Founder Stories | Chris Mills, Founder of Chris Mills Wealth Management

I'm super fascinated with the new technologies with the iPhone, the amount of apps I have on my iPhone. I keep crashing my iPhone. I love tech. I think the best people for growing a business and scaling and just coming up with ideas and fresh ideas was tech. So I just got inspired. So that's where I wanted to jump into tech, because it was inspiration for me just to start working with these people. So when it comes to, you know, tech entrepreneurs, they're so busy, they're focused, you know, literally 247 on their business. Like they're staying up all night, they're doing work all the time. They're actually. Some of them have their money and their personal finances. They just really know anything about investments. They need to get started. As you know, time flies when you're having fun and working so hard. So we don't want that time to get away from them. We want to develop a plan early. We want to work with them, start putting money away, and I help them invest that for them. So it's not so much business related. That's their specialty, that's their expertise. Right. We're talking about personal finances, and that involves their whole family. So whether they're married or not, whether they have children or not children, we just take everything together. We develop a plan for them and then we sort of let them run with their business. We're the CFO when it comes to their finances, on what they're in for investments. When you're an entrepreneur and you're going into your business, every last dollar you have is going for, you know, the pizza you're buying to you through that day or invest in your company. But we want to develop these habits early. So when they do actually have an exit or they do start making money, they're profitable. That foundation's already laid. They have the education, they know where to put it, they know what to do. Because I think you find that once someone gets to that point of I have money, I'm making money, whether that comes through an exit or whether it comes through revenue. It's almost, I wouldn't say too late, but like you said, it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks. We want to create that foundation early. And I think it's invaluable for younger entrepreneurs to learn about money as well. Because at that point in their life, they're learning so much about the business. Let's give them a little bit about financial knowledge and that sort of just will keep them through their whole career. Right. Whether they come to talk with me or whether they come to talk to someone else, whether they go to their bank, they know the importance of investing and savings. And I think that's really important to get in early. Not a lot of entrepreneurs that are just starting out have a lot of extra cash flow to invest. But my mission here is education, to teach them early and create that baseline foundation so they know exactly what they're going to do for down the road. It's sort of paying it forward, if you will. And I'm in a little unique situation, but that's what I'm trying to do. Teach this baseline, help people out, let them know what to do in the future. So that way, when they get there, it's like second nature, and they sort of already have an underlying plan of what to do. So for myself, I already had an established business. It was running. I made it through that really difficult. You know, three to five years of becoming established. Now I was running smoothly. Everything was going well. I want to pivot my target market and my niche. So I was working with one target market, it was going successful. I had sort of figured out how to engage these people, how to educate these people, how to work with them, how to communicate, and I wanted to get into tech. So I wanted to do the big pivot, which was very, very scary for me. When something's working, why am I trying to change this? What's already working? So I really want a way to go in there and efficiently pivot, find out a way through the lean canvas, which was brilliant to be able to, like, fail quickly, figure out what works, what does not work, get ideas instead of. This would have been a catastrophic fail if I had tried to pivot and sort of. And failed on that aspect over the long term, of not knowing what I was doing, and then lost my current clientele. So that was my biggest thing. I had my business, but I wanted to pivot. So for me, I was almost looking at it like, this is my core business. I'm starting something new. Even though I was only pivoting my niche target market, for me it felt like it was a whole new business. So I wanted to get in there and figure out how can I do this as quickly and as efficiently as possible? And that's actually what I got out of the program was fantastic. The biggest thing for me was the lean canvas. And the reason I say that is simplifying something. Any process down to the basics is so, so helpful. So it allowed me to just really nitpick each individual aspect, whether it was different parts of the business. So that was the most valuable was breaking it down and realizing how difficult it is to succeed, but how simple the process is. So if you're following the simple process like you laid out, the end result can be there and you can fail a lot quicker, which I found very important. Like, I had ideas coming into Launch Academy that I didn't share with anybody. And then I realized, yeah, those are, those are just not the way to go. And if I would have acted on in my old mentality, it would have been a big long marketing campaign. It would have been a lot of time and money invested into doing that. And with a Lean Canvas, it just made it obvious that I'm on the right path, but that's not the right idea. So that was the most like, that was invaluable for the whole time there, just that one piece. But then everything else will add on top, like the marketing pieces and the different tricks, the trade through, like LinkedIn, social media. I never even used that before I came in here. So