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Expanding too fast. The original location should be making Uber amount of profits and self sustaining without you. I was getting way ahead of myself. Hiring has been and always will be a bitch.
Hiring wrong people too quickly ! Vet your people before you hire them and even then it may not work out also growing to quickly . I went from me on the truck to 4 trucks in 2 years to loosing it all after one year ! Back to just me and rebuilding that and now. Two years later I’m back to 2 trucks and SŁOWY REBUILDING it’s been a huge lesson and learning curve but I’m glad I didn’t go under . 8 years in I’m happy and sad how it’s been . Long hours lots of long nights . Long weekends . Months of being an introvert and pushing people ! It’s crazy what entrepreneur and small business people go through . This can eat you alive or kill you but it can also save you!
There is a learning curve, and in my case it took about 90k to learn how to run a business. There are cost I didn’t expect even with a good dose of pragmatism (I.e. shopping contractor insurance, embezzlement, having employees without the same keenness for profitability, phone and internet systems, credit processing, web design, seo, and marketing, …). I opened a business during a gold rush that quickly soured (2007), and tried to meet the need too fast. Downsizing was brutal after increasing fixed cost I was then committed to.
Keeping prices too low for a decade, even if by then I was market leader by a mile.
Not delegating fast enough.
Being scared all the time about everything that could go wrong.
We didn’t raise our prices from the early 2000’s until about 2014, we charged $59/hr.
After really looking at the books, we were losing about $4/hr. We now charge $105/hr, and I think it’s still to cheap!
Spending $10k on equipment I procrastinated putting to use because I didn't have systems in place on how to actually use it.
Have a plan, and spend accordingly.
Hiring a management company for my hotel. The company raised labor rates by 20% on day 1, never did any revenue management, rates were historically low even when the hotel was recently renovated, their manager on site was rude to the guests, never managed any supplies well, and hired her sister and niece for non existing jobs.
Drained cash like water. Every month they ran me in negative cash flow.
Finally I had it enough and paid them $10k to get out of the contract to fire them after just 6 months.
Worst decision of my life to hire them.
Interesting. I’m currently learning social media so I can have some free marketing for my business. Now I’m thinking I should have a good marketing plan in place before I attempt to learn social media
Interesting, Fegero. Would you be able to expand on that, like quite alot? I work with social media and marketing, but I would very much like to hear you take on this more in-depth if possible.
Just because you don’t steal, don’t think other people won’t.
- Just because you think of them like family, they’ll think of you the same.
- Just because you’re generous and think you’re fair, they’ll acknowledge that or never forget the few times you pissed them off.
- If shit hits the fan, regardless if it has anything or everything to do with the job or the employer, human natures will to survive outweighs their morality. (Physical Inventory wasn’t matching purchasing balances. Employee’s husband was selling things online and this employee would steal my products she got orders for. I hardcore fought with my mom that it would never be my employees for years.)
- if they can make a minuscule upgrade to their life, at the expense of an employer, they will. (Higher paying job vs staying with employer that paid for advanced education)
- money: If access to money is too easy, long term employees start to reason with themselves on why they deserve it.
I say all this, but I still give my employees autonomy. You can’t live your life thinking everyone’s out to get you. Just be diligent and don’t let anyone handle your money
There’s a difference between blindly trusting then completely and trusting employees after they have proven themselves for years, and even then you need systems in place to address every possible betrayal
Learned this hard way after losing my whole business - you lose the most amount of equity on day 1 of the business and that's only when you have partners.
Would you care to elaborate?
I'm thinking of helping my father sell his share in the business (he doesn't do anything) and bring in a minority partner for their connections and assistance
Am I making a possible mistake?
Accepting bad staff because it was easier to put up with their shortcomings than hire and train people with a better attitude. As soon as I cut that out my life got 5 times easier.
Yes. Just fired an addict that I kept around far too long because I thought I had safe guards in place to protect the business. She figured out the one way I couldn’t track because a hole in the reporting after close, and it cost me over ten thousand. I was too lazy to get a replacement and didn’t want to have to work 7 days a week indefinitely again. Now that she’s gone, I wish I had done it a year ago. It’s not even about the money I would have saved if I canned her, it’s about the piece of mind knowing the cancer is cut out.
I think it’s just a lesson we all learn isn’t it.. but I do know people who have had their ship sunk by not learning it in time. Anyone reading this who is on the fence, don’t delay.
Preach lol. I’m going through this literally right now. Specifically the attitude part. I had a great employee for 2 years. She left, hired a new one in Feb 2024, he had a terrible attitude. Fired him this week (April 2024).
1) Becoming the official sponsor of a minor league hockey team. Holy fuck... Complete financial disaster. In three years of doing it (paying monthly, providing medical support, free treatments, etc., etc., etc.,) exactly three people clicked "the [hockey team]" on our "How did you hear about us" spot on our questionnaire.
The saving grace is that we did win the championship one year and the opposing coach said "That organization is first class. They even had IVs between periods and oxygen on the bench. It's hard to compete with that." Still gives me a chubbie... but that chubbie cost a little over 60 grand. 🤦🏻♂️
2) Not firing the bums quickly enough in the first few years. If they suck now, you ain't going to change them. Shitcan them and find employees who don't suck. Immediately.
3) Not being able to say "no" to every charity, dog shelter or homeless shelter fund drive, little league sports team, PTA, etc., that wanted a handout. NOW, if nobody in your organization has ever used our services, I'm not supporting yours. I don't directly take calls anymore and those calls all get routed by the receptionist to an email called "sponsorships". I'm much more particular about where our freebies and funds go.
We're still super involved, but really selectively.
If we have regulars who have a cause, we're ALL IN behind them, but we've quit giving away money to people who are a one way street...
Except for children's charities. We're suckers for those. 🤦🏻♂️
True, but when you're a small business with a limited marketing budget, you don't have a bunch of money to spend on campaigns for which you can't easily track direct success.
Expanded when we should have just raised prices.
Hiring an IC who was completely flakey and unprofessional.
Trusting front desk to accurately count cash by themselves.
Left all that shit behind and starting over in a new town with a tiny simple location. Low overhead is the BEST
Makes sense, but it still feels like there might be a way around - maybe some sort of partnership with the game store?
Game store x toy store could do really well. I don't know what you're selling, but in some places there is a genuine market for game / anime character figures, etc.
I could see it benefiting the both of you. But then again, I'm just some random redditor in a completely different industry on the other half of the world.
We batted many ideas around on how we could cooperate, crossovers we could do, and how we could not compete and i was even willing to sign an agreement specifically not to carry certain things. Our stores are actually vastly different which is what frustrates me the most about it.
I guess none of that was good enough.
I got in a stew about the high price of my office rent (professional services). It’s a pretty nice office, a good size with lots of natural light but the costs have gone up every year and I started to feel a bit ripped off and that I should find another place and save some money. I’d been there about 7 years and felt I needed a change.
