If somebody had said to me that I’d be running an extremely successful business three months after my college graduation, I would have, most likely, taken it as a joke.
Not because I did not consider myself capable of running a business, but because I was not sure of what it was that I wanted to do.
Following some of my side hustles as a student — including one which became a six-figure business — I launched a company that designed immersive and educational travel experiences for students. I did it mostly because I wanted to travel, and this afforded me the possibility to do so. Since someone needed to guide the group while abroad, that person would be me.
My plans at the time were: travelling, meeting people, and figuring it out as I went along. And since most of my experiences at the time had to do with finance, I thought I’d eventually settle in either Wall Street or Canary Wharf.
As it turned out, the experiences I was designing acquired an enormous level of popularity, and in three months, I was making more than I thought I would be making for the entire year. We closed that year with over a million dollars in revenue.
I’ve written a lot of what happened afterwards and I plan on writing more. Numerous lessons can be learned from it as it involved numerous failures and successes that largely mirrored my evolution as a human and my emotional and mental struggles.
What matters now is that life has given me the opportunity to do it again. I didn’t search for it. As I searched for ways to make a living and regain my footing following the economic transformation caused by the pandemic, I never considered a return to what I used to do. As we all know, all travelling was halted and there was — and is — a lot of uncertainty about how it will come back.
It seems that, like with writing, and with living, and with everything else, life is giving me another chance. And it is secretly whispering in my ear: Don’t fuck it up this time!
So, what will I do differently?
Consider The Bigger Picture In Place
After my travelling project became a business, I dedicated almost every waking hour of my day to it. I burnt out several times. I wanted to grow at all costs, and emulate the role models that praise grinding and hustling. I stopped paying attention to other areas of my life that are equally important.
From my renewed perspective, I see this startup as one line of work of a larger startup (Me). Therefore, the pressure to grow at all costs is less, since the business is playing a role in the bigger picture of my life, where everything is interconnected.
At the same time, the income-diversification strategy that I developed means I am not completely reliant on this new-but-old business for my day-to-day expenses as I used to be. I liked Tim Denning’s approach of saying that we are our own startup. That’s how I see myself: I’m creating content. I’m teaching people online and offline, giving value to people and monetising my different abilities, all of which are components of the “Me” startup.
This combines with the advantage that, since my travelling business is one that I know very well from the inside out, it doesn’t demand as much time of me anymore. Therefore, I plan on using the money I make from it to get out of debt and to keep investing and growing my portfolio. While before I relied on the big paychecks to boost my lifestyle, now I’m setting myself up to create more freedom.
Also, that means a refreshed outlook on self-care. Since I’m the startup, I am aware that I cannot generate quality content or offer a top-notch service if I am overworked. That means being very selective with the work that I take and the work that I decline, a significant contrast with my previous approach of relentlessly pursuing clients at all costs.
There Is Value In Clichés, And Abundance In Scarcity
Boutique has become a sort of fashionable misused term. I know several people who fancy themselves as owners of a boutique business that in reality is nothing but a flashy smoke-and-mirrors empire of pretentiousness.
But the reason why I like the term boutique is that it can also mean a highly specialized and personalized service. A tailored approach, instead of the mass-market strategies highly praised by business school gurus.
In finance — I’m a finance guy by training — boutique investment banks are different from bulge-bracket banks because they cater to fewer clients who have more specific needs.
One of my mistakes before was that I attempted to make deeply immersive travel experiences into something that would be suitable for mass-market sales, because that’s what I thought success meant.
Not anymore. Tourism is an industry that needs to evolve in a way that is sustainable and responsible. As Adam J. Cheshier said in his article, mass tourism is not travelling. We need more travellers, not more tourists.
Therefore, I’ve decided that my reborn business will have this outlook. If I design an experience to learn about impact investing in New York City, there will be one experience like that a year. If I am planning a visit to the refugee camps in Western Sahara, there will be one experience like that a year. And so on.
What this creates is that it allows me to craft a better experience and charge a fair price for it. I want clients who will choose our trip because they believe in our mission and want to have a life-changing experience, not clients whose only purpose is to binge-shop on Fifth Avenue and choose our trip because we’re the cheapest travel agency on the block.
The scarcity of our programs — in order to preserve quality and a tailored service — creates abundance. An abundance of clients who believe in our story, an abundance of positive ripple effects generated by the content of the programme, and also, financial abundance from customers who are paying a fair price and properly valuing our work, which in turn empowers us to give back.
Only The Right People Can Come In
One of the reasons many previous ventures of mine failed is because of my tendency to be a people-pleaser. I often confused generosity and kindness with betraying myself for the sake of others. No was the hardest word to say.
The healing road has been painful and hard at times, but well worth it.
It has also significantly impacted my outlook when it comes to business.
The slogan of my previous travelling business was connecting the world one bridge at a time. The problem was that throughout our emphasis on growth connecting the world became conquering the world, and we completely lost track of the “one bridge at a time” part.
This was because just as the impulse to sell led us to sacrifice our profitability for the sake of more clients, so did my impulse to look good and to project my image as a successful startup founder led me to let all the wrong people in.
It led me to embrace the greedier, darker side of me, who only cares about financial results and not about how they are achieved. It led me to ignore the story of why I had started, and to keep attracting people that matched my unhealthy but society-glorified ambitions.
Right now, I’m staying true to our story. I am drawn to this business because it can create bridges of wholehearted connection. It can create bridges of understanding. I have personally seen how it makes people life better — expanding their horizons, enabling them to see the larger picture. The one that started everything. And I never want to lose sight of that.
Because if I stay true to that story, to those values, then I will attract the right people. The right partners. The right investors, if we need them. The right clients, who are willing to pay a fair price for what we have to offer instead of haggling. The inside and the outside world of the business will be aligned.
It is no irony that my business evolution is completely correlated with the evolution of my personal and spiritual journey. And now, as I’m given this new opportunity, that’s the most important thing. If I keep growing, and healing, and if I stay grounded, then my business will keep thriving. It will evolve with me, regardless of what happens with the travel industry.
And if I don’t, if I drift, and lose track of my values, then, once again, I will gradually lose it, day by day, without realising it until it is too late.
And the whispering voice who told me to not fuck up will be utterly disappointed.
I’d much rather hear that voice laughing.
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Previously Published on medium
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