7 Lessons from Building 7 Businesses

You'd be surprised at what 3 weeks and $500 will get you. I've started 7 businesses in the last 7 years-ish, and here are 7 lessons I've learned through the startup journey of ups and downs and failures and back and forth to eventually have a couple companies that do over 8 figures a year in revenue. Additionally, in this video, I wanna share stuff that you probably won't hear other places and actually give you the nuts and bolts tactics that like changed my life as a young entrepreneur in college trying to make it big. All right, lesson number 1, don't reinvent the wheel. A lot of people have already built your business model or similar type of business to what you're trying to do. So don't go reinvent the wheel. So a few years ago, I wanted to actually get into real estate. I was very excited about real estate. I knew most millionaires in the country were made from real estate. So I went to study on YouTube. I was trying to read books. I was getting courses all on real estate and I made a little bit of progress. Took me a couple of months. I was trying to learn this game, but then I found someone who was an expert in the real estate space. This guy had flipped about 300 houses. I think one of the best tactics you can use, especially if you're young, is use the college card. I called this guy up and said, hey, I'm in college. I'm a young, promising type of entrepreneur guy. I've got good grades. I've been I'm starting business. I have some employees in these other businesses. I really want to learn the real estate game. Can I show up to your office? I'll bring you coffee. I'll pay for lunch, whatever. But let me shadow you for a day or two as you go out and do this real estate thing. And this guy I reached out to was pretty flattered that some college kid would reach out to him. He says, yeah, come on, come on by. So I showed up, I was all sharply dressed, and we— I started to follow him around as we went to properties and deals, and he just started to spew stuff out. He was teaching me and coaching me about how he saw a deal, how he looked at stuff. And lo and behold, in about the next 2 to 3 months, I actually wholesaled 2 houses, made $5,000 in each house. So I made a total of $10,000. I took 6 or 10 months of my learning and I went with this guy for a couple days and it condensed years of knowledge down to a few days. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Even if you have a brand new business, there are people out there that have already launched businesses similar to yours. And typically people, at least in America, like to help out the young hustling entrepreneur. So lesson number 1, don't reinvent the wheel. Go find great mentors that you can follow. All right, on to lesson number 2. If you're like me, you've got 100 business ideas floating around in your brain. It can sometimes be kind of stressful, actually. I remember laying up at night, like thinking through, and I couldn't sleep a lot of nights 'cause I would be planning all these things. I'd get a notepad out, draw out a whole business idea, and then I had a different business idea, and I was running around like a chicken with my freaking head cut off. It was so frustrating. And finally, I was actually in school at a university, and I was in the entrepreneurship program at this university, and there was a teacher, professor named Brother Church. It was a religious university, so his name was Brother Church is what we called him. And he said something that absolutely changed my life, that helped me get all the noise out my brain down onto like actionable something that I'm going to move on. So what he said was find your favorite idea of your list, find that idea and give yourself a timeline and budget on that idea. And actually the way we started Funnel Launch was exactly that way. We had this idea that we can make content and courses and stuff about investment funds. We didn't know if it would work or not. So we gave ourselves a timeline and budget. Our current timeline was 3 weeks and about a $500 budget to test out our product. And by the way, you'll be surprised how much you can get done in 3 weeks and $500. If you fully focus on something. Now, what will happen after your 3 weeks and $500? You will know if this business kind of sucks, it's not worth it, or you'll know if you actually got something here. If you pass the 3 weeks and $500 and things are going well, maybe you have some sales coming in, then it extends to the next 9 months. Okay, we're gonna go all out on this business for the next 9 months. I'm not gonna focus on other stuff. If I have another business idea, guess what? I'm gonna write it down in my notebook and maybe I'll visit it 9 months from now. But for the next 9 months, we're going all in on this thing. Now, what this allowed me to do was gave me clarity that I could move through a systematic approach through my business ideas on my little notebook. And my thought process was kind of like baseball. If I just got up to the bat and I kept swinging the bat, you know what? Eventually I might hit a single and maybe I'll hit a double and maybe I'll hit a frickin home run over the fence, but I just got to keep swinging the bat. So again, to summarize, number 2, give yourself a timeline and budget and sell often and sell early. All right, on to number 3. Now, this might sound cliché. It's all about partners and finding good partners. But I want to share a different side of this. It's kind of cool. Yeah, have great partners. Find a good partner. The partner will change your life. You're going to, you know, all this stuff. But in my opinion, it's hard to just day one wake up and just find a good partner. You don't know if they're going to be good or they're going to work hard. You just don't really know. One of my favorite things I do today is what a mentor