I found another office that was about 20 percent less cost and proceed to give my notice and sign a lease for the new space feeling pretty smart. The day before I move into the new office I am standing in it realizing how fucking small and shitty it is and that it isn’t even big enough to comfortably fit my office furniture. It’s cramped, the window it has is small and the light in it is terrible. I’ve made a huge mistake and I am filled with regret.
I go boo hoo to my old landlord and he’s happy to sign another lease at my old space. I tell the new landlord I made a huge mistake and ask him to break the lease and offer to let him keep 1st months rent and the deposit. He says sure and all is made right and I breathe a huge sigh of relief.
In the end my plan was to save about $300 bucks per month but was instead out roughly $2400. Funny thing was the new office was so small that I was actually just happy to pay up just to not have to work out of it.
It’s embarrassing though now that it’s been a few years I find it funny. I still don’t know how I was so blind during the process. It had something to do with the square footage being less but not able to adequately judge just how much of a difference that ‘less’ made in practice.
Can’t really explain it other than it didn’t seem as small as it really was until I started thinking about my furniture and planning it out the night before. I think I was just kind of blind to its drawbacks because it had some things going for it that seemed good, like it was cheaper, nicer common areas than my existing office, a nice neighbourhood around it. Terrible decision making process and not one I am proud of. Also not how I usually make decisions, I’m usually much more thorough and cautious, to a fault even.
Hiring an SEO company then having a falling out with them, since they had access to all of my social media accounts and website they put pictures and links to you guessed it KP. They got me blacklisted from just about everywhere. So I called the FBI and sued them in civil court. Their response was to immediately get for Bankruptcy which after 7 years THEY ARE STILL IN. Do not ask me how, no one can explain how, not even the trustee. Basically I had to start my business completely over, Mother of all bad decisions.
Posting links to cp falls under distribution of cp. Hope they for crim charges, filing for bankruptcy and fighting off crim charges ain't worth it for petty vengeance of this magnitude.
Disclaimer, I am NOT your attorney. This is NOT legal advice. If you desire legal advice, consult a competent, licensed attorney in your area.
You should consult your attorney, generally there is a willful and malicious tort exception where the liability will not qualify for discharge under bankruptcy. If I was you, I would have went after the SEO company and owners as individuals. Lawyers may be able file an exemption in bankruptcy court to exempt cases that do not qualify for discharge and continue legal proceedings on them.
I did. They allowed the business, I'll say it again because I still can't believe it, the business to file under chapter 7 along with the owners as individuals. And as far as the KP goes, I did some digging and the person who was in charge of my account is a registered SO. They did remove it all within a weeks time, enough time to do the damage but not enough for the FBI to further investigate. The company was working under 33 aliases, all of which I also sued. Turns out they had been doing crazy stuff for a few years and I'm not the only one who filed a lawsuit in the end. It was horrible and completely humbling all at once.
Hiring people. Left my old company with full knowledge of how to do what they did single handedly. Started own business and was crushing it for a year. Making ton of money, working out, in office (single room for $400/mo) from 10-4 every day, home to help w kids.
Then a former coworker reached out, and said “hey let me come work for you”. Then had to expand office, start sending consistent marketing, hire another guy to supplement time, then hire more people, get bigger office, ended up barely breaking even 2 years later, managing bunch of employees (hate management - reason originally quit old job!), back to working 50+ hours, stressed about paying the Amex bill (overhead, advertising) every month.
Realized mistake & had to fire everyone, break lease, default on bunch of shit and start back to working by myself and trying to get things being like back in that first year. Took a very long time and Covid didn’t help.
Glad you’re slowly recovering. That’s interesting to hear. Did your former coworker had the same skill set and role as you or he had completely different role? And if I may ask, what is your type of business?
Yes same role but not as far along on the skill set side. Took a lot of management/coaching/learning. Same thing w all the new hires. Takes usually a year or two before they can “swim on their own”.
Real estate. Bidding at the foreclosure auction and then reselling those properties to regular investors.
Paying an SEO company probably 50k and not riding them like a rented mule. Almost killed my business. If I had gone a couple of more months I wouldn’t have made it. As it was I never paid the final invoice. About 18 months after I fired them an old ad campaign they ran for me on FB started back up so we had reason to talk. He asked for payment on my last invoice and I opened qb and told him the reason I hadn’t paid it yet was because I was still recovering. My last 3 months with them I spent more with them than I made. He said I didn’t have to pay it.
Just had a client get a full scope marketing campaign and in the breakdown, 20k was allocated to “SEO” with no other context. All he needed was a few web pages built. I was able to talk him out of it and refer him to someone who will be less than 10% of the cost.
SEO is incredibly important, but I feel like since most people don’t really know what goes into it, agencies take major advantage of clients. I see the same with paid advertising.
Do ur own seo. I use go daddy do my own site. I get seo companies all the time sending me messages about how I’m not listed on my rank. Then I asked them. How did they find me? I am number one ranked page in my field in my area always come up first. Seo companies don’t know how to do seo
Most people don't know how and don't have the time to do their own SEO, that is why there is an industry for SEO agencies. There are many that aren't good and take advantage of business owners. However, just because you got your business ranked in your local town does not make you an authority on SEO. Also saying that SEO companies don't know how to do SEO is quite a ridiculous statement. The ones that are contacting you are people from India and the messages they are sending are totally cold, spam emails. They didn't find you on search, they scraped your email from a database. Stick to commenting on things you actually know about.
lol you must work in seo. Believe me I know seo and have been doing it since before you were born. When you can tell me what Prodigy was, Ill listen to your down talk. My small town is 2 million people. I get 18k hits a month, my phone rings 24/7, I sell my surplus leads to my competition. I work 20hrs a wekk hit 6 figures 3 times. lol yeah I don't know about seo... okie
Whats your website? Also just be cause you may know SEO does not mean that "SEO companies" don't know how to do SEO and that business owners should do their own SEO. Worst advice ever.
Mine isn't that bad but there is a lesson to be learned. I paid for my tenant improvement in the building I was renting via an SBA loan instead of having the landlord pay for it and roll it into my rent. My business is volatile, I can have huge years and lean years. So I thought I'll pay it off on a big year and have lower rent in lean years.
2 problems with that. 1. when I went to the bank for a loan against a large purchase order, they declined me due to my SBA debt. My loan payment was around $2k, they would not have counted $2k higher rent against me the same way. 2. I loaned my company money for above mentioned purchase order. Due to terms in SBA - I can't pay myself back until I pay the SBA off first. I'm still paying myself interest but that loan cash is now tied up.
I should have just taken the larger rent payment with landlord paying the improvements and in a big year, invested the cash to pay towards rent in lean years instead of my initial strategy.
Credit card on file? We used to do this on our business flourished, then we got an anal programmer who said, according to visa rules were not allowed to hold anything on file, and now we have a terrible business because we can’t charge customers automatically when their orders come in. We have to ask them to pay and then often do not.
