12 lessons for single young men I learned from building a seven-figure business and bankrupting it…

Roughly 30% of businesses manage to endure through their tenth year of operation.

Recent data, according to Fundera, indicates that among small businesses launched in March 2007, 33% successfully reached March 2017.

This article is supposed to be a guide with lessons that I believe to be true due to the fact that I experienced them firsthand while managing my own nanotech company in Mexico from 2008 to 2021, until I crashed and burned.

Before the crash 2018

Treat it with a grain of sand, though, and I might still have drawn the wrong conclusions.

But also really consider the depth of each point.

There are many roads that lead to Rome, but most of them don´t.

Building a team is your biggest challenge, by far.

80% of the problems come from within

I could probably write an entire article about this. But if I had to name just one big mistake of the many, then it would probably be the stupid habit of hiring fast and firing slowly.

The importance of finding and selecting the right people cannot be overstated, since getting rid of the problems down the road is so much more expensive.

Hire slowly and fire as fast as you can

A fish rots from the head down

Yes, that’s you.

Extreme ownership isn´t just another talking point; it is the only mindset that allows you to capitalize on the fuckups.

Your failures are inevitable, so you might as well make sure you own them so you can make the necessary changes that will allow your company to grow.

It is not natural to do so; the gut reaction is to blame the circumstances or others, and when my company crashed and burned, it wasn’t the pandemic’s fault or the corrupt manager I had put in place.

It was my fault for not preparing ahead of time and understanding the situation so I could avoid all the problems before they´d even arise.

Learn to appreciate the failures

I am 46 years old now, and after a wild ride of 12 years, I was left with nothing.

Not true. I am left with valuable lessons, the journey, and the pain and loss and ups and highs.

The experiences and my life journey are now my assets if I manage to use them wisely.

They say don’t write to teach; write to learn. So now I will pass on what I learned by writing this for you.

For two years, I felt so much shame for losing everything that I couldn´t even think about it. I got hooked on benzodiazepines, alcohol, and just about anything to just not feel, until I ended up in the hospital.

Now that I have been clean for a year and a half, I am becoming my best version again, working out like never before, and doing what I love.

Writing is thinking with clarity and structure.

That is different from the repetitive and messy monkey mind that jumps on an emotional rollercoaster with you

Create a culture of commitment

Create a functioning team around purpose and meaning

I remember asking myself many times how some companies managed to create a team where employees wanted to stay and do the work for longer hours and do more quality work.

I failed miserably at this.

Most of them were literally waiting for the clock hit 6 pm and they would be gone

Start with “Why” and communicate to inspire repeatedly and consistently

Become an inspiring communicator

This isn´t optional; it is everything.

You don´t have to be a master public speaker from the beginning but you do need to get very good at it fast

Although I did become better and better at doing live trainings and seminars myself to feel more confident, it wasn´t enough.

My communication style was too sporadic.

I failed at consistency.

If you are not sure how to be confident, then you will have to fake it until you make it.

Make it your mission to become a master communicator.

Time is everything

It is safe to say that time is your most precious resource.

We all have the same amount in our time account. Cut the distractions and streamline your processes.

I failed at this too many times.

A mistake is valuable in itself; making it twice is human, but then it rapidly gets idiotic.

Focus. Focus and focus.

What works and what doesn´t?

Cut to the chase and learn to focus only on what actually makes you money. Focus.

This is where I screwed up big time. Too many side projects, too many distractions.

I failed at this despite taking a strategy session with “the” focus guru, Al Ries (rest in peace), in Atlanta.

I remember paying 8 K for 3 hours.

Too many things dilute what is productive, therefore wasting precious resources

With success come haters and copycats

No matter how good your leadership is, there will always be people who don’t wish you well

Copycats are just a sign you are doing some things well, but again, insiders can really hurt you. There will be people who will try to take advantage of their knowledge.

You need to protect your information and put a system in place to detect saboteurs.

You can minimize the threat, but never eradicate it.

Change your strategy when needed but beware of the fallout

An ever-changing business landscape requires adaptation and change.

The bigger your company gets, the more difficult this becomes.

When introducing change, there will always be a cost. When I tried to save my company from bankruptcy, we had to shut down an entire business unit to enter a new one. This alone caused so much disturbance that I was constantly distracted by attending small fires that needed to be extinguished

Change is necessary but be aware of the consequences

An amazing product with tons of benefits does not automatically sell

I was so convinced about the potential of nanocoatings that I bought into the whole business and dedicated my life to them.

My reasoning was that, being so vastly superior to older technology, it would be a piece of cake, and I went all in.

And so did a lot of our distributors.

But whatever we tried (and we tried a lot), we always had a hard time getting a lot of consumers wanting to spend money on it.

Test the market before you commit to a product.

Don’t trust your gut. Repeat that one more time.

Never trust a supplier that doesn´t share case studies

This sounds obvious, and in hindsight, it is.

We actually worked with a company for 10 years that had made it a habit to tell their exclusive distributors that they couldn´t share case studies.

In retrospect, of course, I ask myself how stupid I was.

I even tolerated and supported them when one of their founders ended up in jail for two years.

They dropped me like a hot potato when the shit hit the fan on my side during the pandemic, and our entire business was shut down due to lockdowns followed by a bogus fabrication of my corrupted manager.

Never build a business where you depend on a single supplier.

Never ever do that. It is very dumb.

Niche-down is a thing

Specificity wins over broad categories

The point I was making before about not being able to solve the problem of finding a single application we could go all in for the consumer market was what eventually brought everything down.

Nanotechnology itself was just not enough.

I understood this years before the crash, but I just wasn’t able to turn it around as everything was set up.

Stay away from products that solve everything.

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All of this led me to go on a different path.

I call it The Uncharted Road Newsletter For Unapologetic Single Men Who Want True Freedom and Walk Away

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