While it’s unfortunate that she didn’t document that first year when she was gathering her ideas and strategizing the trajectory of her business, in her case the process does seem to have sharpened her ideas so that she wasted less time and was able to act more purposefully once she did launch. She is an admirable model of speed and patience.
This is something that I’ve been working on for six years every single day, seven days a week. There’s been no day off. If I’m on vacation, I’m working. And I still have so much work to do. I just did what Gary said in Crush It!, which is constantly hitting it day after day, never giving up, keeping my blinders on, focusing on my own shit, and really, really doing me. Doing me to the best of my ability. Crush It!, and his other books too, allowed me to just be who I am and not be sorry about it.
Passion
I know many people working in jobs that make them heaps of money who aren’t happy, but I don’t know anyone who works around their passion every day who isn’t loving life. As I said earlier, I could take some shortcuts to make more money and thus shorten the time it takes for me to meet my goal of buying the Jets—but I don’t, because those things wouldn’t make me happy. I’d rather wait and get there on my own terms. We’re on this earth for only a short time, and the bulk of our adult days are spent at work. It’s worth taking the steps necessary to make sure those hours are as rewarding, productive, and enjoyable as possible.
Every one of the people interviewed for this book agreed that there’s no point in trying to be an entrepreneur without passion. Your business can’t be just a job; it has to be a calling. Andy Frisella, founder of nutrition and fitness brands Supplement Superstores and 1st Phorm, explained it best:
You’re going to go through a time where you’re not going to make any money. It’s not going to be a week, it’s not going to be a month, it’s not going to be one year. It’s going to be years. And during that time, if you don’t love what you do, it’s going to be very hard to stick it out. That is something that people don’t understand when they hear, “Follow your passion.” They hear rainbows, unicorns, bullshit. But the truth of it is that it’s important, because if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re going to be that much more likely to quit when shit’s hard.
When you’re passionate about what you’re offering the world, whether it’s a sales training method or vintage toys, the quality of both your product and your content will more likely be what it needs to be to get noticed, valued, and talked about. Interestingly, many of the people we interviewed pointed out that you don’t even have to be passionate about the product or service you’re offering. What’s imperative is that you are passionate about giving. That’s what Shaun “Shonduras” McBride discovered. Before developing his massively successful personal brand on Snapchat, he sold jewelry online. The guy was a skater and snowboarder; he had little interest in jewelry per se. But after reading Crush It! in college, he decided to sell jewelry to test the book’s principles and confirm what his instincts told him were true: that engaging with customers and involving them in the development of his brand would pay dividends no matter what he sold. As you’ll see later in this book, he was right.
Finally, most entrepreneurs will tell you that passion is protective, buoying you when you threaten to become overwhelmed by the stress and frustration that is a natural by-product of entrepreneurialism. Passion is your backup generator when all your other energy sources start to sputter. And passion keeps you happy. When you love what you do, it makes every choice easier. When you decide to keep working the nine-to-five you hate because you need the health benefits until your business takes off, when you agree to work for less money than you want because the experience will pay off later, when you eat shit—passion makes it all go down easier.
How I’m Crushing It
Brian Wampler, Wampler Pedals
Twitter: @WamplerPedals
Brian Wampler’s parents, both commissioned sales reps, were more entrepreneurial than the average mom and dad, but they raised Brian to follow the money and do the job that paid, “regardless of whether you are passionate about it or not.” So after Brian graduated high school (by the skin of his teeth) he went to work in construction. A few years later, at the age of twenty-two, he went out on his own as a remodeling subcontractor. It wasn’t his passion, but it was better than working for someone else, better being a relative term—he hated what he was doing.
His real passion was guitar, in particular trying to make the guitar sound the way it did in popular songs. That sound is created through guitar pedals, small electronic boxes guitarists manipulate to create various sound effects and tones. When a friend introduced Brian to an online forum for people interested in customizing existing guitar pedals, Brian dove in.
For the next few years, I would work all day, getting home about five p.m., eat dinner and spend some time with the family, then spend the rest of the evening learning all about electronics through reading and experimentation. I did this every night, not stopping until three or four a.m. . . . sometimes staying up all night and then going into work and doing it all over again.
In many of these forums, many of the questions are asked by laypersons who have no experience in electronics. Most of the people answering were either engineers or talked way over the head of the person asking the questions. When this person asked for the answer to be simplified, they were scoffed at. . . . Basically, there were artist types of people asking a question and heady engineering types refusing to dumb down the answer. I was once one of those “artist types” of people in the very beginning. So, once I figured everything out on my own, I simply made sure to explain things in a very easy-to-understand-and-digest manner so others could learn more easily.
(Which, incidentally, is exactly what I did for wine.)