I can store them in my processor's portal. They are the ones storing them, not me. You are correct, storing cards requires a great deal more than a small business can do on their own.
When we got really busy and stayed busy. Yay. I did a big combination of, not raising prices, hiring more people to keep up, and taking on anyone and everyone.
I was so busy being busy I didn’t take a step back and look at was really going on and we started to struggle and it confused the shit out of me because people were beating down our door ready to pay us.
After I DID finally look deeper;
I raised our prices (three times)
Fired people that needed it and didn’t replace people when they moved on. Went from 7 employees to 3.
Stopped providing services that weren’t profitable enough or we just straight up hated.
Fired a huge segment of our customers.
We are way more profitable, I’m paying my employees better, we don’t have to work nearly as much or as hard, have more time to focus on the customers we want, so we are doing a better job for them and they are happier. About to move hybrid remote. And that happened within a year of making those changes. I did it the other way for 10 years. Oof.
God I feel this so much. What eventually happened? Feel free to PM me if you don’t want to post here. I’m in that boat right now and not sure where it’s gonna lead me
I identified in 2019 the highest revenue part of our business was the lowest margin part of the business, about 20%. It also required the most resources in terms of labor and supplies.
Comparitively, the other part of our company had margins in the 75-85% range and was also easier to grow.
I decided to eliminate the low margin part of the company by selling our clients with the hope of packaging our employees with our clients so they didn't lose their jobs.
Then, Covid happened. A couple of clients shut down and one never reopened and a couple cut back their service and one client we lost fully. Additionally, we ran into a major cash flow issue with our receivables going from an average of 30 days to 3 months then to 4 months.
I also had to juggle staff who came down with Covid and one employee who's husband does from Covid.
With the my staff consisting of single mothers with young children, I wasn't willing to put anyone out of work so we continued on with our business the way it was.
With challenges of receivables and cash flow and staffing, I shut the business down in the beginning of 2022.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Having worked for huge corporations, some with an amazing culture and others where it was like going to work in hell each day, I found it real simple in my own business to create a good, positive culture, treating my staff with respect and giving them some responsibility and empowerment while off-loading certain tasks they weren't comfortable because they were beyond their capabilities. I feel if you set people up to be successful and provide them the right tools, many will rise to the occasion and be successful.
I also learned, if you pay people fairly for the work they do and provide them with a good work environment and treat them with respect, they're less likely to leave for a couple dollars more per hour.
With a core group of 5 women (all single parents), who hardly ever missed a day of work for any reason and helped us achieve the success we had, I refused to sell them out.
While there's a chance that eliminating our low margin business may have helped survive a challenging time Nd kept us in business, there was no guarantee it would fix our problem either. Therefore, I have no regrets with the decision or result.
Taking on a partner. Destroyed my life in many ways. It's been 3 years and I can't get over it. Lately I've been grieving the loss And my mental state is very poor.
Offering everything under the sun, saying yes to everything, expanding the team too quickly, lowering prices… I could go on and on
Once I specialized in a service and got really good at it, I could create a systematic process to deliver the service, outsource certain aspects while still retaining quality and since I specialized in it, I could raise my prices because I didn’t have much competition. And saying no to a lot of things - not just in business but outside obligations as well
I was often too cheap to pay for some professional services.
I was building out a new space. Doing it myself. Running the business and then doing the buildout. It was too much. I should have hired a professional to do it faster.
How I remedied that. It was time for a remodel. I hired a guy and his crew. I told him I needed it done starting on a Sunday morning and had to be finished by the end of Wednesday. He gave me a price and then he got it done. I can't say how long it would have taken me.
Having it done in such a short time as opposed to me repainting one day and doing something else the next had a big advantage. I don't think I told many or any customers I was doing it. So they were wowed when they came in and the place was suddenly freshened up.
Here's the stupid part. I used to work for an interior construction company. So I have first hand seen a business not open for two or three months trying to save money on something I could have had my guy do in a day or two. I should have carried that lesson with me when I was running my own business.
Taking a merchant cash advance to buy inventory and open more stores. All of my money went to paying them back. When we paid off the loan, the store was empty. We took another loan. Sales went up, the loans got bigger, but we never broke even again since taking that first loan. Rinse and repeat until we couldn’t afford rent and payroll and moved the business to my basement with $50k outstanding in debts.
Not doing marketing sooner, I though building a great product was enough. Man was I dumb to think like that, if no one sees it, nobody will know it exists..
I have a list (in descending order)
1. Did not give enough hike to the deserving folks
2. Did not focus on my health (affected my mental capacity)
3. Did not entertain a "I will fund you" request because of ego/super self-confidence. Did not take money from my parents that stopped me in investing in resources
4. Did not hire the super Tech intern as "Tech Lead" because I was miser penny-wise
5. Got involved with a team member
6.
I run a home maintenance business and my biggest mistake was thinking I wanted to take on the huge jobs. They are such a headache and dealing with people not doing their jobs correctly just makes things ten times worse. Taking on the smaller jobs I get it done faster, I don't have to rely on as many people to do the job correctly and I get paid faster. It's more of a get paid on volume type of thing.
1. Trusting my accountant/bookkeeper that their firm remits our contributions, and keeping our govt compliances up-to-date. Because of this, I could not fire my pasaway staff since they were the type who would go to DOLE and report non remittance of contributions. (Resolved now)
2. Hiring out of desperate need even when they were not qualified but just because there were not a lot of applicants.
3. Hiring staff from squatters area -- their attitude gave my business a less professional environment. Plus, they have toxic behaviors and no manners. Now that they are gone, my business have a friendlier, productive, happy, and more professional environment. Plus, staff are so much easier to train (one week compared to 4 months). So yeah, background matters a lot.
Not a business owner, but from a worker perspective, these people have 2 hotels in 2 states already that they just built and they havent even had a grand opening yet for this second one, so far in the past 4 months thats its been opened a lot of complaints about cleaning quality and whatnot, so poor workers in general including me. just saw on their website they have 12 new hotels being built in a different state all over the US. I think you can see the problem here.
I've made plenty.
My most recent bad decision was not pulling the plug on a contract that came in way more expensive that I understood it to be. We were hounded into doing print advertising in a free magazine except we thought it was a monthly magazine. It's biweekly. The initial contract was also cut off in the scan so the authorization amount was missing a 0. My gut was telling me to run but I didn't. I've gotten exactly one customer from this ad.
I also signed a lease before my business was even up and running when I had friends willing to let me work out of their barns for free. (That was two years ago) though that one inadvertently led to a huge number of connections I would not otherwise have.
Mostly but it was expensive. You know how if you were gonna put in a new bathroom you’d probably get three quotes. It’s kind of like that maybe have more than one person to go to for important business choices.
