How to Build a Purpose Driven Business?

I started my first company while living on campus, while going to Ohio State during my senior year. Here's my story.

Most people in college, you know, don't dream of working in a collection agency, right?

Yeah. It's an interesting story, and I think entrepreneurs will benefit from this as well, because, you know, what we ended up being able to do as a company and as a team was really special, and it was a long journey. So back in college, it was my junior year, going into my senior year, I needed a summer job, and one of my friends hooked me up with their dad, who was the CEO of a collection agency in Cleveland, Ohio. I basically got thrown onto the phones after a couple hours of being trained, and I just attacked it hard. You know, I think anything. Anything worth going after requires a lot of hard work. And I found out who made the most calls in the office, and I said, I'm going to beat that person. And by the end of the summer, I was crushing it. And a CEO asked me if I wanted to do something with him in Columbus, Ohio, and I said, sure. And the day before I came back to Columbus, he handed me a sales book. We went out on the road. We walked into a few dental offices. He made the gals at the front desk laugh and smile. And the next thing I know, we had a couple clients. And he said, go back to Columbus and do that. So that's what I did. I went back to Columbus. I had no clue what I was doing. I mean, I can tell you I didn't learn anything at Ohio State, but I learned more on the first day. Going out on the road, walking into offices and getting thrown out of people's offices with, hey, did you. No Solicitation, Right. And it was a hard gig. I had to walk into an office and sell the person at the front desk. Meanwhile, the patients were sitting in the waiting room, and I'm talking about collections, and these are the people that are probably going to be in collections. It was hard. I mean, it was really hard.

So when you started, when he kind of threw you just out there and said, start your own collection agency in Columbus, what was that like for you? Were you just kind of wearing every hat at first and doing every possible job that needed to be done?

Yeah. So for the first six months, I just. I pounded hard. I used to go. I had made so many cold calls. I'd go to class in the morning, and I'd put on a suit at noon. I'd hit the road in the afternoon. I would go collect business cards from every medical building I could possibly find. I would go home probably at 4 o', clock, call all of them up, try to land appointments. And my goal was to let probably about two to three appointments every day that I can go out on. And I was trying to sell them to use our collection agency. When I graduated after about six months, I had about 100 clients. And then when I graduated, we started a separate company in Columbus. And that's when I started to hire a team. And that's, that's really when everything kind of really started. I had to go build a company at that point, and he offered me the opportunity to be a partner with him. He ran the company in Cleveland, I ran the one in Columbus, and we grew it together. And within five years, it just, it just blew up. I mean, we had an office full of people and I was hiring entry level folks, I was training them, I was doing the collections, I was doing the customer service. I, I was doing everything, every single thing until I could elevate and then delegate something off to, to someone that I hired. So I was getting a dose of pretty much everything you could possibly deal with in a startup company. And thank God I had a mentor. So I had someone guiding me about, you know, how to treat people and, and how to deal with some of the problems and challenges that we were up against.

When you think back to those early days, what do you think was motivating you to, you know, run out after class and hustle as hard as you did? I've listened to a lot of interviews with people who have had success and achieved a lot of amazing things. And often what you hear with these people is that there's some sort of voice inside of their head that's kind of chirping at them, saying that you're not good enough. You need to achieve more and more and more. And that's often kind of what's like pushing them and motivating them to succeed. And often too, it kind of stems back to childhood experiences that they've had where they felt in the past like they weren't enough. And I'm curious, when you think back to those early days when you were grinding, what was that driving force behind everything?

Still, it's still the driving force today. And when I coach young entrepreneurs, we talk about this trait that entrepreneurs have. There is a drive that you can't explain. And not everybody has it. Mine is very competitive. I love to win, and I am, I'm obsessed with working hard and being mentally strong and not failing. And I'm not Afraid to fail. And so when did that, when did.

That, where did that come from, though?

From wrestling? I was a wrestler in high school, and I wrestled at Ohio State, and I just had to learn how to be mentally tough. So, you know, like, you just. You get your butt kicked enough and you have to kind of keep fighting. And if you're going to run a business, you better be prepared to get knocked down hard. Because I've had everything from class action lawsuits, to employees stealing from me, to clients pulling the rug out from underneath me, to thinking the business was going to close. I mean, I've had to deal with every punch in the gut that you could possibly deal with as an entrepreneur. And it's hard. And you have to be able to, like, weather through that storm. And that's not something everybody can do, and not everybody has a stomach to do it. So I think for me, I'm wired a certain way, for sure. Very competitive, and I'm very driven, and I like to win. So, you know, I mean, we used to have contests on our. A wrestling team to sit in a wrestling stance and how long can you sit, you know, to the point where an hour in, you're shaking and it was mental. And I just, I remember just like, I'm not going down. Like, I'm not going down, you know, and. And so I just don't know. I just always had that kind of the toughness of just like being strong and being a mental thing, you know, I think we're all. We're all capable of doing more than we think we can. I've been blessed to have certain people in my life along the way that have been there to push me, that I looked up to, and I was able to, like, you know, I wanted them to, like, be proud, right? So I always, like, had like, some father figure, in a way, mentor figure, coach figure that really I admired, that I wanted to impress, I guess you could say. I mean, that's. That's the truth. I was always trying to, like, you know, you know, be the highest performer.