He also started selling his own modified guitar pedals online. That led to questions from customers, which added to the number of hours Brian spent replying to comments and answering e-mails and even phone calls. He finally published a series of e-books to consolidate all the information he was disseminating. Then he started selling DIY kits with parts and instructions for modifying particular pedals. When customers and retailers started asking him to build and sell them custom pedals, he created his own line, which is how Wampler Pedals was born. He quit the construction industry and made his living selling all these products. Demand kept rising.
Brian realized that he wasn’t going to be able to keep this pace up and invest the same amount of time in all of his products. Something was going to have to take priority. It was while trying to decide which direction to pursue, in early 2010, that he came across Crush It! The lessons he took away radically changed the way he ran his business and helped it grow.
1. Embrace Your DNA: “I probably owe my marriage to this idea. Before reading the book, my wife and I were trying to do everything at once—design new products, build them, market them, find new retailers domestically and internationally, keep up with customer service, ship everything in a timely manner . . . manage employees, etc. This created a lot of friction because I really sucked at everything except designing new products, creating content, and talking to new and potential customers. After reading the book, she and I decided to outsource everything to outside contractors or hire people that brought in the qualities that I did not have.”
His epiphany also helped him figure out which side of the business he should concentrate on.
“I realized that I wasn’t an engineer—the books I was writing were fairly complex electrical engineering ideas that I was simplifying to bring them to an audience that wanted them, but my heart wasn’t in it as much as it was with creating something new, something that inspires other artists to use it as a tool to make their art, and creating something with my name on it—something that my great-grandkids will be able to look back on one day and say, ‘That was my great-grandpa.’ So, I stopped selling all of the DIY products and focused on just that.”
2. Storytell: “At the time, man
y of the other companies were faceless. I simply started being myself in an authentic way and became the first president of a musical instrument company who did his own product demos. This was very odd at the time to many other companies. However, our customers loved it! They realized that I was an actual guitar player who happened to make pedals, rather than an engineer who happened to dabble in a little bit of guitar. This difference, though it may seem minor, was huge for us, and a key to our success.”
3. Go Deep, Not Wide: “Analytics don’t tell the whole story. In a nutshell, I decided to stop chasing numbers and focus more on creating content that brought more value to our customers. A thousand views and a hundred comments are much better than ten thousand views and one comment.”
4. Everyone Needs to Become a Brand: “I insisted that everyone who worked for me become a face of the company alongside me. They had to understand that everything they posted online reflected the brand. Equally important to me, by understanding the fact that everyone is basically a brand, they would have an advantage over others should they decide to pursue something else outside of my company.”
5. You Got to Be You: “I jumped in with both feet, convinced that, if I followed my passion with extreme vigor, something, somewhere would happen. . . . I just had to be patient and work harder than anyone else in my niche.”
Patience
It’s interesting that passion and patience go hand in hand. To live in line with your passion will probably require that you go slower than you might want to. It will definitely mean that you say no more than you say yes. Bide your time; you cheapen yourself when you make deals while holding your nose. Remember, you’re only crushing it if you’re living entirely on your own terms.
It’s not impossible to make bank when you build a business with the sole goal of getting rich, but very often entrepreneurs who get rich quickly sacrifice their chances for wealth for the long term. When I was just starting to grow my family business, my friends who graduated college at the same time that I did also went to work. They started making money and spending it on trips to Vegas and hot girls and nice watches. Me? I was making money, too. In the first five or six years, I grew that business to $45 million, and not many years later, it was a $60 million wine empire. When a normal twenty-six-year-old dude builds a $60 million business, he leverages it for twenty-year-old dude things. Yet I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Springfield, New Jersey. I drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I had no watches, no suits, and no flash. I could have paid myself hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but the most I took was $60K. I kept my head down like an ox with a plow, putting almost every dime I earned back into the business and focusing all my energy on building a personal brand around unparalleled customer service, both in the store and online. When not talking to customers, I was the most boring human being on the planet. Today I not only have everything I ever wanted (except the Jets), like all the other entrepreneurs in this book, but also I’m having the time of my life. Some achieved success in a relatively short time; most worked their asses off for years before anyone knew who they were.
You have no reason to start acting like something special until you actually have something special to show for it. Even then, don’t act special; the moment you do, you’ll start moving in the opposite direction. Take my advice: eat shit for as long as you have to. That means be a bigger man or woman than everyone around you. That means the customer is always right. That means you put your employees ahead of you. That means you don’t take many vacations, maybe for years, and your only time off is to mark important holidays and to be there for your family (or your friends who are like family). Be patient. Be methodical. Pay off your debts. Unless your brand is glamorous, live simply, and even then be practical and calculated. Put yourself last. Once you’ve reached your brand and business goals, then you can start living it up (without putting yourself into debt, because that’s insane).
How I’m Crushing It
Alex “Nemo” Hanse, Foolies Limited Clothing Company
IG: @Foolies
The day after Alex “Nemo” Hanse turned thirty, he was in New Orleans to try to meet a few women.
