into them. He built a stronger and stronger foundation by accumulating new advantages over time. There was never “one day” or “one move” that changed everything. My current advantages were built by “past Alek’s” stubbornness, drive, and patience. And, I feel grateful to him for persevering through everything to get here.

Now, it’s my turn. I’ve played a good game so far. But, I want “future Alek” to look back on the work I do today as and feel grateful for the accumulated advantages I’ve given him.

Subscribe below to stay tuned! By sharing my experiences, I hope to provide advice to entrepreneurs facing similar challenges. Feel free to email me with any questions.

In “The Surprising Benefits of Patient Growth” I talk about some of the other benefits that time and patience have given me. If you want to learn more, give it a read!