'Yo. What’s with all the businesses?'

I get this question or similar a bit in the DM’s.

If you’ve read my bio, you may have thought the same thing.

I thought I’d turn it into a THREAD.

This short story may explain a few things.

Life and Business Lessons

I went to university and got one of those degrees that your parents would be proud of.

Then onto one of those jobs that they are proud of. You know, the ones with all the perks.

Did well. A model employee.

But I wasn’t happy. I thought, is this all there is to life?

It was just a job. A good one, but still a job.

I always wanted my own business. (Nobody called it entrepreneurship back then).

Not knowing where to start, I went into sales.

I figured if I wanted a successful business I had to learn how to sell.

After training many people, I thought why not start my own company. So I did.

And it did very well.

Then people started asking me how I was doing so well.

So I consulted on the side to show other companies how to do what I did. Another business.

The consulting allowed me to build lots of connections in that industry.

A friend and I noticed that lots of small businesses had similar problems.

Affordable, practical office spaces were difficult to find.

Spaces were expensive and leases were long.

So we came up with a solution.

Fit out shared spaces for business owners to operate their companies out of.

Shared spaces, shared costs. Like a share house but for businesses.

Low risk and exposure for them. We’d take a profit.

A little like WeWork.

Whilst all this was happening, we'd built an internal customer service team on the phones.

Soon business owners who we knew asked us if we could help them with their customer service.

So we did. That lead to a phone lead generation team as well.

New business.

Our teams grew rapidly and we started to look at ways to streamline our operations.

That's when we discovered outsourcing and virtual assistants.

It allowed us to have our key team members focus on vital tasks that built the business.

We outsourced the rest.

Reducing our costs allowed us to pay our staff more. We also became more efficient.

As a result we grew quickly. Again people asked us how we were doing it.

So we showed them. Our offshoring company was born. We now place almost 50 virtual assistants with local companies.

There are a couple more, but we'll leave them for another day.

So the lessons?

1) Take risks and choose your own path. I could easily have stayed in my safe, secure job. But what kind of life would that be?

I knew I was destined for more.

2) Build a reputation. Every opportunity that I am involved in came from the success of my first business.

3)Relationships are everything. Build great relationships and doors will open for you. I get calls weekly from people looking for help.

4) Businesses come from solving problems. Most of my businesses were accidental. Problems arose and we solved them.

5) Not every business idea works. I’ve had lots of failures as well. But that's just a part of business.

Thanks for making it this far!

Hope you enjoyed it.

If you found some value, feel free to retweet the first tweet.

- EFL - https://twitter.com/entrepreneurfo3/status/1392092313879461888