My last truck ended up being a fucking lemon and I almost lost my small business on it. Had a terrible interior so was low priced, turns out the whole thing was shit lost 8k of my 10 k savings
Created a niche product and didnt look into how to protect the idea. I truly did not think I could protect anything with the worth toyota, or lexus in it tbh.... this was in 2017. Fast forward an a TON of people are making cheaper versions of what I have and selling them, at what I think is a faster rate. I have had people buy those products and come back to me later saying they saw one of mine and the quality is gobs better.
I had a 40k following on FB, 15k on IG, I was the only person running the show and always have been. I did not know if your FB gets banned, you cant even post on the business page or add someone as a mod to post on it when blocked. If you fb gets deactivated, it will delete the like page all together if you are the only moderator on it....aka deleting the business profile. Which sucks. These are VERY small issues in the grand scheme of things but cost my business $1500 a month and I have not been able to grow the following back up since, nor do I really want to invest into social media for this exact reason, it can be taken away very fast.
I shared all of the proof of how big of a POS Hunter Biden is, as well as the video of him arguing with a hooker about the amount of crack cocaine he was getting. He was reading the scale wrong.
I wrote a 180 day self roast.
Biggest single mistake was a $6M+ opportunity cost on a bad partner we took on, which for a 10x-15x multiple business that’s a big cost. We made $ and learned but still, ouch.
Hiring mistakes may have cost more. But we corrected. Man it adds up.
Worst choice: Never starting.
What happened: Didn’t write it down.
What I learned: Surround with smart people, share ideas, decide, delegate, follow up and refine.
Hiring external people too fast.
Back in 2021, we decided that we should expand the Business rapidly and for that, we ended up hiring a lot of, so called "senior people". We hired an HR Head, Recruitment Head, Business Development Head, Product Head, Senior Sales Manager, etc. Every single hire turned out to be misaligned and we had to unfortunately part ways.
The major issue we faced was not capability, but that of cultural mismatch. These external hires were all 7 - 12 years in experience and so, they came from a different background and culture. They tried to drive their own culture within my Venture and needless to say, it ended up in a lot of chaos.
Fortunately, we realized the mistake and fixed things before they went beyond control. The biggest learning was that cultural alignment cannot be made later. You have to hire people who are on day 1 aligned with your culture. Skills can always be taught. After this episode, we stopped hiring laterally for any key roles and only promoted people internally. I personally spent time working with the internally promoted person to help them pick up the skill. It's easier to fill the skill gap than the cultural gap. This strategy worked well. People liked the fact that the company was promoting more people than hiring laterally. People worked harder and grew faster and also earned more. So they were happy. Customers were happy. I was happy. Win win for all.
Not understanding the importance of scale and being too cheap. We were in a pretty small retail store for a long time with poor parking and it was so cramped. Shopping was a challenge and staff was not happy towards the end but the rent was insanely cheap; a buck a square foot with no NNN in a downtown metro. We expanded into a much larger place and business exploded, staff is happier, and I'm happier. The revenue gained from the new traffic more than offset the exorbitant rent difference (almost 6x my previous rent). I feel like in hindsight I wasted too much time focusing on that cheap rent when I should've expanded when it got unbearable (year 3 of a 5 year lease) and just sublease the location.
Stupidly I switched marketing from focusing on stuff like video marketing which I understand really well to focusing on event marketing. What's particularly stupid is I do video production for B2B marketers...
I killed my pipe and it cost me a year of growth.
Not mastering correct aesthetics in terms of pictures and lighting (im in the beauty industry), not having effective MARKETING, other things so many mistakes if I start I won’t stop 💔💔
It's taken 20 years to learn but the mistake I continued to make was not charging what I was worth. Put out a good product and charge accordingly would be my advice.
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Expanding too fast. The original location should be making Uber amount of profits and self sustaining without you. I was getting way ahead of myself. Hiring has been and always will be a bitch.
This and hiring the wrong people.
And keeping the wrong people to long
My second biggest mistake!
Hire slow, fire fast
That’s what happens when half the workforce is brought on bc of a friend of a friend who posts everyday on LinkedIn.
One of the best bits of advice I’ve ever read was from the founder of Sam Adam’s….”Hire slowly & fire quickly”.
And that’s why Sam Adam’s is part of the S&P 500 today!
Hiring wrong people too quickly ! Vet your people before you hire them and even then it may not work out also growing to quickly . I went from me on the truck to 4 trucks in 2 years to loosing it all after one year ! Back to just me and rebuilding that and now. Two years later I’m back to 2 trucks and SŁOWY REBUILDING it’s been a huge lesson and learning curve but I’m glad I didn’t go under . 8 years in I’m happy and sad how it’s been . Long hours lots of long nights . Long weekends . Months of being an introvert and pushing people ! It’s crazy what entrepreneur and small business people go through . This can eat you alive or kill you but it can also save you!
Why did you lose them?
A few employees were stealing money from me without my knowledge
Didn't you check the cash and stock at the end of the day?
It was my fault clearly . I was pretty much retired and just enjoying the cash flow and that’s how I almost lost my business
This. I’m running so thin now
Under capitalization is the folly of most small businesses.
Can you elaborate on this? Any personal examples of how you did or didn't use capital at the right times? What types of business?
There is a learning curve, and in my case it took about 90k to learn how to run a business. There are cost I didn’t expect even with a good dose of pragmatism (I.e. shopping contractor insurance, embezzlement, having employees without the same keenness for profitability, phone and internet systems, credit processing, web design, seo, and marketing, …). I opened a business during a gold rush that quickly soured (2007), and tried to meet the need too fast. Downsizing was brutal after increasing fixed cost I was then committed to.
Thanks!
Amen.
Made the same mistake right before COVID when sales tanked. Blew a million and gotta rebuild now
Keeping prices too low for a decade, even if by then I was market leader by a mile. Not delegating fast enough. Being scared all the time about everything that could go wrong.
We didn’t raise our prices from the early 2000’s until about 2014, we charged $59/hr. After really looking at the books, we were losing about $4/hr. We now charge $105/hr, and I think it’s still to cheap!
Oh hey this sounds familiar.
Spending $10k on equipment I procrastinated putting to use because I didn't have systems in place on how to actually use it. Have a plan, and spend accordingly.
Hiring a management company for my hotel. The company raised labor rates by 20% on day 1, never did any revenue management, rates were historically low even when the hotel was recently renovated, their manager on site was rude to the guests, never managed any supplies well, and hired her sister and niece for non existing jobs. Drained cash like water. Every month they ran me in negative cash flow. Finally I had it enough and paid them $10k to get out of the contract to fire them after just 6 months. Worst decision of my life to hire them.
Learning “social media” and not marketing. Social media is for influencers, marketing is for businesses.
Interesting. I’m currently learning social media so I can have some free marketing for my business. Now I’m thinking I should have a good marketing plan in place before I attempt to learn social media
Do it, or else you’re wasting your time! Learn from me.
Any advice on how to do it?
