Trials of a New Business

As you can imagine, starting a business can be difficult, the unknowns, the ups and downs, the pace of everyday work, but man do you get an education real quick. I have a degree in communications from a four year school and I can tell you, not one lesson that I learned prepared me for starting a new business. I know what you are thinking… “Well duhh.. If you wanted to learn about running a business you should’ve been a business major.”  Well listen to you smarty pants, you have cracked the code for success! Wrong! I took several business classes, Matt was a business major and he and our 2 partners have run very successful businesses of their own. It’s still hard, and no amount of school can prepare you for the real world… While I say that, what I mentioned in the previous post (We Struck Gold) was the first experience where I learned that this is what I wanted to do forever. Real Estate and Business. Matt, running 3 businesses of his own and myself, just getting started in the Entrepreneurial world both agree that we wouldn’t want it any other way.

For reference, Matt, myself, and 2 partners started a Real Estate Wholesaling business. We were wholesaling in a few different markets throughout the country which meant we were all working remotely, which meant communication was huge. Wholesaling is very tedious and has quite a few different layers to it. You need 2 sales departments, one to talk with home owners to sell their home, and another to sell that home to an investor. You also need a customer relations department to make sure your buyers and sellers are happy throughout the transaction, and you need a transaction coordinator. Along with that, you need to build relationships, build a trusted brand and so much more. Needless to say it is a lot of work if you want to build a big wholesaling company and here is what Matt and I learned along the way.

1. In order to know if what you are doing is working or not, you need to give it time. If you change up your strategy, or your scripts, or your target audience before you give it the appropriate amount of time and effort, you are going to have a tough time figuring out what works best for you and what will make you money. 

2. Having a complete understanding of your strengths and weaknesses is critical, especially with a team. And this takes time. When we first started, I was unsure what I was best at so I wanted to take on everything which was not a winning formula because I made A LOT of mistakes and we could have been much more successful if we all focused on our strengths and executed.

3. Set commitments and consistently stick to them. I was guilty of committing to certain tasks and I would veer off and try to complete other tasks that I had no business doing, Matt did as well. What this did was not only mess up the momentum, but when your team is expecting you to complete a task, you need to be counted on to complete and do that consistently. For me, that came with trying to do it all and be more than I needed to be. Which leads to my next lesson learned…

4. More is not always better. With so many moving parts in business, if you have partners, you have them for a reason. Lean on them to do the tasks you suck at and they are good at and visa versa. I kick myself knowing how good we all were and how successful that business could have been if we had stuck to the tasks we were good at and put 100% focus into that. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, Mark Cuban, aren’t billionaire’s because they can do every task all the time perfectly within their businesses. They are billionaire’s because they are the best at putting people in the right places and trusting them that their job will get done.

5. Bonus lesson that puts all of these lessons together is… Stay the course and try like hell not ride the rollercoaster. In business every day is a challenge and just because things are going wrong does not mean that something drastic needs to happen every time. Trust that the foundation you build is strong enough to withstand the chaos. Put your head down, stay the course and every few months look up and check in on your systems.

These are the major lessons I took from one of my first ventures as an entrepreneur. I learned about 500,000+ lessons in total, but these are the ones that really stuck out to me. Lessons that you can’t learn from a business class, or having a fancy degree. You can have 12 majors and 17 minors in business related schooling and I’m willing to bet your professors couldn’t properly articulate these lessons even if they tried. Even if they did go through all of these lessons one by one, they would not stick unless you went to the school of hard knocks and learned them from running your own business. 

These facts right here are why I LOVE being a business owner and entrepreneur. Everyone, no matter what background, schooling, upbringing, etc. is on the same playing field. You could be a Harvard grad, or a kid from Sturgis South Dakota with a high school diploma and there is 0 guarantee that the Harvard grad will be any more or less successful than the high school grad. In my opinion, the trick to it all is, how do you respond to the lessons you learn? How quickly can you bounce back? We’re gonna find out if Matt and I are able to respond in real time through these blogs and I am excited to share our journey with you.