It’s absolutely wild to think about what’s happened over the last few years. I uprooted and moved to Florida. Experienced have very little savings and a $0 weekly income. I now have 5 businesses in my portfolio that I own equity and am partnered on.. One of them did 2.6 million in revenue it’s 3rd year of business. This year we should add another million onto that. Syndicate is our holding company that we use to invest in and consult with all of my 5 businesses. Hence the logo below and above.
It was like a spark. A kid who waited tables barely making $500 a week. A kid who got straight D’s in college and even though I finished all my classes, I never technically received my degree. At the end of 2015 I decided enough was enough. I was 27 and was not anywhere close to where I wanted to be. Thats when we started NEXT ($2.6 million last year). So you want to know how we did that? Here is what I am calling “The Formula”:
- Wholeheartedly accept that there will be truly shitty situations. Horrible days. Real storms! Category 5 hurricanes. Tornados. Monsoons. Utter devastation. You have not just accept it but embrace it. Call it out. Like Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump on the shrimping boat. “Is that all you got?!?!” Perservere. Take it. If you can’t persevere then RUN. Run far away.
- Hire people that are way smarter than you. Better than you. Hire people that can be your consultant. Hire people that can teach you how to do things. Your team makes or breaks you. Oh and if you don’t plan on hiring and delegating, do yourself a favor and don’t bother at all.
- Scale is the endgame. Yeah you can make a little money without it. But always be scaling. I can close a lot of deals with 7 employees but I close a crapload more with 42 employees. If a business works well small, scale it. Why have one tow truck when you can have 30 tow trucks? Why sell one car when you can sell 100? Why have 1 coffee shop when you can have 50 coffee shops? Don’t rush it. Scale organically.
- Leverage everything and everyone in your circle. Your friends cousins sister is a writer for Buzzfeed. Great reach out to her see if there is a way you can help each other. You have a friend who has a similar business to yours, speak to them regularly and compare ideas. Help and share various tactics that worked and did not work with them. Think of everyone you know and narrow that down to people who might be able to help you.
- Screw up. Make Mistakes. I made a ton. Mistakes are unavoidable. I’m fine with it. At the time of making them, every mistake felt like a knife in the abdomen. But mistakes were imperative because thats where the lessons were truly learned. If the end result or consequence to the mistake was bad enough, you will do everything in your power to make sure that you don’t make the same mistake twice. And eventually, the wisdom and experience compiles so that mistakes become less frequent and when they do happen, they aren’t complete daisy cutters.
- Find a way to make everything better. Keep improving yourself, your people, your processes and your product. When it’s perfect, improve it some more. The point is its never perfect because everything is constantly changing, evolving, morphing and coming back around.
- Think outside the box. Just because your Uncle Fred told you it has to be done a certain way, doesn’t mean thats the case. Be careful who’s opinions you listen to and who’s you ignore. Listen to people who’s proof is in the pudding. Its usually the people that don’t know shit that are always offering their opinion. Getting back to the point, that’s not the way it has to be done. There are other ways. And are the other ways perhaps better? How can we do things differently and will that help us?
- Perfection is the sworn enemy of success. Oh you’re a perfectionist? That’s cute. If you can’t figure out a way to leave that at the door, you’re in trouble. No one every became successful requiring perfect with everything they do. There is such thing as good enough. It’s an A already, do you really need an A+? How much longer is that A+ going to take you? What’s the opportunity cost of the time spent getting from the A to the A+? What happens when that opportunity cost is compounded over time? Some might say, this is kind of contradictory to number 6, but continuously improving on things and chasing perfection are not the same thing.
So there it is. The formula. Take it, apply it. One more thing. So as to not BS anyone, owning your own business is NOT FOR EVERYONE. I hate these self help gurus out there telling everyone that anyone can do it. It’s simply not true. Theres absolutely nothing wrong with a job. But if you have a job, move up and be the top person in the company. Then invest into people you believe in, trust and think may be going places. Signing off.