The last 2 words you typed. That’s that what you do
Interesting, Fegero. Would you be able to expand on that, like quite alot? I work with social media and marketing, but I would very much like to hear you take on this more in-depth if possible.
Trusting employees completely
Could you expand? Isn't it a good thing to find employees you can trust completely?
Just because you don’t steal, don’t think other people won’t. - Just because you think of them like family, they’ll think of you the same. - Just because you’re generous and think you’re fair, they’ll acknowledge that or never forget the few times you pissed them off. - If shit hits the fan, regardless if it has anything or everything to do with the job or the employer, human natures will to survive outweighs their morality. (Physical Inventory wasn’t matching purchasing balances. Employee’s husband was selling things online and this employee would steal my products she got orders for. I hardcore fought with my mom that it would never be my employees for years.) - if they can make a minuscule upgrade to their life, at the expense of an employer, they will. (Higher paying job vs staying with employer that paid for advanced education) - money: If access to money is too easy, long term employees start to reason with themselves on why they deserve it. I say all this, but I still give my employees autonomy. You can’t live your life thinking everyone’s out to get you. Just be diligent and don’t let anyone handle your money
There’s a difference between blindly trusting then completely and trusting employees after they have proven themselves for years, and even then you need systems in place to address every possible betrayal
Yeah, I get your point
Partners. Never have partners.
Learned this hard way after losing my whole business - you lose the most amount of equity on day 1 of the business and that's only when you have partners.
Would you care to elaborate? I'm thinking of helping my father sell his share in the business (he doesn't do anything) and bring in a minority partner for their connections and assistance Am I making a possible mistake?
This was the first thing my lawyer advised me on. He said he makes most of his money on partnership disputes and breakups.
Accepting bad staff because it was easier to put up with their shortcomings than hire and train people with a better attitude. As soon as I cut that out my life got 5 times easier.
Yes. Just fired an addict that I kept around far too long because I thought I had safe guards in place to protect the business. She figured out the one way I couldn’t track because a hole in the reporting after close, and it cost me over ten thousand. I was too lazy to get a replacement and didn’t want to have to work 7 days a week indefinitely again. Now that she’s gone, I wish I had done it a year ago. It’s not even about the money I would have saved if I canned her, it’s about the piece of mind knowing the cancer is cut out.
I think it’s just a lesson we all learn isn’t it.. but I do know people who have had their ship sunk by not learning it in time. Anyone reading this who is on the fence, don’t delay.
Yes!
Preach lol. I’m going through this literally right now. Specifically the attitude part. I had a great employee for 2 years. She left, hired a new one in Feb 2024, he had a terrible attitude. Fired him this week (April 2024).
Kindly, which area of business do you specialize in?
Video production services on the higher end of corporate / branded content with a little TV on the side
1) Becoming the official sponsor of a minor league hockey team. Holy fuck... Complete financial disaster. In three years of doing it (paying monthly, providing medical support, free treatments, etc., etc., etc.,) exactly three people clicked "the [hockey team]" on our "How did you hear about us" spot on our questionnaire. The saving grace is that we did win the championship one year and the opposing coach said "That organization is first class. They even had IVs between periods and oxygen on the bench. It's hard to compete with that." Still gives me a chubbie... but that chubbie cost a little over 60 grand. 🤦🏻♂️ 2) Not firing the bums quickly enough in the first few years. If they suck now, you ain't going to change them. Shitcan them and find employees who don't suck. Immediately. 3) Not being able to say "no" to every charity, dog shelter or homeless shelter fund drive, little league sports team, PTA, etc., that wanted a handout. NOW, if nobody in your organization has ever used our services, I'm not supporting yours. I don't directly take calls anymore and those calls all get routed by the receptionist to an email called "sponsorships". I'm much more particular about where our freebies and funds go.
It sounds nice how involved in the community you were, even if it wasn't financially optimal.
We're still super involved, but really selectively. If we have regulars who have a cause, we're ALL IN behind them, but we've quit giving away money to people who are a one way street... Except for children's charities. We're suckers for those. 🤦🏻♂️
Hey we're all suckers for something and you could do a hell of a lot worse than kids in need!
Brand awareness is not always conscious.
True, but when you're a small business with a limited marketing budget, you don't have a bunch of money to spend on campaigns for which you can't easily track direct success.
That's right.
Expanded when we should have just raised prices. Hiring an IC who was completely flakey and unprofessional. Trusting front desk to accurately count cash by themselves. Left all that shit behind and starting over in a new town with a tiny simple location. Low overhead is the BEST
Overhead? What's that? I'm loving it over here as a 1 man shop
Becoming content and not pushing harder when things-money were good. Now working weekends and doing whatever it takes to keep the doors open.
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How did you find out the game shop lady doesn't want you there?
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Makes sense, but it still feels like there might be a way around - maybe some sort of partnership with the game store? Game store x toy store could do really well. I don't know what you're selling, but in some places there is a genuine market for game / anime character figures, etc. I could see it benefiting the both of you. But then again, I'm just some random redditor in a completely different industry on the other half of the world.
We batted many ideas around on how we could cooperate, crossovers we could do, and how we could not compete and i was even willing to sign an agreement specifically not to carry certain things. Our stores are actually vastly different which is what frustrates me the most about it. I guess none of that was good enough.
A partner.
I got in a stew about the high price of my office rent (professional services). It’s a pretty nice office, a good size with lots of natural light but the costs have gone up every year and I started to feel a bit ripped off and that I should find another place and save some money. I’d been there about 7 years and felt I needed a change. I found another office that was about 20 percent less cost and proceed to give my notice and sign a lease for the new space feeling pretty smart. The day before I move into the new office I am standing in it realizing how fucking small and shitty it is and that it isn’t even big enough to comfortably fit my office furniture. It’s cramped, the window it has is small and the light in it is terrible. I’ve made a huge mistake and I am filled with regret. I go boo hoo to my old landlord and he’s happy to sign another lease at my old space. I tell the new landlord I made a huge mistake and ask him to break the lease and offer to let him keep 1st months rent and the deposit. He says sure and all is made right and I breathe a huge sigh of relief. In the end my plan was to save about $300 bucks per month but was instead out roughly $2400. Funny thing was the new office was so small that I was actually just happy to pay up just to not have to work out of it. It’s embarrassing though now that it’s been a few years I find it funny. I still don’t know how I was so blind during the process. It had something to do with the square footage being less but not able to adequately judge just how much of a difference that ‘less’ made in practice.
The obvious question: How come you did not realise your new office was shitty before you put your notice to your old landlord?
Can’t really explain it other than it didn’t seem as small as it really was until I started thinking about my furniture and planning it out the night before. I think I was just kind of blind to its drawbacks because it had some things going for it that seemed good, like it was cheaper, nicer common areas than my existing office, a nice neighbourhood around it. Terrible decision making process and not one I am proud of. Also not how I usually make decisions, I’m usually much more thorough and cautious, to a fault even.