Not just any women. Specifically, some of the stars listed on his T-shirt, like Taraji P. Henson and Ava DuVernay, who were in town to attend the Essence Festival, a four-day megacelebration of black culture in general and black women in particular. It’s the T-shirt that put his clothing brand, Foolies Limited Clothing Company, on the map.
But what’s really interesting about his presence at the gathering is how he got there.
His fans and customers gave him birthday money to pay for it. They literally sent him the money to buy himself a plane ticket so he could attend and connect with people who could help him grow his brand.
That’s some pretty spectacular customer love and loyalty. Alex must have been doing something right.
Alex has always had a strong entrepreneurial spirit. His mother died when he was in the fifth grade, and since he didn’t have a father figure, he was taken in by a family friend (who had twelve kids of her own). He was grateful to have a roof, but at school he got tired of getting picked on for his raggedy clothes and shoes, so he’d carry around a big duffel bag stuffed with chips, candy bars, and Capri Suns that he could sell to earn a little money. He also worked after school at a car wash, where he got paid under the table because he was underage. “I was just trying to survive.”
In 2005, when he was a student at the University of Florida, Alex was a rapper. “Dropping bars and spitting hot lines of fire . . . at least, in my mind I was.” While Googling “How to create a brand for a rapper,” he found an article that said a rapper needed to create an identity for his fans. So he and his “brother of another color,” Billy, a big supporter of his music, worked to come up with some kind of catchphrase. “And we’re sitting around saying, ‘Man, this idea sounds so foolish. This is so foolish of us.’ We kept repeating it and playing around, and we started saying, ‘Yeah, we’re Foolies.’ And it was like, ‘What’s a Foolie?’ And I said, ‘I guess somebody who’s dumb enough to try something and figure it out in the end.’”
After graduating in 2009 with a degree in sports medicine, Alex couldn’t find a job, so he kept concentrating on his music while working at an AT&T store. Then he and Billy decided that rappers needed a clothing line. They had no money, so they ironed the word foolies on a dirty white T-shirt. They did what Alex calls the Daymond John effect: “Put it on one person, take a picture, you take it off. Put it on another person, take a picture, take it off. Because you don’t have money so you can’t give shirts to everyone, but if you can post pictures on Facebook and Twitter and make it seem like everyone has a shirt, maybe other people will want it, too. And that’s what started happening for us, slowly.”
The shirts were created to bring attention to Alex’s music, but they soon became his main output. He came up with clever ways to deliver an extra special experience to his customers. When he had a special sale, he’d send customers who bought a shirt a custom link to a YouTube video of himself singing a song with their name in it, or some other personal message. He shipped the shirts inside miniature paint cans, the idea being that when you opened the can you’d be releasing your dreams. And he’d send a handwritten letter to every customer, along with a dream journal, “because that’s the biggest thing that people don’t do: they don’t write their goals down, so they can never manifest and come to life.”
As soon as customers received their order, they’d post a picture to social media. Except, interestingly, sometimes they didn’t post the shirt—they posted the letter, the can, or the dream journal. They’d thank Alex, saying it had been years since anyone had written them a letter, and some attached the letters to their refrigerators or bathroom walls.
The company eked out an existence, barely, while Alex kept working a day job, tutored, mentored at Boys and Girls Clubs, and couch-surfed. It was hard going, but he kept at it. Reading Crush It! in 2015 “was a conf
irmation that I wasn’t crazy. I’d go to pitch competitions and these fake investors would chew me out: ‘How is that scalable? Why are you writing letters to every customer?’ I started reading the book and thought, Man, somebody finally gets me. It was like finding a long-lost friend or meeting your twin after being separated and you didn’t even know you had one.”
He realized his problem was that he wasn’t creating enough content. “I went all-out motivational, plastering Facebook with posts.”
In September 2015, he watched on television as Viola Davis won her first Emmy. That same night, Regina King won her first Emmy, too. “I was bawling. My brand has never deliberately focused on black women, but they’ve always supported me. So I was like, ‘Man, we need to make something motivational based off of this dopeness that these black girls are doing.’ That’s when we listed all the phrases, like a regular graphic.”
The graphic was a list of ways in which people could emulate the black female powerhouses of our era: write like shonda. speak like viola. walk like kerry [washington]. be fierce like taraji. be strong like regina. lead like ava.
“I posted the graphic right before work at about eight thirty in the morning, and around maybe ten fifteen, my phone started buzzing. So I go to my Facebook page and I see forty-plus shares. I had gotten shares before, but this was a weird number, and it kept increasing. What was going on?”
The reason Alex’s phone was buzzing incessantly was because best-selling author, speaker, and digital strategist Luvvie Ajayi, aka Awesomely Luvvie, had posted the graphic to her page. She messaged him and told him he needed to put those names on a shirt. “She didn’t even know I had a T-shirt company. She just thought I was a random guy, which is crazy how God works and how everything just lines up.”
Then Ava DuVernay reposted the graphic on Twitter.
Crushing It! EPB Page 5