Milestones Are Stepping Stones
“POUND THE ROCK, MINI BIAR!”
Such was the weekly, bursting encouragement of my calculus teacher in high school. Truthfully, he called me “Mini Mini Biar” - one ‘mini’ for being younger than my brother, and the other to acknowledge my imposing stature ;)
To pound the rock meant to commit myself to a process rather than fixate on a desired outcome. For example, to make it my goal to spend an hour each day working out math problems instead of to get a 5 on the BC Calculus AP Exam.
I did, and therefore, as it would turn out, I did. The test score was simply a picture of my process.
More importantly, that process far outlived the result. My peers in college never could grasp why finals week was always my favorite week of the semester - I was still pounding the rock! Made ready for the big days by all the little days leading up to them.
Entrepreneurship rocks, I won’t lie to you. There are very many of them indeed! :D
The amount of moving parts and changing variables felt like a blur for the first few months, and that’s not to speak of navigating the varying interests of customers, employees, short-term investors, and long-term owners. Oh yeah, and across multiple businesses! Haha!
Emotionally, you can go from rockstar to rock bottom back to rockstar on seemingly a daily basis. How much more significant, now than ever, does this make the process: the stable ground that is not the ground itself, but the consistent action of laying brick after brick.
I’ve been laying entrepreneurial bricks for a year now. I can hardly believe it! So what is being built over here?
BIAR Legacy has grown from nothing to a couple dozen clients representing a seven-figure AUM, with no marketing spend and no sales calls. It is a small but established business that has now started paying me each month, and I cherish the responsibility of serving as my clients’ financial advisor. I constantly feel the need to subdue my excitement for how I anticipate this 3-5 year window will impact clients for decades or even generations. Long term, I have yet to determine how many total clients BIAR Legacy will take on (due to the very personalized nature of my service), but I imagine accepting applications for at least another couple years.
Common Goods did over $230K in sales during its first year, representing an over 100% return on cost of goods sold, with sales almost exclusively driven via Facebook Marketplace listings. We simultaneously built out shelving throughout our 5000 sqft warehouse and have finished filling it all with inventory, representing another couple hundred thousand dollars in unrealized value. CG is ready to test its potential as a storefront in this second year, aiming for retail foot traffic to complement or even surpass its Facebook customer base.
BudgetForLife is only about 6-months-old as a business (compared to its one year old siblings), but it is delighting a paying user base of around 120 that is growing slowly but steadily. We feel the software is ready to service a much larger audience but are still discovering avenues to effectively reach that target market. Nonetheless, with negligible operating costs, it is certainly rewarding to see BFL successfully utilizing a SAAS model.
Overall, as I pause from the rock-pounding to look up and look around, I’m beyond encouraged at the progress we’ve made.
Still, I’ve heard it said that men overestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they can accomplish in five years.
There’s no “arrival” for those on a process-oriented journey; a milestone is simply the next stone to walk across.
Pound the rock, friends. And thank you, Mr. Mellor.