5 Lessons Learned from 5 Years in Business

Five years ago I started 33 Sticks, a boutique analytics services company, with my friend and business partner Hila Dahan. Today, we celebrate our 5 Year Anniversary!

It’s hard to imagine that in a blink of an eye, we are 5 years into this amazing journey. I feel truly blessed that through all the struggles, all the good times, all the life lessons learned, that we have reached this special milestone, I don’t take it lightly that we have been able to build and grow a company doing what we love.

Over these last 5 years, I’ve learned a lot about myself and a lot about what it takes to run a successful business and I’m happy to share my experiences with anyone who is willing to listen and I hope deep down that some of my experiences will prove valuable to others as they seek out their own journeys and adventures.

Being an entrepreneur might be fun and easy but running a business is really hard.
Television, social media, and the startup bros have done an amazing job glamorizing entrepreneurship but the reality is that running a business is nothing like what you see. It’s really hard work, often times doing things that are not fun, not enjoyable, and not the things that you thought you would be spending your whole day doing yet are things that are very necessary to building a stable and profitable business.

When we started 33 Sticks, I had no idea that most of my days would be spent reviewing legal contracts, negotiating with procurement teams about the tedious details of how we would get paid, submitting invoices, convincing company’s that they owed us money — in fact, they should have paid us that money 5 months ago, balance sheets, taxes, expense reports, deprecation, and on and on and on and on.

It’s great that potential entrepreneurs get excited about the glamorous lifestyle that they see in the media enough to start down the path of building a business but it’s just as important, if not more so, to know that the path is more often difficult than it’s not, that the idea of an all day party, every day, is not a reality, and that running a business is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.

You don’t have to win everything, just have to win the right things.
Business isn’t about getting all the customers, winning all the awards, getting all the monies. Running a successful business isn’t about winning everything, it’s about winning the right things.

As you start a new business, you have to decide what the right wins are for you. What are the type of products you want to sell, what type of customers do you want to work with, what type of relationships do you want to build, how do you want to work?

When we started 33 Sticks, we defined some core principles of what we viewed as the right things for us. Principles that we agreed we would never question, even in the hardest times (and there were some really difficult times, like when I went 5 months without a paycheck), so that we wouldn’t win everything but we would win the right things.

For us, the right things were:

  • We would never sell our time, we would only sell services based on the value we would deliver for our clients

  • We would be committed to running a fully remote company, including not taking on any client that required that we be on-site for any extended period of time

  • We would only take on clients that were looking for a strategic analytics partner as compared to a client looking to outsource tasks to a contractor

  • We would walk away from any deal, regardless of how large, if we determined that the company’s culture was in direct conflict with our culture (And yes, we’ve done this several times and will no doubt do it many more times in the future)

  • Our reputation was not for sale, we would not take kickbacks to recommend specific products, we would not pay to be listed on any “fastest growing”, “best place to”, etc. lists, and we would always do what is best for our client’s

Sticking to these principles, without question, has helped ensure that we don’t win everything and that we more often than not win the right things.

You have to take care of your mental health.
As I have already mentioned, running a business of any size is really, really difficult. As I like to say, “I get my ass kicked on more days than not.” From getting turned down by prospects, to getting beat up by a client’s legal team, to the stress of feeling responsible for your employees well-being, it’s a lot for any one person to take on.

Taking time to take care of your mental health is extremely important to any long term business success. If you are not mentally healthy, there is no way your business will be healthy, as a founder, your business is often a direct reflection of you.

Long before I ever started running a business, there were a few mental health areas that were a real struggle for me including a formal Generalized Anxiety with Panic Attacks diagnosis and Impostor Syndrome. The stresses, and feeling of being the one ultimately responsible for the success of myself, my business, and my employees, only amplified my existing mental health conditions making it difficult for me to travel to meet with prospects and clients and an overwhelming feeling of fear that I would wake up one day and everyone would realize that I was a fraud, that I had fooled them all this entire time, and my business would crumble.

Taking time to care for my mental health was a very important decision. There is no single path that business owners can follow but recognizing the importance of mental health, and investing the time in caring for yourself, is a must for all entrepreneurs and business owners.

For me it was seeking professional help, spending time in nature, learning how to let things slide, being open and sharing my feelings, and one of the biggest thing that has helped is journaling and questioning my constant, negative thoughts.

Stop trying to control everything and just let go.
In the beginning, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t give up any control. I had to be the sales guy, the legal guy, the top consultant, the marketer, the web developer, the social dude, and on and on. I didn’t feel comfortable that anyone else understood my vision and could do as good as a job as I could do.

That….yeah…..that was a losing strategy for sure. What I found is that not only could others do just as good of a job as I could do, the truth is that more often than not, they did a much better job than I did.

I also recognized the importance of having a business partner. I had a partner that got it, we were in this together, it was stupid for me to even pretend that I could take this all on myself. We quickly got together and determined the things I was best at, building relationships with our clients, and the things I wasn’t good at, dealing with client’s legal teams (there was that time I told a corporate attorney to….well, use your imagination…it happened.), so we divided the duties and more importantly we showed complete trust in each other. I trusted she would own everything that she was taking on, and she trusted me fully that I would own the things I committed to.

And an amazing thing happened…the minute I gave up control, everything got a little bit easier, we were all a little bit happier, and the business was measurably more successful.

Build your business not someone else’s.
I saved the very best piece of advice for last, you are taking on all this additional stress, you are taking a huge financial risk, you might as well build the business that you want — this however in practice is much easier said than done.

In the first two years of business, I often found myself comparing ourself to other’s in the industry. Why aren’t we winning all the awards that Agency X is winning? Why aren’t we building a fancy downtown office, with an open bar, like Agency Y is building? I think it’s human nature but this constant game of comparing to what others were building was proving to be a big source of unhappiness and poor mental health.

At some point in time, I accepted that the reason why things are they way they are is that I’m not building someone else’s vision, I’m building my vision — it feels silly to even type that sentence but it’s a reality for many entrepreneurs, they have a vision for what they want to build and then overnight they get caught up in a game of competing with everyone else and they lose their way, they are unhappy, and they ultimately put their business at risk trying to build what someone else wants rather than what they want.

The dream of building your own business is that it is yours, build what you want, and stop getting so caught up in what everyone else is doing, let them build what they want to build, you build what you want, and you will realize that the whole world belongs to you.