It has been an interesting 10 months. Stepping out on my own I still hold dearly as the best decision I have come to make in my life. While that decision was an anguishing one it’s done. Today with a staff of 5 and a client base of over 200, my company became profitable, literally from day one. I took no loans for Syslo Ventures, and asked no one to invest in it. I just picked up my phone and started calling people and businesses.
When I got focused and really started to pay attention to what I was good at what was merely done for survival turned into a profitable high six figure business. I decided to not venture off in directions that seemed great, that offered an allure and stuck to my true qualities and what I am good at. Yet being an entrepreneur, now business owner with employees the game is very different then when I started with myself. I find myself hustling to ensure my employees are protected and my clients are protected. The hours worked are unfathomable and I used to read stories and listen to other entrepreneurs talk about this, until experienced there was no real way to grasp it.
What’s funny right now is that I am so focused on the business, on my employees, on delivering for my clients I found myself wondering where do I stand in relationship to other companies that have started? That was a strange sensation. What barometer do I have for this to know how well I was doing. I spent the extra money on employees and started delegating. I track every single item down to the T, this includes how many social posts, daily income, customers acquired, reach on social platforms, phone calls, sales, product value delivered. And the only thing I see month over month is lines reaching to the sky on all my graphs. Week over week I watch as I crush goals and have increases in the 400%+ percentiles. Again there is no real barometer. Then I realized, why do I need one? I simply need to reinforce what I have been doing for the last 10 months and expand again.
It is crazy to think that the amount of income is 5x what I ever have made in my life, yet I don’t get excited about it. To me income and wealth allows me to handle issues, expand and reinvest in my business and invest in my company. I would force expansion. I would sell, sell, sell and put myself in a position where I needed to hire to deliver. I would focus on the income, then expand and then repeat. I still do this. I Figured out this technique when I was working as a sales director at my last position. I would grind for 90 days as myself until I got to a point I literally could not deliver this on my own anymore. So I would oversell expand and work twice the hours to ensure no loss of production occurred. I would stabilize and then do it again. I am going into my third cycle of expansion now and realize I have many more to go.
When analyzing my stats, I saw a huge increase when my non-compete lifted. This was a definite turning point for me. While the business was profitable from day one when I started to push on it and got my head straight, six months after quitting my job, when the noncompete lifted the stats shot through the roof and I couldn’t believe the condition of power achieved. I attribute that to doing the right things and producing always and spending close to 18 hours+ a week on my own development. I even ask myself how I have time for that. But if I didn’t do this piece, I would not be able to handle everything that comes connected to running a company.
I woke up this morning and thought I need to write this out and get it out my head. I find writing, promotion, and videos help me remove and identify areas where the success has happened and where I still need to improve. I wrote an article my first 90 days as an entrepreneur, this is more of a 10 month check in for myself. There are moments when I am extremely proud and then there are moments where I am “WTF”. When those moments happen, I immediately return to the fundamentals of promotion, sales calls and delivery. It just reinforces the moment and grounds the situation. I compare myself to no one, and literally hold in my mind that I exist in a different strata than anyone else. That may sound vain, it’s more of a reality point. I am me, my business is me and my direction is my own. To compare and look, is a waste of production time and energy. The only way I got to where I am now, completely debt free and expanding my employees was done on pure focus and reinforcement. A really proud moment for me was when I paid my employees first salary and sales commission it was nearly 5K on top of a base salary. I was amazed! I was proud and honored to be able to help someone achieve this.
The end goal of this is really just a different perspective and viewpoint on where I am and what I am seeing from the day to day. From 0 – to 5 employees and over 200 clients, is absolutely incredible and it is done and achieved through the right ethics and the right level of action. Barometers aren’t really required as I thought to myself. What really matters is the constant progression. For an artist I sure pay attention to my numbers, at least 6 to 8 times a day I am looking at every statistic and number connected to my production and the production of the company. I didn’t think I had that ability but as the days progressed I realized it was a vital survival necessity.
I’ll write another article like this in a few months. But from 0 to this, is quite incredible.