Learning From My Successes And Failures
I think that it’s important that all of our students learn from not only our successes, but also from our failures.
Although my family and I have had many blessings in our lives as we have built several successful businesses, we certainly have failed over and over again along the way. I know that many of you know of my failed attempt to start a second grocery wholesaling business after I left the company that I had helped to build for 13 years and to $1.8 Billion in sales.
I left there on March 14, 2000 and proceeded to fail over and over again for the next 2 years and lost my entire life’s savings up to that point – $1.6 million. I came as close as I ever want to come to filing for bankruptcy. It was one of the worst times of my life, but I learned what it takes to rise from the ashes and build something great.
I’ve learned that in building a business and fighting for a dream, failure is simply part of the journey. I discuss it in depth in my trainings at Kents15Keys.com
With that said, I want you to know that we’ve stumbled as well in real estate. We haven’t always been great at this. We haven’t always been great wholesalers, rehabbers, trainers, or property managers.
Over the years I’ve personally had foreclosures, upset customers, made missteps, and generally made some mistakes that simply are part of the process of building and learning. In fact, at one point we were horrible at property management. It took “screwing it up” over a year and me losing the faith of some of my closest friends to figure out how to finally get good at it and create the machine that you see today.
In real estate, it also took making some “bad investments” in 2007-2009 (when money was free flowing from the banks) to appreciate and make better purchasing and financing decisions in our business today. We have become so much better at what we do and what we teach because of our willingness to put our own money and businesses at risk over and over again.
I’m sure over the next couple of years we will still deal with some of the headaches, collateral damage, and bad investment decisions that we made back in the heyday. In fact, I’m banging my head up against the walls right now, like many Americans and actively dealing with the banks now to try to negotiate with them on several properties (who knows how that will turn out).
But I share this with you so that you don’t ever think that we ALWAYS make good decisions and don’t ever screw up.
It’s simply not true and although I share our success stories with you, it is important to me that you know that we are human as well and have made real estate purchases that in hindsight, we should have never bought.
It’s all part of the process of learning and growing as an entrepreneur and I want to empower you to keep pushing and don’t ever stop trying.