The Power of Proximity

Moses Kabandana gave a name to something I'd experienced without ever labelling it. We were talking about my school years and he called it the power of proximity. I told him I was stealing it, and I have.

The bus and the Mustangs

My mother did something close to wizardry to get me into a school in a wealthier part of San Diego. Six or eight minutes from the beach. Most of the kids came from two-parent households with disposable income, new cars and pools in the back garden.

I took the city bus there every day on my own while classmates arrived in Mustangs and Mercedes.

That did two things. It made me permanently comfortable being the only Black kid in a predominantly white room, which has been useful in every room since. I never felt any pull to conform or blend, partly because I was reminded of the difference hourly, and you either make peace with that early or you spend your life performing.

The second thing was bigger. I got a look at how the other half lived.

Most of what changed my sense of possibility was free

The first time I ate sushi was at a friend's birthday with their parents. First time I surfed was with school friends — none of my Black friends surfed. First bonfire, first time kayaking, first time snorkelling. All of it came from being nearby when other people did ordinary things.

Here's the part that matters: most of those things cost nothing. The beach is free. The waves are free. You might rent some gear.

What was missing wasn't money. It was knowing it was available to me. Once you've met someone who does a thing, it stops being foreign. It moves from the category of things other people do into the category of things you could do next weekend.

That's the whole mechanism. Proximity doesn't hand you resources. It hands you permission.

I'd go to those houses after school — six or seven bedrooms, up in a canyon, art on the walls — and absorb conversations parents were having with their children simply because I happened to be in the room. Some of those conversations shaped how I think about being a father, years before I had any reason to think about it.

What my mother told me before I left the house

She worked two full-time jobs, so she often wasn't there. But two things were non-negotiable.

Never leave without your ID, because you're a Black kid in America and if something goes wrong you need to be able to prove you are who you say you are.

And: a lot of what these other kids get away with, you will not. Keep your nose clean, pay attention to what's happening around you, and come home to me.

Guilty by association is an old phrase and it's accurate. Proximity cuts in both directions, and she made sure I understood which rooms were worth being in.

Busy is not the same as profitable

Moses asked where small businesses go wrong on the money side, and my answer is that they don't organise their day around profit centres.

People get lost in busy work and mistake it for business. Update the website. Fiddle with the logo again. Take another course. Attend the event where someone will teach you a thing. Watch tutorials.

That can consume an entire day and produce nothing. Roughly eighty percent of your time should go to whatever generates revenue — prospecting, marketing, leads, conversations with people who might pay you. Everything else gets squeezed into the remaining twenty, which means it takes longer, which is correct.

Do that consistently and you start seeing the patterns in what actually produces a result. Once you can see the pattern you can write it down. Once it's written down you can hand it to someone else, and then it keeps happening whether or not you're paying attention.

Vanity metrics

Same principle applies to numbers. Click-through, cost-per-click, open rates — all useful, none of them the point. The only number that matters is conversion: how much attention you generated, how much of it became leads, and how many of those became money.

A video with fifty views that produced five customers beats one with five thousand views that produced none. Not close.

I know an influencer with 1.8 million followers who has never worked out how to monetise any of it. Well known, and still trying to turn the corner. Likes and shares tell you whether you're resonating. They don't tell you whether you have a business.

The advice that lands on deaf ears

Learn to sell.

People treat sales as a dirty word. But sales is a synonym for revenue, and without revenue there's no profit. If you haven't deliberately developed selling as a skill — and it is a skill, not a trait you're born with — then you're playing at entrepreneurship rather than doing it.

The structure isn't complicated. Get to know the person before you say anything about yourself. Find out what their problem actually is from their perspective, because you don't yet know whether you can solve it. Then present a solution built from what they told you, connect it explicitly to the problem they named, and show them someone else you've solved it for.

Then handle their questions. Keep handling them until there aren't any left.

Then ask for the sale. Plainly. "Let's get you started — which card would you like to use?" Most people get to that moment and start beating around the bush, because asking directly feels presumptuous. You're not running a charity. Ask.

Everyone can. Not everyone should.

Anyone can be an entrepreneur. Every object you touch is somebody's business, so any genuine interest can become one.

But I can always tell when I'm talking to someone new at this, because they say they want to start a business so nobody tells them what to do, so they can control their calendar, sleep in, travel when they like.

You will work longer and harder than you ever did for an employer. It will take a greater emotional toll than any boss did. It is mostly early mornings, late nights, being stressed, not having the funds for the things you want, and genuine confusion about what your priorities should be today.

Plenty of people should be grateful for the job they have and get better at it. That's not a failure. It's an accurate read of what this costs.

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The Power of Proximity in Entrepreneurship. The Moses Kabandana Podcast, December 2024.

Thanks to Moses for the phrase. I've been using it ever since.

Turning the thing that works into something that runs without you is what Ignite Funnels is built for.