taught me. He said, Bridger, you need to date your partners. He goes, you wouldn't wake up today and just go marry somebody tomorrow, right? You would date them. You'd court them. You get You get engaged and then you would get married. The same thing's true with business partners. If you can go through the process of dating a potential business partner, give them projects, have you work with them, see how you guys like— do you text, do you email, do you call? Are they bugging you or are they not? Over the course of— back to number 2, that timeline and budget— over that 7 to 9 month period, you can date your partners in a really good way to see if you want to actually get married with them and get into business with them. Now, my past businesses, I'm typically a partner type of person. A lot of people aren't partner people. Some people like to just be the solopreneur, but I I feel like there's a lot of value in having a partner. Sometimes when I'm down or frustrated, that person's very excited and energetic and vice versa, and we help each other out during our low moments. Now, I've loved having partners. I have incredible partners in my businesses today. In the past though, some of my businesses that didn't really work out, I had some kind of crummy partners, to be honest. They didn't work hard, they weren't following up on assignments, and thankfully we went through this dating period and I found out, hey, this guy or this gal just doesn't work really hard. They don't actually want to do the work. They love talking about business. They don't like actually doing business. And maybe I was a bad partner as well. Maybe they would say the same thing about me, but for whatever reason, we just didn't work out. And I found I have a couple of business partners now that I absolutely love. They're amazing business partners. We're best friends in the business. We do a lot of stuff together. It's freaking amazing because we went through the dating process. So to summarize, number 3, date your partners. All right, on to number 4. Now, I learned this through a lot of pain. When I got into college, I started 6 businesses my first 2 years of college, actually. I was starting a bunch of different businesses, any business that I could find that would kind of make money. And what I learned was different business vehicles have totally different outcomes and different margin profiles for that business model. And I decided that I wanted to be way more intentional about the type of business I was getting in before I got into that business. For example, I started a Chinese tutoring business. I actually speak Mandarin Chinese. I served a 2-year LDS mission in Taiwan. So I came home from that. I spoke Mandarin pretty well. I started to tutor kids in college in Mandarin Chinese. So I was charging $30 to $45 an hour as a college student, which is pretty good money. Now, I wanted to scale this, so I started to hire other tutors and I started to pay them. So I hired a handful of tutors. They were getting kids that were coming over and we were tutoring these kids and we're starting to build this business. But then I started to analyze the business model of a tutoring type of company. I was paying my tutors a good salary. I'd pay them, you know, if we charge $30 an hour, I'd pay my tutor probably $24 to $25 an hour because that tutor at any given time could just leave and go set up a competing business and just bring their clients with them. So if I didn't pay them enough, they would just leave. So my margins were really thin. I was only making $5 per lesson and I started doing the math. I was like, man, if I want to be a millionaire running a tutoring business, I've got to have hundreds of tutors tutoring every single day. There's got to be overhead. There's going to be complaints. I got to have thousands of employees to make $1 million and my margins kept getting competing down and down. So after that experience, I decided to be way more intentional. About the business models I got into. Now, a lot of you that follow my channel know I love investment funds. The model of investment funds is amazing. You can use one of the 4 leverage pieces of capital to lever up what one person can do in a business. Most hedge funds or real estate funds have maybe less than 100 people that work for them, yet they generate billions of dollars in revenue every year. I love the vehicle of funds because the margins are so wide, the gaps are huge, that there's a lot of excess cash that's spit off. Even if you're an okay fund manager, I would make way more money as an okay fund manager than I would as a really great tutor because the margins were so thin in that business. So number 4, be very intentional about the business type you get in, which dovetails actually into number 5, which is red ocean and blue ocean analytics. Now this concept comes from a book called Blue Ocean Strategy. It's been taught around the world, but this concept drastically changed my way I approached business, especially online business. Now the concept is this, that there are oceans out there and red oceans are bloody. There's sharks eating there. There's already a lot of competition in these oceans. If you can move to a blue ocean, there's not much competition. Now what happens is in a blue ocean, there's typically someone that comes in, captures a blue ocean, and then more competitors come in and slowly over time, those waters become more red and red until it becomes a red ocean. And then as a young entrepreneur, you try to find new blue oceans that you can branch into. Now this sounds like a pretty obvious concept to find like a niche in a market, but you'd be surprised, you know, if I told you, hey, let's go open a coffee shop today. Together and there's 7 coffee shops on this one corner. Do you think we should open an 8th? Well, maybe, but it's pretty saturated. It's