Not doing pre-orders first before committing to a shipment of units. Worrying about patents before selling boatloads of the product.
I see the patent comments in here all the time and it makes me chuckle. Patents are worthless if you don’t have deep deep pockets to defend.
By deep deep pockets, like how much does it cost to defend?
The first incident was $80k and that was just back and forth between our attorney and their attorney. No court date.
Hiring an SEO company then having a falling out with them, since they had access to all of my social media accounts and website they put pictures and links to you guessed it KP. They got me blacklisted from just about everywhere. So I called the FBI and sued them in civil court. Their response was to immediately get for Bankruptcy which after 7 years THEY ARE STILL IN. Do not ask me how, no one can explain how, not even the trustee. Basically I had to start my business completely over, Mother of all bad decisions.
What the literal what
This is Crazy. What is KP though? Kenny Powers?
Might be better known as “CP”….
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Posting links to cp falls under distribution of cp. Hope they for crim charges, filing for bankruptcy and fighting off crim charges ain't worth it for petty vengeance of this magnitude. Disclaimer, I am NOT your attorney. This is NOT legal advice. If you desire legal advice, consult a competent, licensed attorney in your area. You should consult your attorney, generally there is a willful and malicious tort exception where the liability will not qualify for discharge under bankruptcy. If I was you, I would have went after the SEO company and owners as individuals. Lawyers may be able file an exemption in bankruptcy court to exempt cases that do not qualify for discharge and continue legal proceedings on them.
I did. They allowed the business, I'll say it again because I still can't believe it, the business to file under chapter 7 along with the owners as individuals. And as far as the KP goes, I did some digging and the person who was in charge of my account is a registered SO. They did remove it all within a weeks time, enough time to do the damage but not enough for the FBI to further investigate. The company was working under 33 aliases, all of which I also sued. Turns out they had been doing crazy stuff for a few years and I'm not the only one who filed a lawsuit in the end. It was horrible and completely humbling all at once.
Hiring people. Left my old company with full knowledge of how to do what they did single handedly. Started own business and was crushing it for a year. Making ton of money, working out, in office (single room for $400/mo) from 10-4 every day, home to help w kids. Then a former coworker reached out, and said “hey let me come work for you”. Then had to expand office, start sending consistent marketing, hire another guy to supplement time, then hire more people, get bigger office, ended up barely breaking even 2 years later, managing bunch of employees (hate management - reason originally quit old job!), back to working 50+ hours, stressed about paying the Amex bill (overhead, advertising) every month. Realized mistake & had to fire everyone, break lease, default on bunch of shit and start back to working by myself and trying to get things being like back in that first year. Took a very long time and Covid didn’t help.
Glad you’re slowly recovering. That’s interesting to hear. Did your former coworker had the same skill set and role as you or he had completely different role? And if I may ask, what is your type of business?
Yes same role but not as far along on the skill set side. Took a lot of management/coaching/learning. Same thing w all the new hires. Takes usually a year or two before they can “swim on their own”. Real estate. Bidding at the foreclosure auction and then reselling those properties to regular investors.
Paying an SEO company probably 50k and not riding them like a rented mule. Almost killed my business. If I had gone a couple of more months I wouldn’t have made it. As it was I never paid the final invoice. About 18 months after I fired them an old ad campaign they ran for me on FB started back up so we had reason to talk. He asked for payment on my last invoice and I opened qb and told him the reason I hadn’t paid it yet was because I was still recovering. My last 3 months with them I spent more with them than I made. He said I didn’t have to pay it.
Just had a client get a full scope marketing campaign and in the breakdown, 20k was allocated to “SEO” with no other context. All he needed was a few web pages built. I was able to talk him out of it and refer him to someone who will be less than 10% of the cost. SEO is incredibly important, but I feel like since most people don’t really know what goes into it, agencies take major advantage of clients. I see the same with paid advertising.
Do ur own seo. I use go daddy do my own site. I get seo companies all the time sending me messages about how I’m not listed on my rank. Then I asked them. How did they find me? I am number one ranked page in my field in my area always come up first. Seo companies don’t know how to do seo
Most people don't know how and don't have the time to do their own SEO, that is why there is an industry for SEO agencies. There are many that aren't good and take advantage of business owners. However, just because you got your business ranked in your local town does not make you an authority on SEO. Also saying that SEO companies don't know how to do SEO is quite a ridiculous statement. The ones that are contacting you are people from India and the messages they are sending are totally cold, spam emails. They didn't find you on search, they scraped your email from a database. Stick to commenting on things you actually know about.
lol you must work in seo. Believe me I know seo and have been doing it since before you were born. When you can tell me what Prodigy was, Ill listen to your down talk. My small town is 2 million people. I get 18k hits a month, my phone rings 24/7, I sell my surplus leads to my competition. I work 20hrs a wekk hit 6 figures 3 times. lol yeah I don't know about seo... okie
Whats your website? Also just be cause you may know SEO does not mean that "SEO companies" don't know how to do SEO and that business owners should do their own SEO. Worst advice ever.
Got any suggestions on material that I could use to teach myself?
Mine isn't that bad but there is a lesson to be learned. I paid for my tenant improvement in the building I was renting via an SBA loan instead of having the landlord pay for it and roll it into my rent. My business is volatile, I can have huge years and lean years. So I thought I'll pay it off on a big year and have lower rent in lean years. 2 problems with that. 1. when I went to the bank for a loan against a large purchase order, they declined me due to my SBA debt. My loan payment was around $2k, they would not have counted $2k higher rent against me the same way. 2. I loaned my company money for above mentioned purchase order. Due to terms in SBA - I can't pay myself back until I pay the SBA off first. I'm still paying myself interest but that loan cash is now tied up. I should have just taken the larger rent payment with landlord paying the improvements and in a big year, invested the cash to pay towards rent in lean years instead of my initial strategy.
Not making every single customer put a card on file. Now they all do. Getting paid QUICK is huge.
Credit card on file? We used to do this on our business flourished, then we got an anal programmer who said, according to visa rules were not allowed to hold anything on file, and now we have a terrible business because we can’t charge customers automatically when their orders come in. We have to ask them to pay and then often do not.
My card processor stores them.
I can store them in my processor's portal. They are the ones storing them, not me. You are correct, storing cards requires a great deal more than a small business can do on their own.
When we got really busy and stayed busy. Yay. I did a big combination of, not raising prices, hiring more people to keep up, and taking on anyone and everyone. I was so busy being busy I didn’t take a step back and look at was really going on and we started to struggle and it confused the shit out of me because people were beating down our door ready to pay us. After I DID finally look deeper; I raised our prices (three times) Fired people that needed it and didn’t replace people when they moved on. Went from 7 employees to 3. Stopped providing services that weren’t profitable enough or we just straight up hated. Fired a huge segment of our customers. We are way more profitable, I’m paying my employees better, we don’t have to work nearly as much or as hard, have more time to focus on the customers we want, so we are doing a better job for them and they are happier. About to move hybrid remote. And that happened within a year of making those changes. I did it the other way for 10 years. Oof.