that was another thing that's been really helpful. But I think the best thing about this one was the value of the information with a smaller classroom so you can really pound it into our heads, whereas some of the other ones, you go to a big auditorium, you don't even have a chance for a question. So I really like the small classroom size. And like I said in all this stuff, like when I buy a book or when I go to this class or whatever I do, I'm not looking at the price tag of the course because I like that one idea that I got. There's many of them, but let's just use the Lean canvas and how you showed me how to use that, that's invaluable, right? Like that was the idea that just made the course. Like I would have paid, you know, well, I shouldn't put it on camera. I would have paid 20 times as much as that for that one idea. Because that's like the million dollar idea, right? So that's what I'm looking for in every book, every class. Everything is that one core idea is going to change my mentality. And that's what I found with this class. The classroom size was a huge help in that. Okay, so I'm going to be the biggest financial advisor in all of Vancouver, all of bc, for the tech sector. So I'm going after all the sort of the incubators like Launch Academy. I want to get more and more involved with Launch Academy. And like you said, I think the way to accomplish that Is to start at the grassroots when it comes to education and when it comes to developing relationships. So I'm helping young entrepreneurs, reaching out to them, how to develop a baseline, how to develop these different tactics when they get whether even if they change careers, hopefully, I mean they're gonna keep creating businesses because I think once you're an entrepreneur, you're never gonna stop. But developing that baseline and that learning is gonna pay it forward for the rest of my career and hopefully help them for the rest of their career. So I see myself continuously going out, promoting financial management, teaching people how to invest their money, how to create a budget. In Vancouver, this is, it's a, it's a huge problem because everything, it's very, very expensive to live here. So I think having a budget and putting money away, investing is very, very important, having that discipline. So I'm going to continue to preach that, continue to grow my business, be more involved with the tech community through different events. Of course, grassroots I think is where it starts. So I see myself just being the name when it comes to the tech community for financial management and help with investment. And I'm just really looking forward to learning more myself and sort of preaching and showing the way to really, really good, sound financial advice. I've got a bit of experience with that doing, you know, most in Vancouver, but also down in San Francisco, around that area, the Bay Area as well. I have a family down there, so I've been to different locations in different cities and you always find, you know, the same sort of diamonds in the rough as you will the people that are willing to really push it to that next level and they're really, really passionate and that's what I'm looking for. And I find at Launch Academy, not sure if it's the staff, it's probably the great staff, but also the layout and the friendly atmosphere where you find more of that on average than the other places where people are here and they really want to be here, they want to learn, they probably trust a lot in the people, the staff and like the mentors that are here. But I did find like if you go to Launch Academy website and you're looking at the mentors they have there, I mean that's pretty much second to none. Like when you look at the people you actually have access to and are here to help you. So the one thing I could say about Launch Academy and the base here is just that inspiring atmosphere is sort of like next level. The biggest thing about Usain that I found is just the follow through and the follow up. So I've had a relationship with Hussain for the last, I might even say it's a year and a half, two years. And we've always, constantly kept in touch. And every time I keep in touch with him, he's sending me value, whether that's an idea. How are you doing, by the way? Check this out. So this relationship naturally developed. I've learned so much and got so many ideas, of course, over the last year and a half, two years. Then when launch Academy came, I was like, excuse me, Leap came, I was like, I'm on that, let's jump in this. Then when I got in there, I just realized that, okay, he doesn't just do this with me, he's doing it with all these students and with everybody. Right? That's just how he is. He's just paying it forward and talking to people and really helping. So it's just the communication, whether that's like, you know, yelling at someone in the back row, snap out of it. You got to pay attention. Keeping everyone on track or just being so passionate about what he's teaching. I think that was like, again, I was talking about inspiration earlier, but it's just the passion of having a teacher, in this case Usain, really preaching and showing like, I've been there, I've done that, I know what it takes. And I think that credibility that Usain's bringing forward is just, it's invaluable. So that's something that I really want to learn from someone that's been there and done that and had those experiences. And then I can say, okay, I'm gonna listen to what you say because you've actually been there and you've done that. So for me personally, that's really important. And I think for Hussein it was the constant follow up, knowing that he cares and always adding value to all the conversations and the meetings and the get togethers. It's like the leap was done for me. But that relationship with that teacher Hussein is not going to be over. Hopefully never ends. Right. So caring, inspiring and you know, the experience, that's what I would say. The best sort of piece of Hussein that I found in my experience working at Leeds. It.