Ever since I can remember, I have always had this drive and passion for business. Not so much the details of it, although I do love the minutia sometimes, but more so the possibilities business creates for people.
As a child, our family didn’t have much, which means I went without. I didn’t have the GT, RedLine or Robinson BMX bike like the other kids in the neighborhood, or the latest Vans or Nike shoes like my classmates. Was that shiny new bike and good looking shoes too much to ask? Yes. I couldn’t get these things from my parents, as these were considered luxuries.
The WANT drove me to go out and earn my own money by starting a business of my own. A business where I could earn what I needed to obtain the things I wanted, but I couldn't have if I stayed put and did nothing about it, so at the age of 10, I started a grass cutting grass in the neighborhood.
This was my first ever venture, which started with me hitting the streets of my neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking people to let me cut their grass for a fee of $15/cut. My success was almost instant. This effort led me to land 10 clients that paid me $15 per cut every two weeks. The first 5 clients I was able to handle myself, but as the customer base grew, I had to think about hiring help to scale the business. I ended up hiring some friends to help me serve these customers. I remember getting my first payment, I was like "wow, I have actually managed to get someone to give me their money for a service I am providing, this is something that can be big!, I am building an empire here". I had employees and was making real money. At the age of 10, I was dreaming about how I was going to establish a company that had all these "employees" cutting grass on my behalf, and eventually, we would expand it to other neighborhoods.
This business venture taught me one of my first business lessons on the distributions of equity in a business and the power of entrepreneurship. I charged $15/cut and paid my friends (employees) $5/cut, which seemed fair to me, as I was the one that knocked on the doors and got the customers. It was my idea and I executed on it, so why should I split the fees 50/50 with my friends that were helping me? This was a topic of conversation all the time with my friends, they wanted to know why they only got $5/cut vs. my $10/cut. At the time, I knew nothing about business, but I just knew instinctively that this was the right approach and one I needed to hold a hard position on. After all, I knocked on the doors and was the one with the business idea. I didn't have a co-founder.
As entrepreneurs we can sometimes get accused of being greedy, paying too little, not sharing the love with others that are helping us build the company, etc. Here is my take on that, as an entrepreneur we take LOTS of risk and put all we have at risk to build something that may or may not work, YES we have others that help us build the company for a salary that we pay them, even if it's not market rates, but they made the decision to take the job. As an entrepreneur and founder(s) of an enterprise, you deserve the line share of the business and you should never feel guilty about it.
You "knocked on the door' ;)
That grass cutting business lasted for about 8 months. Within the next couple of years, I nibbled away at other business ideas in Jr High and High School. I always had this dream of being a business man.
The other day I was going through some of my things and found this paper I wrote in 11th grade. The title of the paper, 'Business Man'. It's basically a paper describing me in the future. The purpose of the paper was for us to write where we saw ourselves when we graduated high school, what we wanted to be doing with our life and what our life is going to be like. I read through the paper, which was filled with grammatical errors, aside from those, I realized that this paper I wrote in high school, described what I had created in my life. I wrote about starting a business selling CD storage cases. Back in those day, CD’s had just come out, and there weren’t a lot of options for storing this new media.
The paper described my business being a huge success, I had a hundred employees, a really nice car, and a 6,000 sq. ft. home. The teacher had encouraged us to cut out pictures of what we wanted, so in my paper, there were cut outs of the home I would live in and the car I would drive. I look back today and think, “WOW, It’s not that far from what I actually have accomplished in life.” Interesting that I could look back at a paper from 20+ years ago that actually worked out, minus the CD storage business. I actually wrote, back then, what I have become today.
I’ve always dreamt of doing what I am doing today. I've never given up. I have had many businesses failures, and I’ve never given up. Almost so much that my friends and family would think and say, “OK, what is Ivan up to this time?”
Now, I realize that you gotto keep going.
People will wonder what you’re up to, and wonder when you are going to actually “Be There”. You will get so excited about your idea, dump time and money into it, and pour all of your heart into it. You will experience great triumphs, and epic failures throughout your process. Realize, it’s yours and you gotto design your own life and keep going.