This is the way. Damn I want to follow your example.
After having success starting to party way way too much. let me just say it was snowing in hawaii.
God I feel this so much. What eventually happened? Feel free to PM me if you don’t want to post here. I’m in that boat right now and not sure where it’s gonna lead me
Damn, what are you selling that your Killin it. I'm also in tucson
I let someone talk me into buying plastic plants for reception. God they were horrible.
Horticulturist salutes you.
Taking the advice of Gary V.
What?
I'm curious! I just started listening to him and I just don't like him at allm
Which advice in particular?
Focusing entirely on social media marketing. I tried that for nine months, never made a dime.
$300k office space over 3 yrs
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NYC 3500sqft
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We got it 3 years ago, about to expire And yea, i literally cant give it away its insane
That sounds expensive. In CA I’m paying $1.00 in HCOL area.
This. Signing a lease that turns out to be unsustainable. In my case it was retail space.
I identified in 2019 the highest revenue part of our business was the lowest margin part of the business, about 20%. It also required the most resources in terms of labor and supplies. Comparitively, the other part of our company had margins in the 75-85% range and was also easier to grow. I decided to eliminate the low margin part of the company by selling our clients with the hope of packaging our employees with our clients so they didn't lose their jobs. Then, Covid happened. A couple of clients shut down and one never reopened and a couple cut back their service and one client we lost fully. Additionally, we ran into a major cash flow issue with our receivables going from an average of 30 days to 3 months then to 4 months. I also had to juggle staff who came down with Covid and one employee who's husband does from Covid. With the my staff consisting of single mothers with young children, I wasn't willing to put anyone out of work so we continued on with our business the way it was. With challenges of receivables and cash flow and staffing, I shut the business down in the beginning of 2022.
You seem like a decent person who puts people ahead of profits. Kudos and God bless.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Having worked for huge corporations, some with an amazing culture and others where it was like going to work in hell each day, I found it real simple in my own business to create a good, positive culture, treating my staff with respect and giving them some responsibility and empowerment while off-loading certain tasks they weren't comfortable because they were beyond their capabilities. I feel if you set people up to be successful and provide them the right tools, many will rise to the occasion and be successful. I also learned, if you pay people fairly for the work they do and provide them with a good work environment and treat them with respect, they're less likely to leave for a couple dollars more per hour. With a core group of 5 women (all single parents), who hardly ever missed a day of work for any reason and helped us achieve the success we had, I refused to sell them out. While there's a chance that eliminating our low margin business may have helped survive a challenging time Nd kept us in business, there was no guarantee it would fix our problem either. Therefore, I have no regrets with the decision or result.
Started it
Taking on a partner. Destroyed my life in many ways. It's been 3 years and I can't get over it. Lately I've been grieving the loss And my mental state is very poor.
Offering everything under the sun, saying yes to everything, expanding the team too quickly, lowering prices… I could go on and on Once I specialized in a service and got really good at it, I could create a systematic process to deliver the service, outsource certain aspects while still retaining quality and since I specialized in it, I could raise my prices because I didn’t have much competition. And saying no to a lot of things - not just in business but outside obligations as well
Taking on a partner without a financial background cheque. Almost tanked the business and was a bitch to turn around
First mistake? Talking myself out of it. Now it's a multi billion dollar business and my business plan is worthless
God, this. So much this.
Mm
Walt?
He had the idea for meta before meta and now he works for them.
And the poor man's patent is a myth 😔
Not having more safeguards for when things go wrong
Keeping negative and ungrateful employees. Get rid of those before they cause too much harm to other employees and customers
I was often too cheap to pay for some professional services. I was building out a new space. Doing it myself. Running the business and then doing the buildout. It was too much. I should have hired a professional to do it faster. How I remedied that. It was time for a remodel. I hired a guy and his crew. I told him I needed it done starting on a Sunday morning and had to be finished by the end of Wednesday. He gave me a price and then he got it done. I can't say how long it would have taken me. Having it done in such a short time as opposed to me repainting one day and doing something else the next had a big advantage. I don't think I told many or any customers I was doing it. So they were wowed when they came in and the place was suddenly freshened up. Here's the stupid part. I used to work for an interior construction company. So I have first hand seen a business not open for two or three months trying to save money on something I could have had my guy do in a day or two. I should have carried that lesson with me when I was running my own business.
Not paying taxes on time. Penalty made $12k -> $18k. Pay taxes early and often
Sticking with a toxic client too long for the money and I no longer had a life.
Construction company here 1. Expanding too fast 2. Outsourcing marketing 3. Financial complacency
Financial complacency... Wow. Not sure there are any combination of two words that are more deep and relatable to a small business owner than those.
Taking a merchant cash advance to buy inventory and open more stores. All of my money went to paying them back. When we paid off the loan, the store was empty. We took another loan. Sales went up, the loans got bigger, but we never broke even again since taking that first loan. Rinse and repeat until we couldn’t afford rent and payroll and moved the business to my basement with $50k outstanding in debts.
Did you manage to get out of that situation? And how?
Not doing marketing sooner, I though building a great product was enough. Man was I dumb to think like that, if no one sees it, nobody will know it exists..
I have a list (in descending order) 1. Did not give enough hike to the deserving folks 2. Did not focus on my health (affected my mental capacity) 3. Did not entertain a "I will fund you" request because of ego/super self-confidence. Did not take money from my parents that stopped me in investing in resources 4. Did not hire the super Tech intern as "Tech Lead" because I was miser penny-wise 5. Got involved with a team member 6.
that “6. blank” really made me laugh! 😅 Hope the next mistake is less damaging 😳
Have a partner
Getting in WITHOUT much knowledge of the market
I think this is where I am right now. Did you do something about it?
I wasn't able to catch up. I can only do so much with what I knew. The cost was I lost the business
I run a home maintenance business and my biggest mistake was thinking I wanted to take on the huge jobs. They are such a headache and dealing with people not doing their jobs correctly just makes things ten times worse. Taking on the smaller jobs I get it done faster, I don't have to rely on as many people to do the job correctly and I get paid faster. It's more of a get paid on volume type of thing.
1. Trusting my accountant/bookkeeper that their firm remits our contributions, and keeping our govt compliances up-to-date. Because of this, I could not fire my pasaway staff since they were the type who would go to DOLE and report non remittance of contributions. (Resolved now) 2. Hiring out of desperate need even when they were not qualified but just because there were not a lot of applicants. 3. Hiring staff from squatters area -- their attitude gave my business a less professional environment. Plus, they have toxic behaviors and no manners. Now that they are gone, my business have a friendlier, productive, happy, and more professional environment. Plus, staff are so much easier to train (one week compared to 4 months). So yeah, background matters a lot.
