I know where my bread is buttered

The wife and I were rummaging around at an antiques store last week, picking up some furniture and generally looking for an excuse to grab Dairy Queen without telling the kids. I can’t ever go into a junk store without checking the whole thing out, and vinyl records are a particular weakness of mine. Well, this store had a whole slew of records, milk crates full of them on the floor and covered in dust just as God intended.

Most of them were either has-beens or never-weres, but there were a few golden oldies that I could get behind (nothing like the Rick James classic Throwin’ Down I found in a discount tire store, but that is a story for another time)

There were a couple choice offerings from Conway Twitty and then a couple of Charlie Rich albums. Now, my introduction to Charlie Rich is from Clint Eastwood’s classic “Every Which Way But Loose” where Rich cameos at a honkytonk in LA. Note: I want to live in 1978 LA.

Anyway, I listened to the albums in the background while working and one tune caught my ear, a song titled “I know where my bread is buttered.” The gist of it is that bar flies and floozies keep catching his eye but he knows that going home to his wife is a better deal. He knows who really has his heart. And this got me to thinking about B2B sales and services.

Oh, I’m kidding. I have never paralleled B2B sales to anything enjoyable.

But it did get me thinking about knowing where you bread is buttered in other ways besides a relationship. For me, it’s sticking with a niche that has paid out handsomely for a long time instead of chasing another shiny object. It was logging into Name Cheap and canceling all of my web hosting for websites on the side that aren’t ever going to amount to anything more than a timesuck. It is about doing the things that have worked in the past because they will continue to work in the future.

Most people never succeed in earning a single dollar online so when you find something that actually gets you paid, you better milk that sucker for every cent it’s worth. Don’t even think about diversifying to other things when there are still dollars left on the table.

And that’s it. That’s knowing where your bread is buttered.