It’s kind of hard to believe I’ve been building companies on the internet for 7 years now (6 years successfully)

I don’t know why this realization hit me lately, because in mind I still feel very new and novice in the entrepreneurial game and then I realize when I talk to others I’ve been at this for a while

I’ve ran drop shipping stores, been a sales rep, ran a sales agency, been a freelance recruiter, scaled Closify to an exit, ran a software development agency, done consulting, been paid as a creator, scaled Payd to an exit, been an advisor to many other software companies, worked inside a billion dollar tech company, I’ve done a lot in these last 7 years

and with that being said, I’ve learned a lot and thought I’d distill some of my favorite and most important learnings for you to read

Lesson 1: Everything is Risky

I used to follow this twitter account itsallrisky and I still do, and I vividly remember them posting this Jim Rohn video about taking risks and how everything is risky

and this was in 2019 for me as I was a freshman in college but knew I didn’t want to stay in college or pursue the path I was studying

and it resonated really deeply with me because it made sense, either NOTHING is risky or EVERYTHING is risky

if you’re going to tell me dropping out of school is risky, well then so is waking up every day, driving your car, eating food (you could choke), getting on a plane, getting a job, you can’t pick and choose what’s risky

if you’re going to tell me dropping out of college is risky, I’m going to say living a life you hate for 40 years is risky

now the caveat to this is I was (and still like to think I am) young and had very little responsibilities and no one depending on me

are circumstances different perhaps if you have a family and kids depending on you to think about? I would imagine so

but if you’re young with no responsibilities, nothing is risky and you need to swing for the fences and fail as much as you can as fast as possible to get to your big win

because trying a bunch of things will bring you to lesson #2….

Lesson #2: Find Your “How” ASAP

When my business partner Luca Netz came onboard to my first company Closify he told me the following:

“everyone wants to get rich, and the hardest part that takes most people the longest (or never at all) is figuring out the “how”….HOW will they get rich, you found your “how” (with closify)”

and then he said “don’t f*ck it up” hahahaha

he was right though, most people know they want to be rich but don’t know how, will it be a job? A random investment? Which business will be the one to succeed?

But the lesson is you’ll never land on your “how” if you don’t just try a lot of stuff, like I said I sold shoes in highschool, then tried drop shipping (and failed for a yr straight) but that led be to being an online sales rep, to a sales agency, to a freelance recruiter, to Closify which ultimately made me my first $1m

If I didn’t try drop shipping originally, the following chain of events would have never happened, you need to get in the arena and try things until you find your how

and when you find your how….. don’t f*ck it up.

Lesson #3: The Four Pillars of Leverage

There’s four things that one you have all four of these, you will never worry about money again

it becomes almost like you can snap your fingers and money comes to you, or like you have a faucet that you can just turn on and make money on demand

you build these over time and you won’t have all of them upfront, here they are:

1. Skills

2. Capital

3. Network

4. Audience

You start off with skills, you need to get REALLY good at one thing, for me it was sales (both closing over the phone and outbound sales)

This led me to be able to go sell myself to other clients to grow my sales agency, which made me more capital, and as I crushed it for these clients, they helped me and introduced me to more people, growing my network

as my network grew, I made more money, I took that money and bought courses to acquire more skills, more skills grew my income, network grew, started Closify, sold Closify, then finally I started posting content and grew an audience of collectively over 250,000 people

If I needed to make $10,000 in a pinch I can:

• post a story and know 10,000 people will see it

• send an email out to my 26,000 person list

• go through my phone contacts and have many skills I can sell to my wealthy friends

• ask my friends to connect me to basically anyone

• use my capital to runs ads

• I can go on and on

this is where you need to get to, once you have all four, you have built a moat and an insurance policy for yourself that you will never worry about money again

Lesson #4: Goodwill goes a long way

In this “business” world way too many people are too transactional

“if I do this for you what will you do for me” type of thing

I have helped countless people expecting nothing in return (as many people have done for me) and I expect nothing but somehow someway it always comes back to me

here’s an easy example: one of the first clients I closed sales calls for, I ended up staffing his entire sales team for free because I liked it and I didn’t have proof yet

I built his sales team, managed it etc for free, and then we parted ways as he shut down that operation to focus on ecommerce

fast forward literally like 4 years, his ecom brand is doing $3m/mo and he becomes a giant client of Payd the last app I was running

full circle moment, and there’s tons of these, never be the guy that is always looking for something out of people, help people often expecting nothing in return, goodwill with people will take you far

Lesson 5: If It Isn’t Fun, You’re Doing it Wrong:

If you can’t have fun throughout the journey, you’re doing something wrong, I think as young men we often get too fixated when starting on the end result (all the fun material stuff)

but the journey should be very fun, and you’re going to have stressful moments and there’s going to be fires often, but you need to learn to have fun through it all

Realize that if you’re so fortunate to have your own business that provides for your life with no boss and full location and time freedom

what a blessing that is and just learn to enjoy it all, the stress, the ups and downs just learn to stay even keel and have a blast through it all, because you have a long career ahead and the random fires will never stop popping up

One day I woke up and had a lawsuit because I sent a text too early in the morning and lost multi 5 figures because of it

I laugh about it now, what a blessed problem to have, it is just never that serious, if you can’t laugh over that stuff, you need to learn how to

my friends like to say I’m “allergic to cortisol” because nothing can stress me out, life is too good for me to be stressed about anything

I encourage you to view life the same way

I could go on and one, but I’ll leave it there, and if you liked this email let me know and maybe I’ll turn it into a longer youtube video

Happy Thursday peeps

Alex