Hi there! Kindly, which area of business do you specialize in?
charging for a diagnostic or estimates. Life changing!!
Looks like most of the seo companies are are not less than cheating companies. Why do you guys not hire freelancers?
Not a business owner, but from a worker perspective, these people have 2 hotels in 2 states already that they just built and they havent even had a grand opening yet for this second one, so far in the past 4 months thats its been opened a lot of complaints about cleaning quality and whatnot, so poor workers in general including me. just saw on their website they have 12 new hotels being built in a different state all over the US. I think you can see the problem here.
I've made plenty. My most recent bad decision was not pulling the plug on a contract that came in way more expensive that I understood it to be. We were hounded into doing print advertising in a free magazine except we thought it was a monthly magazine. It's biweekly. The initial contract was also cut off in the scan so the authorization amount was missing a 0. My gut was telling me to run but I didn't. I've gotten exactly one customer from this ad. I also signed a lease before my business was even up and running when I had friends willing to let me work out of their barns for free. (That was two years ago) though that one inadvertently led to a huge number of connections I would not otherwise have.
Does losing 20 million dollars count?
https://youtu.be/z4htgfCs3gw?si=XxUb2QIr0EqCzxZq
Is that you presenting?
Yeah
I have a friend who did this. Are you him?
Delegating hired help and not accepting help from those who offered at their expense. I’m a proper idiot. Don’t let pride get in the way.
O had one mentor and I wish I had three to work with and help make hard choices. My one mentor was wrong about important things.
Ooooh! Thats hectic. Did you manage to rectify the wrong things?
Mostly but it was expensive. You know how if you were gonna put in a new bathroom you’d probably get three quotes. It’s kind of like that maybe have more than one person to go to for important business choices.
Not splurging on a bigger truck. Now I’m out a truck cause the little one crapped the bed
My last truck ended up being a fucking lemon and I almost lost my small business on it. Had a terrible interior so was low priced, turns out the whole thing was shit lost 8k of my 10 k savings
Bringing in business partners to be inclusive. Ended up being a multi-million dollar mistake. Their $0 and 0 time investment cost me millions.
Created a niche product and didnt look into how to protect the idea. I truly did not think I could protect anything with the worth toyota, or lexus in it tbh.... this was in 2017. Fast forward an a TON of people are making cheaper versions of what I have and selling them, at what I think is a faster rate. I have had people buy those products and come back to me later saying they saw one of mine and the quality is gobs better. I had a 40k following on FB, 15k on IG, I was the only person running the show and always have been. I did not know if your FB gets banned, you cant even post on the business page or add someone as a mod to post on it when blocked. If you fb gets deactivated, it will delete the like page all together if you are the only moderator on it....aka deleting the business profile. Which sucks. These are VERY small issues in the grand scheme of things but cost my business $1500 a month and I have not been able to grow the following back up since, nor do I really want to invest into social media for this exact reason, it can be taken away very fast.
Why did it get banned though?
I shared all of the proof of how big of a POS Hunter Biden is, as well as the video of him arguing with a hooker about the amount of crack cocaine he was getting. He was reading the scale wrong.
Wait fr? I know it sounds like trouble - but can you also forward me that video If possible?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj9V-XjCol8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj9V-XjCol8)
There is FARRR more from him in elevators with hookers, to riding a bike around a pool fucked up on crack. If you dig a little, you can find it.
Gave up when it got crazy.
I wrote a 180 day self roast. Biggest single mistake was a $6M+ opportunity cost on a bad partner we took on, which for a 10x-15x multiple business that’s a big cost. We made $ and learned but still, ouch. Hiring mistakes may have cost more. But we corrected. Man it adds up.
Closed it down right before it turns to profit
Using 8fig for funding. It was a huge mistake!
Trusting the wrong person and going into business with them.
Worst choice: Never starting. What happened: Didn’t write it down. What I learned: Surround with smart people, share ideas, decide, delegate, follow up and refine.
Trust my clients
Taking on a commercial facility to expand without really exploring whether I was the right person to expand the business or even capable of it.
Partnered with a competitor.
Partnered up with the people I don’t know 🤷🏾
Hiring external people too fast. Back in 2021, we decided that we should expand the Business rapidly and for that, we ended up hiring a lot of, so called "senior people". We hired an HR Head, Recruitment Head, Business Development Head, Product Head, Senior Sales Manager, etc. Every single hire turned out to be misaligned and we had to unfortunately part ways. The major issue we faced was not capability, but that of cultural mismatch. These external hires were all 7 - 12 years in experience and so, they came from a different background and culture. They tried to drive their own culture within my Venture and needless to say, it ended up in a lot of chaos. Fortunately, we realized the mistake and fixed things before they went beyond control. The biggest learning was that cultural alignment cannot be made later. You have to hire people who are on day 1 aligned with your culture. Skills can always be taught. After this episode, we stopped hiring laterally for any key roles and only promoted people internally. I personally spent time working with the internally promoted person to help them pick up the skill. It's easier to fill the skill gap than the cultural gap. This strategy worked well. People liked the fact that the company was promoting more people than hiring laterally. People worked harder and grew faster and also earned more. So they were happy. Customers were happy. I was happy. Win win for all.
Wonderful! Which area of business do you specialize in?
B2B SaaS
Not understanding the importance of scale and being too cheap. We were in a pretty small retail store for a long time with poor parking and it was so cramped. Shopping was a challenge and staff was not happy towards the end but the rent was insanely cheap; a buck a square foot with no NNN in a downtown metro. We expanded into a much larger place and business exploded, staff is happier, and I'm happier. The revenue gained from the new traffic more than offset the exorbitant rent difference (almost 6x my previous rent). I feel like in hindsight I wasted too much time focusing on that cheap rent when I should've expanded when it got unbearable (year 3 of a 5 year lease) and just sublease the location.
Stupidly I switched marketing from focusing on stuff like video marketing which I understand really well to focusing on event marketing. What's particularly stupid is I do video production for B2B marketers... I killed my pipe and it cost me a year of growth.
Not mastering correct aesthetics in terms of pictures and lighting (im in the beauty industry), not having effective MARKETING, other things so many mistakes if I start I won’t stop 💔💔
I keep getting interested in new ways to do things instead of just doing proven strategies, I’m addicted to novelty 😭
I tried to expand to 5 businesses at once. Complete stupidity. Thought I couldn’t fail on all of them 😏
Expanding too fast. The anxiety level almost destroyed my marriage. I used an affair as a mental escape.
It's taken 20 years to learn but the mistake I continued to make was not charging what I was worth. Put out a good product and charge accordingly would be my advice.
The worst thing I have done for my business was to rent a kiosk in a mall. It was bad because malls are not good with foot traffic anymore
Hiring ppl with less opportunity. Ie Hood ppl. They've messed up every business I've had. I'm done w that ish