Read This To Save Yourself 500 Days Worth Of My Business Mistakes

I’ve nearly went out of business 3 times. Profited nearly nothing my first year. And lost nearly my entire staff in one day, all in the past 2 years.

I start off with that because in business the only guarantee you have is problems. No matter who you have as a mentor or however much money you have, problems will arise.

The only real hedge you have against it is being able to stick to your business and not give up during that time period.

That’s the first lesson I want everyone to have because without it I wouldn’t have even passed my first $5,000 in business. Just being resilient got me from nowhere, to somewhere, to here. And the thing is, the person who believes in himself and who can stay committed will always beat the person with the know how, money, leverage, etc if they are susceptible to quitting or giving up.

The second thing that helped me get passed most of my problems was having loyal people around me. Really quick shout out to the entire BlueShine team, the person who stuck it out with me throughout this entire summer, even during the Cochrane arc, and so many others too, I would name everyone off but idk if they’d want that (haha.)

My first year in business I had my close middle school friend be essentially my right hand man, and that first year had so many mistakes. 90% was just financial and employee related but my one friend stuck by me and that alone really helped make sure that we kept the business going until school started up again.

Having loyal and overall good people around is important because without them, you have no one to talk too, no one to ask for help during a hard day and you have no one to celebrate your wins with.

The second year I would say everyone around me was loyal and I was able to have an amazing relationship with everyone. There wasn’t a single time where I didn’t wanna keep pushing, or even quit and I’m happy to have had my best year (so far) with this current team.

After making sure that you as a person can be able to fully commit yourself to one thing, get the most loyal people you know and find a way to work with them. Without that, max I would have made 25k this year.

What also helped my business not only continue to grow but also helped save reputation was customer service. And there’s 2 pieces that helped.

We are a service based business, and messing up on job sites is almost guaranteed, almost 1/10 times we make some type of mistake, usually small but sometimes it’s a big fuck up.

One of my friends and (to a degree) mentor of mine, Dan Bagniuk actually met because of a similar situation. We sold his mother in law and when my one friend cleaned her home, it looked worse than before because she had some special type of windows, low-e windows.

And when we cleaned it she wasn’t home, so after the job was done we sent a text, said thank you and sent the payment link. The next morning she pays the invoice and emails me saying “the job was shit, but here’s the money, please do a better job for the next person.” It was like 9:00 am and I was playing clash royal when I got the notification.

As soon as I finished the game I replied with along the lines of “omg I’m so sorry, we didn’t know about the mistake, we’ll come back in the next 3-4 hours to redo the whole thing, where can I send a refund in the mean time?”

I got there and she was like “wow I’ve never had anyone do that, offer a refund or reply that quick to a complaint” and I was like “well it’s the least I could do, you were super sweet when I first met you and my goal was to make you happy, not just take the money and run off.” And everything I said was true, as well as I meant it. Always use your tone of voice to help with every customer scenario.

I essentially followed up on my promise and guarantee, which is “worst case if we mess up we’ll come back and redo the whole thing.”

She then introduced me to Dan (who’s much more advanced in business than me) and she gave the story and he was like “yeah that’s what any good business does.” Respond quick and be genuine. Also something I do is offer refunds (no one ever takes them) and if someone does take it they’re always more than happy to give you more money after the job is done right. So start offering refunds and always be genuine with your customers.

If you haven’t seen the previous post about Hard decision making, I’d highly recommend reading it because that was another big part of my success and longevity and there’s no way I can condense that into this, so do give that a read as well.

I would also like to give an honourable mention to positive thinking. Whenever selling nowadays I notice that whenever I get pissed off or am just thinking about negative things, I never close anyone or make money.

Throughout all my time in business and sales the only time I get massive amounts of money, results and just do good overall is whenever I’m thinking positive and have good thoughts in my head. Even when it gets really hard to stay positive tell yourself, “Bro. Stop being negative .” At least that’s what helps me haha.

Being positive and limiting the negative thoughts was honestly what saved me from closing my business all 3 times that I got close to doing it. Even though everyone says it, try and be conscious of your negative brain stepping in and just shut it down and see how everything around just changes.

And to finish this off, the biggest mistake I’ve made in business was……… Not being smart with my money :0

I ended up finishing my first year of business with nearly nothing as well as not being able to give the people around me the money/opportunities that they wanted.

The second year however was incredible, and that was because I learned from my mistakes.

What caused me being broke was honestly being a dickhead who didn’t listen to anyone about saving money, because I had a good amount coming in and I started listening to the “sAvInG iS sTuPiP, yOu jUsT nEeD To MaKe MoRe MoNeY bRo.” If You can save yourself from being as retarded as old me by just listening to now me then good. If you don’t listen, I’m sure you’ll be fine by the end but you’ll regret blowing all the money.

Honestly I couldn’t even tell you what I spent all the money on either. It literally just vanished. That’s what happens when you aren’t smart with your money. And something that helped me tremendously with this was just having multiple bank accounts.

1 for business, another for my business savings, an investment account, and a personal banking. The first year I only had one account and it was too hectic. I wouldn’t even keep cash the first year. I was so Stupid back then.

But at least I figured it out and am doing very good now, and hopefully I could stray the few of you away from the spending era or even help just cut back on spending because it’s one of those things that catch up to you Very quickly.

I hope you enjoyed this and are able to apply a few of these lessons/principles into your business and benefit tremendously from it too.

Thank you friend for reading and have an amazing rest of your day 😁 

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