Focus

One of the toughest things to do as an entrepreneur is to maintain a focus. This is particularly true if you have a full time job or another business that is pulling you in different directions.

When I started financialaid.com, my brother and I were still running NationWide T-shirts. After hearing me complain about the lack of progress in financialaid.com, my wife suggested I "quit" NationWide and focus full time on financialaid.com. This was just the push that I needed to get things going. After talking to my brother, I transferred all clients and responsibilities to him (Matt stayed on until we sold the business in 2001). I was still going into work in the same office, however, my focus was on doing whatever it took to get the new business going.

This worked well for a while, then I found myself still interacting with my old clients (since I was in the same office) and slipping back into my old roll. We decided to do something drastic. We (Julie and I) picked up and moved the company 400 miles south to San Diego. We took the four employees we had and moved.

We were in a new city and had nothing no other distractions, it was truly sink or swim. These were some of the most fun days of the business. We moved the servers to my rented apartment and looked for office space... We found used equipment and cubes (saving thousands of dollars) and installed most ourselves. We added a nerf hoop in the office and spent time shooting when the phones were quite (which was a lot in the beginning.) We ate lunch in most days and stayed late in the night fixing database/website problems as we grew faster than we knew how. This is the adrenaline of startups.

And we succeeded.

Cheers,
Mike