My Story: Failure Isn’t Forever

Life As A Financial Advisor

I was a college athlete & firefighter that packed up his bags to become a financial advisor down under in Melbourne, Australia.

It lasted 6 months.

My boss was an American from New York City that behaved like Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street. I’m not kidding… when the SEC came to audit his books, he would scream at them and tell them he didn’t have any office space for them to conduct their audit – we had the entire 44th floor of the building with more than enough space.

Life As A Commercial Real Estate Agent

After coming home to Virginia, my next step was into commercial real estate. I have always had an interest in real estate and liked the idea of being an agent because it allowed me to work when I wanted and set my own schedule.

The benefit is that I could work on my side projects in my spare time while hopefully making some money to support myself and my other endeavors.

Well let’s just say I may have underestimated the time and effort required to make a living in a commission only business environment. It’s really hard. I didn’t make hardly any money until my 4th or 5th year in the industry, but with that said, I now knew what I was doing and was able to save some money to put towards a new side business.

So again, I do not consider my commercial real estate career a failure and still practice real estate because I enjoy it and now invest in various projects and properties in an effort to diversify my sources of passive income!

Remember, I’m 24 years old now approaching big ECommerce brands trying to take over their entire social media strategy for $2,500 per month plus ad spend.

I failed.

I had no experience in social media and no connections with any big business owners that were willing to trust me with their marketing efforts. But I didn’t stop there.

I decided to pivot to focus on serving local dentists in an effort to help them acquire more patients for their practice. I thought this made sense becuase I should be able to deliver a fair amount of leads (and hopefully patients) and dentists had plenty of money to spend on advertising.

I spent my late nights and weekends creating marketing materials and sample case studies, and even had Kinkos print and bind a bunch of presentations to take to local dental offices.

Again… flat on my face.

It turns out, it’s hard to get in touch with dentists and again, I had no connections being in a new city where I didn’t know many people, especially any dentists. Of the few receptionists that gave me a chance, I quickly realized that dentists & doctors think they know everything and won’t trust anyone without a dental/medical degree.

It hurts to fail.

But the prospect of continuing on without a unique value proposition and no way to set myself apart wasn’t something I was interested in, and quickly my Social Media Marketing Agency dreams were dashed.

Business #2: Greenbrier Goods

Back to YouTube! At this point the new fad being peddled by the hot video creators on the platform surrounded E-Commerce, specifically Dropshipping.

For those that may not be familiar with this business model, it involves the creation of a website to sell products that are shipped by a third party fulfillment center. So your job is to sell the product, and the suppliers handles investory and shipping on your behalf.

Dropshipping is actually a business model I still think about to this day and one that can be profitable and completely passive when done properly. I also like the idea of a business that sells a physical product… there is something special about putting a product in the hand of your customer.

So I set up the website at www.GreenbrierGoods.com and put up a ton of products from a catalog provided by the supplier I was using at the time. But again, I had no clue what I was doing and now had to figure out how to get traffic to my website.

So I browsed the Instagram landscape and found 10-15 Star Wars theme accounts. I reached out to ask about a shoutout for my thriving eCommerce brand and ultimately secured a few 24 hour spots for the product. 

This time my ad actually wasn’t too bad, and I was able to make some sales of this $10 coffee mug. I can’t remember the details of what I paid for the shoutouts or how many I sold, but I’m guessing it was around 8 mugs or so. I probably paid $100 for the shoutouts and $5 per mug to get it to the customer. 

I was rich! It really was an incredible feeling making those first few sales. Just seeing the notification on my phone when they came in was so wild. I really did feel like I’d made it!

Unfortunately, the reality was that I had probably lost $50 in the process, and now I had to handle customer service, manage the supplier, and all the things that come with any eCommerce business. 

This “supplier” was Chinese and the products took 3 weeks to arrive. So now I’ve lost $50 and have 8 customers wondering where their awesome Star Wars mug is and when it will arrive. 

 Not to be discouraged, I trudged on in this business for a few months, redesigning the website over and over trying to improve conversion rates, and continuing to lose money on advertisements and shoutouts. 

At some point enough was enough, and I was so overcome with trying to make it work that again, I pulled the plug.

Boom, another attempt… another FAILURE! 

Business #3: Beard Rover

Let’s try this again. I’m seeing dropshipping ads pop up all over my social feeds and even more educational content on how to replicate this success pop up all over YouTube.

This time I get serious and purchase an online course from one of the YouTuber’s I’ve grown to like and trust. The course cost around $397 to join and actually turned out to be super helpful.

By the way, any investment you make in yourself is the best money you can ever spend!

So now I have some structure, a plan and some guidance to follow, a community to turn to when I have a question or idea, and eventually I decide on a product.

I called it the Beard Rover. Basically it was an electric hair brush that heated up to make styling a beard possible. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had a beard but they don’t always cooperate.

Long story short, the product sold for $34.99 and my cost to put it in the customer’s hands was around $9.50 per unit. 

