Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Luke and Sean run an online health food retailer called Fit Fuel. They recently started a blog called Health Pundits and Luke contacted me about a link exchange. I don’t do plain old link exchanges anymore and instead asked whether he’d like to provide a little background on how he started his business. Luke was happy to share his story…

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As an entrepreneur, your job is to solve problems. The first problem you need to solve is determining which problem consumers face and how you can build a viable business model around solving that problem. Once you’re able to answer this question, you’ve framed one giant problem around a series of small, day to day problems that you’ll run into. This is where the fun begins and you’ll want to strangle your business partner from time to time.

The greatest dichotomy I’ve encountered in my entrepreneurial experience is that of going from working at the largest financial services company in the world, Citigroup, as an investment banker, to bootstrapping a start-up operation. I went from working for a firm that gives its employees the most possible resources to use to one which had no resources at all.

At Citigroup, I could send work to an analyst in India before I left for the night and when I came back the next morning it would be ready for me to check. If I needed a pitch book made, I’d call the presentation department. If I needed to find out how many companies had filed for IPO’s in Q12004, I’d call an associate in New York and ask him if he’d done any presentation pages on Q104 IPO’s. Life was good (at least in this regard).

When Fit Fuel was still in its infancy, Sean and I nearly drove ourselves insane signing up for merchant accounts, taking customer service inquiries, running boxes to the post office, hand writing labels, designing business cards and a plethora of other somewhat mundane tasks that were no less essential to making our business work. So if you’re ready to become an entrepreneur, ask yourself – do I have what it takes to put my ego aside and do some ‘BS’ work for 6 months? Maybe a year? It might even take longer. But if you believe in your vision, you’re going to stick with it as long as it takes because you believe that profitability and financial freedom is right around the corner.

Today, Fit Fuel is thriving. We’ve managed to build a leading online nutrition store and the country’s only true healthy vending program. But when I decided to leave my job nearly 3 years ago today, I had no assurances. There’s no such thing.

My favorite quote on entrepreneurship is from Henry Kravis, founder and managing partner at KKR, a leading private equity firm – I’ve got this quote hanging on my call behind my desk at my office:

“I ask students up at Columbia – I’m on that Board – ‘How many of you want to be an entrepreneur?’ A lot of hands go up. I say, ‘OK, you explain to me, what does that mean?’… ‘Well, I’d like to go to work at IBM.’ And I say, ‘You failed.’

A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them. That really truly has an idea and has a vision, and stick to his convictions. You’ve got to have the courage of your convictions. If you did everything by consensus, you wouldn’t do anything at all.”

The key here is ‘somebody who has no safety net underneath them. That really truly has an idea and a vision, and sticks to his convictions’. That’s what kept me going day after day. I didn’t realize the depth of this quote until I was $100,000 in debt (credit card debt) and had dumped my entire bonus from the prior year into Fit Fuel. I went from some of the highest echelons of finance that a 22 year old kid can achieve - and made quite a bit money doing it – to being massively in debt to the point where I had only two choices: succeed or file for bankruptcy. My personal pride and will to success would not allow the latter to happen.

When you’ve got no safety net beneath you, sometimes you will thrust great things upon yourself. No matter how hard I tried to make myself believe that I could “moonlight” at my job and build a successful enterprise while maintaining the comfort of a salaried job, I couldn’t buy into it. Entrepreneurship is a full-time commitment full of sacrifice and sometimes even despair, but at the end of the day the fulfillment that you’ll feel from seeing it through is worth a thousand bankruptcies and a thousand sleepless nights wondering how you can gain more customers, more revenue, more clout, more breadth. This is why I eventually handed in my resignation.

There is beauty in creation – creating something, whether a product, a service or a new market – that makes it all worth it in the end. There is a reason artists engage in art, writers write and poets dream…creation it the root of all things, and entrepreneurs, in our own way, strive for the same goal.

Luke Arthur