The Key to Making Your Business Successful

I've been flying solo for so long, I've been a one-man show, even when I've got employees, I'm the guy at the top in meetings, I tell people what to do and I'm more of a top-line CEO. I handle strategy, where are we taking this business and we can open a location. This has forced me to get back down and now I'm getting my hands dirty again, where I'm taking investor money, I'm filling out spreadsheets, I'm having to get involved with and someday it'd be cool to build a team around that. Right now, I feel like I need to learn the business, I'm accountable to my partners, I'm accountable to people we're raising money from.

I had a job when I was 26 years old, I've felt like I was really accountable to anybody, so I'm just working on a team again and being accountable it's humbling. I will just say I'm building spreadsheets, I'm building processes, everything I do, I'm trying to document how it went down and how I can do it better next time. Just processes, it's like any other business, you do yourself a few times, you learn to build processes around what you did.

So it's some point you could build a team to take over a lot of those duties that you feel like you need to get away from at some point, my goal is just to raise capital and to look for deals, look for deals and raise capital, analyze deals, and raise capital and build strategic partnerships, those are the things where the rubber meets the road. And the faster I can do that, the faster you and I can do $15, $20, $30 million deals. The first deal was for four and a half million, I expect the next deal to be over $10 million, but the goal is to get to a $30 million deal in the next three to five years. So as a buyer, we're going to get there by having processes in place and we're going to start building a team. Hopefully, we'll bring on an acquisition specialist to some point, administration person that does all the admin and somebody that deals with the investors.

So you just have to keep going, when I started in real estate, I had my first three deals. I lost money, people would quit. I say that for anybody who's going to go into business for themselves. You're going to get kicked several times, you're going to have setbacks and I see a lot of people quit, a lot of people give up and throw in the towel and you just have to keep going, you have to learn from your mistakes and if they don't wipe you out, just learn from them and keep going.