Update on where I am at, and the steps it took to get me here. Part 1

In this update, I will discuss where I am at right now. I have a feeling there are many other people out there in the same situation that I am. This blog will hopefully one day be a resource for other people as well as a way for me to communicate and learn from others just as they will learn from me (and my mistakes).

I graduated college about 9 years ago. I joined the rat race.

I Took 5 different sales jobs over the course of 6 years. All of which were horrible. I was always average at sales, never really had it in me to be passionate about the products that I sold. The reason for this is that they were all commodities, you could get the exact same product or service somewhere else.

I was nearly fired from 2 of those jobs, and got laid off from my “final” sales job in 2006. It was at that time that I realized I was going nowhere.. fast. I sat around a moped for a year, living off unemployment and credit cards. I had some entrepreneurial spirit in me, and pretty soon I was at least trying to figure something out that I could do on my own.

I tried looking into starting an online music store, but soon realized that there was immense competition, and I would bring an utter lack of originality to the table. Then I tried looking into supplements (which I always had an interest in). I came up with a supplement called Enduraboost. It was going to be for runners who were looking for a natural way to boost their endurance. I got so excited about it, I wanted to be that awesome guy that everyone looked at because I started my own company! Mistake number one…

I joke you not, I spent 2 years working on this project and NEVER actually made the product. I created this vast infrastructure, including a website (I created myself) with a payment system, marketing materials, business cards. I even called some local supplement stores to try and “pre-sell” them on the product. During those two years, I learned a lot about adwords, and how difficult it can be for an average person to benefit from it (more on this later).

Not one time during any of this did I actually spend the money and make the supplement, then go out and market the crap out of it. After failing to get any sales (even though I never had the product to begin with), I shut down the website (that was getting a whopping 2 visitors a month).

After that mess of failing, I realized that if I was passionate about what I was doing and not about the end result of “being awesome because I ran a successful supplement company”, I might have actually done something with it. I might have gone to marathons, and MMA training facilities, etc. Hung out, made contacts, loved my product and the process of watching people benefit from it. I still havent figured out why I didnt do this, maybe fear of failure, maybe because supplements was never something I was that passionate about… one day I may get some clarity on this.

During this whole time, as a back up, I was also manufacturing jewelry.. yes jewelry. I had come up with an idea of having a manly ring, one inlaid with concrete. So during my spare time I worked on prototypes, found someone to manufacture the metal portion of it, and made probably 200 rings in my garage.

Needless to say this never worked out. I was actually making about $300 a month selling them, but I never got the concrete formula 100% right, and they would occasionally crack, and I realized that if I ever wanted to go big, I would need to manufacture them on a much bigger scale. I was also never really excited telling people about what I did, I ended up losing my drive, and shut that business down as well…

You’re probably thinking now, wow, this guy has had a lot of failures! and your right, that wasn’t even all of them! I had about 3 other businesses that I worked on from the time I graduated college (more on those too). Importantly, I did learn from those failed businesses, now I have a pretty good knowledge of PHP, HTML, Payment gateways, MySQL, of which I knew nothing about before.

Since that time, I decided that making $300 a month + unemployment income was not the way that I wanted to go through my 30′s (I was 29 at the time). I spent a lot of time reflecting and deciding what I really truly wanted to do in life, and what path it would take to get there. I had many different paths on a list, of which, I narrowed down to becoming a CPA or a becoming a Teacher (professor). You may be thinking right now that those are pretty much the opposite of being an entrepreneur, but after 2 years of living off beans and rice, I was ready to make some real money while I tried to start a business, whatever that business was. What I really wanted was a career with the flexibility to start a business.

I chose to go the CPA route, it was the closest thing to starting a business since I could run my own firm. It would also allow me to have some free time to start whatever it was that I wanted to create. Most important though, it would give me some flexibility with money to be able to invest capital when it needed to be invested.

Continued in Part 2 – The steps I took and am taking to start a tax firm, and the path I am taking to do what I really want to do in life.

Edit 1 – 10/7/11 – Edited some Grammar (attempted), spelling