I don’t remember the exact numbers but this store ended up doing around $100,000 in just 4 months.

I’m rich again! Not so fast…

I had quickly scaled this business to over $1,000 a day in revenue, and if you do the math that equates to around 3,000 orders I had received in the 4 month period. I look up and see 2 big problems. 

Problem #1 is that orders are again taking too long to get to the customers. My shipping times are clearly stated as 14-21 days on the product & checkout pages, but people expect to get their products sooner.

On top of that, as I am started to get a higher volume of orders, the quality of the product itself appears to be diminishing. Remember, I am using a dropshipping service out of China so I never even see the product. 

Long lead times + faulty products is a recipe for a customer service nightmare.  

Problem #2 was that my ad costs completely negated my profit! My profit margin on each unit was $25, bringing the gross profit to $75,000. However, that was what I had spent on the Facebook & Instagram Ads I had implemented to acquire the customers I now had to answer to!

Ultimately, I decided the right thing to do was to refund the people that weren’t happy, and shut down Beard Rover. The headaches of the customer service were too much to handle, and on top of that I wasn’t profitable!

Are you catching the trend yet? FAIL!!

Business #4: Blowout Brush

Initiate Dropshipping Store #3! After a few months and a lot of soul searching looking back on what went wrong with Beard Rover, I found another product that I felt had promise to succeed as a winner.

Enter Blowout Brush. The Blowout Brush was yet another heated hair brush that offered a “salon quality blowout from the comfort of your home.” It sold for $59.99 and cost around $24 to get to the customer, a $36 margin.

This time, I was able to profitably acquire customers from the Facebook & Instagram Ad Campaigns I was running and scale the revenue to $3,000 Per Day, and ultimately I achieved around $275,000 in sales with Blowout Brush. 

Right as I get comfortable, Facebook decides to shut down my Ad Account!

This was a time when Facebook was shutting down ad accounts for no apparent reason, so all I can figure is that my spend reached a level that was significant enough to trip the system.

So here I am dead in the water again. I feel like a real life business owner at this point so I try everything to keep it going. I turn to Google Ads, Influencers, Snapchat Ads, TikTok Ads… anything and everything. 

And all that happens is that I burn through the profit I had made with the store. I’m back to breakeven and maybe even lost a little bit of money. I kick myself for not sticking with it as Facebook eventually began to review and approve its users ad accounts, but again, I was so distraught I ended up shutting down the business. 

FAIL! 

Business #5: Real Estate Success Academy

So at this point I’m starting to feel more comfortable in my abilities as a real estate agent. It’s really my only true source of income and it is supporting a pretty decent life.

All of these other businesses have failed, but efforts in real estate are turning out ok. So I come across another YouTuber that is making a killing selling online courses. Yes, he sells an online course about how to sell an online courses.

So I purchase the course for $800. I’m going to say it again, any investment you make in yourself is the best money you can ever spend!

I probably spent another $2,000 on the ads to drive traffic to the webinar, and while I had some people sign up for the webinar, no one watched a significant portion of it and I certainly didn’t get any sales. 

Again, I’m crushed. All this work and the only thing I have to show for it is a credit card bill to pay and some spare camera gear. 

BIG FAIL!

Business #6: Blackstone Media

Here we go again… Business number 6!

I’m still focused on doing something that compliments my real estate career or at least do something that allows me to leverage my experience and connections in the industry.

So here I go again, I buy a $2,000 drone from DJI, a course to learn how to pass the drone pilot course (thankfully only $175), and insurance to cover my new business and drone operations.

I’m able to get a couple of gigs but quickly find out how time consuming and labor intensive it is take these photos and videos and edit them into something the client can actually use.

The other aspect is that people don’t pay much for these types of projects because they don’t realize how difficult it actually is. There is so much to consider when taking photo and video and that doesnt even take into account the cost of the equipment or the software required to produce quality results.

Again, I had done a few jobs but the payout for what I was doing didn’t seem worth it, and I saw no way to reasonable scale the business to the point where good money was coming in with limited effort.

You might even feel bad for me at this point… FAIL!

Success Story #1: Pursuit of Passive Income

Our mission is to help as many people as possible achieve financial freedom and create a life they love! Of course, that is never easy, and we know that. But we want to do everything we can to help you get there.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we generate income from Pursuit of Passive Income, make sure to check out our article on How To Make Money Blogging!

Other than that, thank you for being here and feel free to reach to me anytime at [email protected] with any questions, comments or ideas you may have! I do my best to get to every email I receive that is thoughtful and respectful.

If there is one thing I want you to take away from my story, it is to never ever give up! 

Starting a business is never as easy as people make it seem, but if you’re able to accept that going in, do your market research, and start something that you’re truly passionate about and commit yourself to, you will find success no matter how long it takes. 

Failure is part of the process, and I know it’s tough. But each failure is one step closer to success, and you only need to be right once!