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Epic Fail

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Many years ago, my father gave me a book about a Latin American business man from Venezuela named Gustavo Cisneros. The son of Diego Cisneros, who's business boomed during the industrial revolution in Venezuela in the 1920’s. He is known for creating and leading what is now known as the world’s largest privately held media and entertainment organizations. By the 1940’s, the Cisneros Group were clearly established as one of Venezuela’s major corporate entities and because of this, they were able to represent big names like Pepsi and Studabaker. They owned a ton of companies in North and South America, and as a multi-billion dollar organization, the men who own and run the organization are amongst the world’s wealthiest businessmen.

I read that book with such enthusiasm. I was around 24 or 25 and was working at Overstock.com at the time. When I finished that book, I thought, “Shit, I am going to build a holdings company that will own all these different businesses I want to build.” I had found a new mentor in the pages of that book my dad gave me.

So what did I do?

I went out and had a smart friend of mine set up a company, The Zerimar Group, in Las Vegas Nevada. You may ask why Nevada? For the tax saving benefits of course. I needed a way to protect all these profits I hadn't made yet.

I look back at it now, and I laugh and think, "Man, I didn't know anything, I was clueless."

I threw $15,000 I had in savings into the business and put in place an organizational structure that cost me more then the business activities I was performing. I was thinking big, but those are things you do when you have a tremendous amount of wealth, and you want to have tax savings on all that wealth.

I started a few different businesses that were held by The Zerimar Group. My goal: I'm gonna start all these different companies, and The Zerimar Group would be the holdings company of these different companies. At some point, I am going to build out a kick-ass management team that will work for the group. Together, we will manage all these different companies. That was the plan!

2 1/2 years later, after paying maintenance fees on The Zerimar Group, we ended up closing down the company. Note to self- Maintaining and closing a company like this in Nevada costs more to close than it does to open it.  This was sort of my first shot at creating this dream organization where I owned a bunch of different businesses where I was the head of this corporate group. OK, so that didn't go very far, but I kept on working, plugging away, starting businesses on the side, as I continued to work at Overstock.com. Even though I lost thousands through the efforts, I gained real working knowledge through these efforts.

I believe that if you fail, and fail hard sometimes, as long as you're paying attention, you will always come out on top. If not financially, then through the invaluable education you can only get from rock bottom.

Run It As If It Were Successful

There is this saying… “Fake it till you make it.” You've heard it, I know you have.

This is what I have done most of my life. Fly by the seat of my pants and cross my fingers that it works out. I don't always know if things will work out, like sometimes what I think may be the best idea scares the shit out of me. But I stick to my vision, and it's worked out well so far.

There are a few obvious things you want to stay away from, like lie, steal, and ruin your reputation in the industry, but you definitely need to act like it and you need to see yourself in a certain place; See yourself with a successful enterprise and go.

Don't be one of those guys who says you need to have ‘this, this and this’ in place before you start running the business.

You have this idea for your company, and even in the early getting started stages,  you need to run it like you would run it if it were successful.

Start the company, incorporate the company, get your accounting system in place, get your business cards, set up your social media profiles, and then get the business up and running. Start the business!

You dont know how many businesses I have set up- incorporated,social media profiles, started putting a team in place, planned out how it would all go down, and then pulled the plug.

So many of the businesses I have started have gone places too, which I’m proud of. Over the years, something that pisses me off is that so many people think about starting a business, and then wait for the stars to align.

The stars are never going to align, people. If you start thinking, you will never do anything.

As Nike puts it, JUST DO IT. Just Fucking Do It!

Never give up on your dreams. If you believe in it, you’re gonna get there.

I have had times where I'm like, SHIT! I have failed at everything I have done. Now, I have to go back and get a corporate job. But, instead of that, I've kept at it. Every day is a new day that can add something positive to your life.

Never, ever, ever give up - Winston Churchhill

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Gotto Keep Going

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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.

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Get Off Your Ass and Just Do IT!

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The toughest part of starting a business is actually getting off your ass and doing it.

There are so many people with great ideas, but they just don't execute. How many times have you heard people say, "I had that idea... first," or "They took my idea!" There's no fucking excuse that should hold you back from starting a business, just do it- get it done! Right? You gotta be a doer, and do, do, do.

I have heard excuses like; "I don't have experience in this,  "I'm not talented enough in that, or "I just haven't had the time to get started.", etc., etc." Guess what? This is BULLSHIT! No more excuses, just take the plunge and get started. When it comes time to celebrate, the procrastinators are going to be wishing they could have just made something happen, looking at the doers and hating on them cause they had the balls to do something.

Our VC firm Zerimar Ventures, just recently made an investment in a company called eMoov, a leading online estate agent in the UK. Russel Quirk, the founder, is a talented guy, loaded with love, passion, and humility with a knack for seeing and doing BIG. As a third generation estate agent, he knows the industry, and he knows how to make things happen in this space. When Russell started eMoov several years ago, he didn't know a single thing about technology, online marketing, and what it would take to build an online company, all he had was a vision to disrupt the estate agency space. This is a perfect example of a DOER who never made excuses for anything. He rolled up his sleeves, put his head down, and used the shit out of Google to learn those things he didn't know. No excuses baby, no excuses!

On one of my recent trips to London, my wife Angela and I went to visit the company offices in Essex, a county north east of London. It was so freaking cool to see the culture he's built in this company and what a great business they have built lacking all the expertise in things like technology, marketing, pr, etc. This is why we love this company so much and why we jumped in to be a part of this passionate group of people out to make a mark in the space. This is a great example of someone who looked at an existing process within an industry that's been around for decades, and saw a better and more affordable way to provide the service. However, the most important part about this example is that I am sure there have been many people with this idea, but guess what, Russell was one of the ones that did it without thinking of all the things he didn't know.

Russell Quirk is a DOER.

That's the hardest part of starting a business- finding or having somebody with that kind of drive and passion. That can take all the excuses and push all the naysayers off to the side. It's not capital which is the most important part of a business... It's not capital at all. It's a matter of executing- NO EXCUSES!

Look at Google...this is one, if not the best tool that's been introduced to society in the last few decades.  I always say that there is no such things as an ignorant person anymore, but there will be a lazy one. Many of the businesses and products being created today are not new concepts, they are old ideas that are being rehashed, improved, flipped on its head, or taking traditional businesses and computerizing them. Steve Jobs didn't create the mp3 player. There were hundreds of mp3 players out there on the market before the iPod came out, he just made them more user friendly and sexier than all the others. He also didn't create the smart phone, he just made it better and SMARTER than all the others. Look around you and look at things in a way no one has ever looked at them before. Don't think that because something exists, it's been  created and there is no room for improvement. There will always be room for improvement or different solutions to problems.

There world has many unsolved problems. We need to continue driving change in the world by looking at problems in different ways or improving upon existing processes that were set up years ago by those innovators of the past. Do something BIG, start thinking and looking at what surrounds you, the ideas are floating around, we just need to grab them and execute on them.

When are YOU getting started?

What are YOU waiting for?