3.5 Months into Our Startup ~ Lessons, Learnings, Commentary, and All Sorts of Thoughts

It’s now been 3.5 months since we launched our company Grid Consulting, it’s been an awesome whirlwind of successes, new challenges, and emotional peaks and valleys. We’ve created a fairly large network to distribute our content to in a short period of time and have successfully launched an Instagram, Facebook Biz Page, Facebook Private Group for Real Estate Discussion, Podcast distributed on 4 networks, Youtube Channel, Linkedin Page, and our website. We’ve also partnered with wonderful, forward-thinking brokers, team leaders, and agents to help with the next evolution of their business. Our focus with these partnerships: workflows, operations, and margin expansion (aka make more money!). Lastly, we’re working on our secret behind the scenes projects that we’re incredibly excited about.

So..what have have we learned since going out on our own? Here are some musings:

Positives and Challenges: It’s incredibly hard, but don’t let the doubt defeat you!

• Positives: It’s all a test, challenging your psyche, determination, and willingness to power thru the peaks and valleys.
• Challenges: You’re used to things being easier (but harder) because you often have months or years of company development behind you.

Positives and Challenges: The psychological warfare is real

• Positives: The peaks are incredible, you’ll find yourself in a state of bliss, a state where you can do anything you set your mind to and every win is a win, independent of the size.
• Negatives: The valleys are awful, you’ll find yourself in a state of sadness, a state where you question your confidence. This is totally normal, power through it, you’ll be surprised how quickly you can train yourself to snap out of the valleys.

Positives and Challenges: Your Sphere of Influence and their support

• Positives: You have those people in your life that will support you with whatever it is you do. They believe in you, they trust your purpose, they have unwavering belief that you can do whatever you put your mind to and are willing to do the work necessary.
• Challenge 1: You also have those people in your life that will tell you they support you, when in reality, behind the scenes they’re either wishing for your failure or thinking your project is stupid.
• Challenge 2: People that you were previously close to or that used to support you disappear from your life. It’s ok, you can solve for the two above and use it as motivation.

Positives and Challenges: Lack of brand awareness

• Positives: You get to create your own brand identity, you get to throw out all rules or guidelines, and start over from scratch.
• Positives: You get to test alternative ways of brand development, succeeding sometimes, failing others, but you get to swing away more rapidly.
• Challenges: It’s really hard to develop a brand from scratch and it often takes a long term outlook. Determination, willingness to see the big picture, put in the work, and continually develop your network of distribution.
• Challenges: People may question intent, but this can be resolved by having a strong mission driven purpose.

Positives and Challenges: Small team size

• Positives: You can move much quicker with a smaller team. In the early years of Amazon, Bezos instituted a pretty awesome rule: every internal team should be small, meaning it can be fed with two pizzas. Like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and scalability. The former is obvious. Smaller team’s spend less time managing timetables and keeping people up to date, and more time doing what needs to be done.
• Positives: Politics or lack thereof . Smaller teams that came together to start something anew, often get the benefit of a less politically driven, career titles and personal growth oriented culture.
• Positives: Titles don’t matter, it’s about execution, efficiency, performance and purpose.
• Positives & Challenges: You spend a ton of time with your small team, lol.
• Challenges: Each team member has to do more to get large projects done and you often need to outsource subject matter experts for specific jobs, costing $$$.
• Challenges: There are less checks and balances, meaning your trust in your team members needs to be “100.”

Positives and Challenges: Change in income

• Positives: Money can change you, for both good and bad. Resetting your priorities can be enlightening. When you started you career, you had certain goals, purpose, and a why, when you grow, this often changes. One of my own tricks to eliminate complacency has always been to ‘go broke again.’ This doesn’t mean actually broke, but rather trick myself into thinking that, by putting money away and setting smaller spending budgets. When you start doing this, you’ll eliminate the unnecessary, compulsive spending habits that income can create over time.
• Positives:I recently read an interview of Simon Sinek, he said “There is a cost for the money we make and sometimes the cost is not worth it. That goes for companies and individuals.”
• Challenges: You created a certain expectation on weekly, monthly, and annual income, now you’re starting over. It’s ok, it’ll be fine 🙂 There are plenty of jobs, companies, and leaders looking for you right now if you need it.
• Challenges: Society and your sphere of influence don’t always understand the choice you made. Another quote from Sinek, he said “When entrepreneurs choose to quit their well-paying jobs that have full benefits an no pay, they are aware of the statistic that more than 90% of all small business fail in the first three years.”

Positives and Challenges: Office Space

• Positives: You get to pick the geographical location of your office, can work from home, and can show up to the office whenever you want.
• Challenges: Bigger companies often have snacks, everything is free, and there’s more room to roam.

It’s been an incredible journey thus far. There are peaks, valleys, doubters, supporters, haters, and lots of learnings along the way. The key is to stay grounded and focus on the long term outlook of what you’re trying to accomplish. Consistently communicate with your team and create road maps that everyone is aligned on. There are so many moments where you’ll be tested, but that my friend, is the beauty in building. Testing yourself is a learning experience that will allow you to be that much better the next time you’re faced with a similar situation. Life, business, careers, and relationships are cyclical, the same experiences will come at you in different forms throughout the entirety of your life. The more frequently you test and challenge yourself, the easier it will be the next time you’re faced with the same circle.

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