My Entrepreneurial Journey

While my cleaning company is my first official, LLC’d company, I have always had a knack for entrepreneurship. From a young age, I was mowing my neighbor’s lawns and doing whatever I could to make a buck. Here is a list of the biggest entrepreneurial ventures I have done.

• Buying and Selling Shoes: What started as trying to fit in at school quickly turned into a job when I realized how much money was in the shoe game. In 8th grade, I collected everything from Nike SBs to Air Jordans, and at one point, I had over 14 pairs of shoes at a time. I studied the shoe market daily and tried to take advantage of any new releases as that’s when I could get the shoes at base value. On top of this, I even learned to sew so I could stuff the tongues of certain shoes as it increased their value. Through this, I was able to get my first taste of making money solely on my own.

• Power Washing: I started a local power washing business in the summer of my freshman year of high school. I made a brochure highlighting the difference I could make to my customer’s driveways and houses and went door-to-door to offer my services. Through this, I was able to avoid getting a summer job and even managed to hire some of my friends to work for me.

• Flipping Camera Gear: Just after high school, I got into cameras and photography. Just like the shoes, I learned about the market and identified the gear that I wanted to own. Through this, I bought and sold upwards and managed to get everything I needed as a photographer while also earning a profit. The majority of the time, I did my buying and selling on FB marketplace and Ebay.

• Buying and Selling Gym Equipment: During the pandemic, I saw an opportunity to buy and sell gym equipment. With everyone wanting to work out at home, I called up all the gyms within a 20-mile radius of my house and offered to buy their equipment if they were going out of business. Through this, I found myself driving to new gyms every day and flipping more gym equipment than I’d ever thought I could sell on my own. Like all of my past ventures, I also used this hustle to build myself the home gym of my dreams.

• A Moving Company: During my junior year of college, I started a small moving company. I found customers by reaching out to people who were doing move-out sales on Facebook. I rented U-Hauls and did the moves myself or with friends, mainly in New York City. It was a great way to make money, but it also taught me that I didn't want to do hard labor forever.

While these aren’t all of the entrepreneurial ventures I have had, these are the opportunities a started and rode with. I managed to both learn a lot and be profitable through all of these different experiences and I have taken a lot of these lessons to my current hustle of owning a cleaning company.

Traveling: Why everyone should do it

As mentioned in my last newsletter, my end goal is to become financially free and be able to travel as much as possible. Traveling has provided me with some of the greatest experiences in life and I always suggest it to anyone who hasn’t traveled a lot. It has provided me with the opportunity to explore new cultures, meet new people, and create memories I could have never made if I didn’t take the initiative and plan trips for both me and my friends to go on. I've been fortunate enough to travel to 14 different countries, including a backpacking trip through Europe with friends, and a solo trip to Portugal last year.

Backpacking has been one of the best experiences of my life. I have done it twice and both times, it has been affordable and fun. I always stay in hostels (yes, those cheap hotels where you share a room with 12 people) and I suggest that anyone considering a trip to Europe in their 20s do the same. While hostels have a bad reputation as scary and unclean, they actually provide travelers with an experience they wouldn’t be able to have at a hotel. The rooms are surprisingly clean and you are forced to meet new, fun, and often interesting people. They often have great food and drink deals and every hostel I have been to has a nightly bar crawl that allows your travel experience to be as fun as it is explorative. (If you are planning on doing hostels, look up the best party hostels. Everyone else who wants to have fun is doing the same.)

On top of being able to experience new cultures, foods, customs, and languages, traveling has also afforded me the opportunity to combine my love for photography with travel. By bringing my camera everywhere I have gone, I have managed to go off the beaten path and away from tourists. By trying to find new perspectives for photos, I have often stumbled into areas and places I never planned on going to.

While I may have a biased opinion, to anyone who thinks that they don’t need to leave the country and travel, think again. There’s a whole big world out there waiting to be explored.

Cleaning Company Weekly Update

• Number of Cleanings: 11

• Total Revenue: $2,006.20

• Takeaways:

  • Google LSA is officially dying down: We had five total calls but luckily closed four of them.

  • Repeat Customers are low-hanging fruit: We had two former customers call us and book same-week cleanings this week. There’s something about not paying for a lead. Nothing better than not paying for leads.

• Main Focuses:

  • I finally invested in GoHighLevel and got off the free trial. I am using it for everything from sending emails to past customers, to reaching out to every customer asking for a review, to automatically responding to missed calls.

  • I am trying to focus on other ways to get sales besides Google LSA.

    • Thumbtack: I just had a custom Zap created for me by Thumbtack. It is set up so now every time a Thumbtack lead comes in, the lead will get an automatic text and voicemail.

    • Real Estate Agents: I used to reach out to Real Estate Agents every day for referrals. This week I started focusing on that again.

Thanks for reading!