a pretty red ocean. What if we went to a different part of town that has no coffee shops and we open a coffee shop there? Maybe it'll perform better just because we're the only coffee shop around. It might be more of a blue ocean. Now that sounds obvious, but it's very not so obvious online. I have friends all the time online trying to create content in red oceans. I can't tell you how many friends I have that are like, hey Bridger, okay, I'm gonna— I decided I'm gonna be like a Fitness influencer. I'm gonna go like make content. I'm gonna like work out and like drink protein shakes and like be in fitness. I'm like, okay, what's gonna be your angle or your niche? Well, I'm just gonna work out and look good. Dude, there's about 10,000 other fitness influencers. It's one of the most red oceans online for this space. Right now, if you scroll and Google or search anything about starting an investment fund, starting a private equity fund, starting a real estate fund, my videos are at the top of almost every page. Why? Because we positioned ourselves online as a blue ocean. And as we've grown, we've become the category king of that blue ocean. And it makes it very hard for competitors to come in because we're starting to make the red— more of a red ocean at this point. So lesson number 5, be very intentional and try to go after blue oceans, especially if you're doing an online business. Lesson number 6, the growth curve that you have to go on when launching your business to then scaling your business. Business. I've seen this in a massive way in my business. Bridger Pennington, who was the person that was launching businesses, has had to grow and develop into a way different person as we're running now an 8-figure company than I was when we were first starting. So let me explain. When you're starting out, I would call this person a startup entrepreneur. They're just good at executing, launching, just doing stuff. But once you hit a certain threshold in your business, that person— this was me at the time— I had to become a CEO. A CEO is way more focused on systems and people, and an entrepreneur is way more focused on just launching and execution. This transition for me has actually been very hard. I've had to learn how to build teams and manage people and help them then go out and lead their teams. No great business is launched alone, and I actually have a lot of friends that have flatlined in their businesses because they have not been able to transition from an entrepreneur to a CEO type. I'm actually currently in this process of development where we can get now a second and third layer of leadership across our company. And I recognize our business will only grow as much as I grow. So lesson number 6, an entrepreneur and a CEO are 2 different people. All right, lesson number 7. This might be a little corny, but your body and your mind and your spirit are the most valuable assets you'll ever have in your business. If you do not feed and take care of your body, your mind, and your spirit as you try to grow this business, it will consume you and in a lot of cases destroy your life, and with that, your business will crumble as well. I actually had a good friend of mine that was just, I'm gonna launch my business. Everything was focused on the business. What happened was he let go of his entire physical health. He also let go of his spiritual health and his relationship health with his family and family members. And what happened was it worked in the short term. He scaled his business, it worked, his business went like this. But then it hit a tipping point where he started to shut down in a lot of different ways. And what happened was he then started to outlash, and he would go back and forth, and he'd He lost his center and core. And guess what? His entire business fell. And I believe they're actually almost in bankruptcy at this point. And he's one of the most miserable human beings I've ever seen. So for me, I make sure every single day I do some type of workout. That's changed in the past. I now do cold plunges. I love doing different stuff, but I make sure my body is fed in some way, shape, or form. I additionally make sure I'm spiritually aligned. I read scripture, I attend church, I make sure I have a spiritual connection to God. For you, that could be Creator, whatever you want to call it. But I think that's corely important to what you're doing with the rest of your life. Life. And then finally, I make sure I have good relationships with my family and friends and people around me. Now, sometimes time is spent in different places, but I make sure that I spend— at least I can send videos, text messages, whatever, to make sure my wife, my family knows that I love them and care for them and spend time with them. That brings me back to my core focus and values. And what happens is if you do all 3 of those together and you're aligned, your employees, your clients, your customers, people around you feel that energy in your business and they want to work with you. It attracts like-minded people to your business. That are usually A-players, incredible people in your business, which in turn helps your business skyrocket. So for number 7, make sure you feed your mind, body, and spirit throughout this entrepreneurial process. Now, if you want to go in more in-depth with positioning yourself with a hook in your whole story, here's actually a link to a video from kind of some secret archives from Funnel Launch Live. I give a presentation, one of my favorite presentations we've ever given. We actually just put it out on YouTube. So the link right above, you guys can check out For how to live and be your hook. Now these are 7 lessons I've learned across the journey. I'm still learning a lot. If you guys have lessons, comment them down below. I'd love to make more videos in the future about this.