Valuable Lessons To Create Successful Business

So after hurricane Sandy in 2012 we started our wholesale business in 2011. Hurricane Sandy came in, decimated the market in 2012 we kind of figured out some different things to do. And then 2013 we were seeing a lot of people getting taken advantage of by house razors that were flying in from like Louisiana after Katrina. So there's a lot of new people coming in and a lot of people price gouging these people that lived on the water because they needed to lift their houses. So we came up with an idea that said, here's a website, it will give you multiple competitive bids on your house, raise it, got a lot of traffic.

It got a lot of press and it was free to the homeowner and the problem is right. You partnered with FEMA and the government and they didn't change regulations as much as we thought that they would. And they're still dragging it on. Actually, it's 2019 now and they still haven't completely changed, flood maps and things like that in New Jersey. So it took a lot longer, it costs a lot more, it was a lot harder to get rolling. We hired a chief executive officer to come in and run that business on the day to day. He left the job, he had a family and that business eventually folded. You know, we could not get traction, we closed a couple of deals, but it never blew up the way that we thought it would. So a lot of learning lessons from that. It just costs us a lot of money and time.

The CEO needed a paycheck, right? So the guy has triplets, so that was a big one. He said, I can't do this for much longer. And we just assessed everything and said, look, I don't want to put you in a bad financial spot, go find a job and we'll pay you until you do and he had to go find another job and we were starting our flip business, so we couldn't run two businesses. So we said, you know what, the market's just not here. Let's leave the company open. Maybe one day we'll come back to it and we never did.

So to this point where things just weren't going in the direction that we thought they were going to go and you had to make that decision that, I got to choose the one that's actually working. Although I thought it was a brilliant idea, I still do, I still think it could help a lot of people. The timing just wasn't right and you just can't force some stuff. You have to be wise to know when it's time to walk away. What would have you done differently in that business if you were going to start over today and start fresh. So now I have a much better handle on what marketing looks like. We didn't even join the single family mastermind yet to have an idea of how to reach the consumer.

So I think we would have been a lot better at discerning who our target market was and how to get to them and that would have probably driven more leads, which would eventually drive more traffic, but we didn't really have the full team in place. I say CEO, that guy was banging on doors trying to get people to lift their houses with us, it wasn't a business, it was an entrepreneurial venture. But in hindsight, now that we have built businesses, now we kind of understand systems and processes and marketing and things like that, that we would have done things pretty differently.

I think a big thing for people to remember here, for all the entrepreneurs out there, everyone's got great ideas. There's a ton of great ideas and I know I've experienced this before where I'm like, this is going to be amazing, we're going to do great things with this and for summer it doesn't work out. And there's this whole thing called marketing and sales that apparently make the transaction happen. So no matter how good of an idea you have, if you don't have a way of getting to the customer and getting the customer to understand your value, things just don't work out. And we've faced that in our single family business at times where you have to be able to be creative. And so I think it's a really powerful learning lesson that I think we can all take away from that experience. I think crashing and burning creates a ton of life lessons right now. You can grow through it and you can learn from it. And I've been fortunate enough to be around mentors that even they always say like, the cliché, “I either win or learn”. And I mean that's the truth though, if you are not teachable from those experiences, then you probably only fail once and never get back on the horse. For us, there's no, there's no plan B, there's just, we're going to make it happen.