Lessons Learned in Business from My Success and My Failures

keywords

business lessons, entrepreneurship, partnerships, resilience, financial decisions, personal growth, home service industry, leadership, success, motivation

summary

In this episode, Branden Sewell shares five key lessons learned from his eight years in business, focusing on the importance of taking action, the challenges of partnerships, resilience during tough times, financial decision-making, and the dangers of comparing oneself to others. Each lesson is rooted in personal experience and aims to guide aspiring entrepreneurs in their journeys.

takeaways

• Just get started and don't wait for perfection.
• Partnerships can be challenging; choose wisely.
• Resilience is key during tough times; don't quit.
• Learn from your mistakes to avoid repeating them.
• Make informed financial decisions for your business.
• Networking is crucial; don't rely solely on paid leads.
• Invest in things that will generate revenue.
• Avoid comparing your journey to others; focus on your path.
• Reflect on your experiences to grow as a leader.
• Success looks different for everyone; define it for yourself.

titles

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Business Lessons

06:48
Navigating Partnerships in Business

14:11
Financial Decision-Making Mistakes

28:49
Avoiding the Comparison Trap

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Transcript

Branden Sewell (00:01.506)
Hi everybody, I am Brandon Sewell. I'm the owner of Seal Pro Painting and I'm also the host of the Off the Ladder podcast. And we exist to help home service business owners learn so that they can lead well and ultimately live life off of the ladder. Thank you guys so much for joining into today's episode. This is gonna be another solo episode and today I wanna go over five lessons that I've learned in business.

I've been in business for going on eight years. And I to just share five of the top lessons I've learned. And I kind of wrote these out in the order that I learned them in. And I feel like they're pretty key to just my journey as a business owner. So the first lesson that I've learned, and this kind of came through reflection is,

just get started. So I think what happens to a lot of people who either want to start a business or they have an idea for their business, you get into this place of analysis paralysis. You're thinking about everything that you have to do to try and start this business. You're thinking about all of the potential failures and challenges and

wondering if it's even going to be successful and the unfortunate thing is I think so many people get in this place where they try to get everything perfect before they get started and the reality is you just have to start and and know that

upfront, you're going to have things you have to figure out. You're going to go through those challenges. You're going to learn hard lessons. But the hardest thing to do really, I think, is getting started for most people. like I said, the reality is, is no matter what, it's going to be challenging in some way. So if you if you have an idea to start a business, I think the best thing that you can do is

Branden Sewell (02:27.182)
decide what you want to do, make a plan, and then execute that plan. And then maybe you give yourself a time limit to that goal or plan for your business and you say, hey, this is what I'm going to do. And if it doesn't work out by this time, I'll evaluate and potentially decide whether to continue or not. But to not get started at all is just...

unfortunately, the biggest failure I think that most people could have. So second lesson that I learned is to be very careful about doing partnerships. Partnerships are really tough and you know, that's how I got started in business and I had two separate partnerships and

You know, they're they're challenging because you have, you know, two different people or however many people going into a partnership who have different ideas. They have different, maybe perspectives on how things should be handled or, differing opinions on moral matters or business ethics and

things like that and and all of those things can become a contention within the business Which makes it really hard to operate and grow successfully and And I've experienced from my side that I think for the

people who have upside in business, it's very easy to continue in a partnership, right? So if you're the one who has the financial upside, if you're the one who has the time upside, if you're the one who's, you know, benefiting the most from the business, it's easy for that person to just kind of be along for the ride and enjoy it.

Branden Sewell (04:52.3)
where I found myself as I was not the one benefiting, like in my first partnership, I was doing all of the work, I was putting all of the time in, and I was seeing the lease return on my investment for what I was doing. And that was really challenging.

That's one of the main reasons why that had to come to an end. And then the other one, was just a time thing. I was investing all of my time into growing a business. And on the other side, my partner just didn't have the same amount of time. And so, you you begin to have those feelings of like, okay, well, this isn't fair. Like if I'm

investing all of this time and, you know, everything that I have into something, but I'm either not benefiting in the same way or benefiting equally from something from someone who's like, not doing as much, it's kind of frustrating. So anyway, I just think those things in partnerships are really challenging. And of course, you have like,

a bunch of other pieces there, but I would just say be very, very, very leery of going into partnerships. I don't really ever hear stories or good stories of partnerships turning out well. And so anyway, that's just my feedback on partnerships. If you're thinking about doing one, I would tell you

do it. Or if you're going to just be very, very, very prepared, think of every possible scenario where you could have conflict and disagreements and really just work those things out ahead of time. It's kind of like, you know, marriage, like if you if you don't have a good foundation, then your

Branden Sewell (07:18.058)
not really going to be successful down the road if you're, you know, if you're not solid on some really key issues. so jumping in without, you know, like, for example, if you jump into a marriage without talking about like, how many kids you have or want to have, or do you want to have kids at all? Or how do you want to handle finances? Are you going to do joint finances? Are you going to do separate finances?

Are you going to cook all the time or eat out all the time? Are you going to take on tons of debt or are you going to be more frugal and try and live debt free? All of those things can be things that come up in a marriage that could be points of conflict. In the same way, in a partnership for business, it's almost like a marriage.

So you have to work through all of those potential challenges. And I would say that you will probably, even all of the challenges that you can try and figure out, you're probably still going to come across ones that surprise you or don't realize there are going to be points of contention. anyway, that's my two cents on partnerships. Let's move to the next point. My next point is hard times are coming and don't ever quit in the valley.

you know, started my business in 2017 and, by 2022 we had grown. was our biggest year, to date, you're going to be super successful. And it was the Valley of my business most challenging time I've ever faced.

But one thing I can say in hindsight is I'm really, really glad that I didn't quit. because, you know, one failure is not final. And that's something that I realized more than anything today, is that you can have your worst year, you can have your worst day and you can still learn from it and grow from it. And I think the people who are most successful are those who can face that failure and

Branden Sewell (09:40.856)
continue to move forward because it really just prepares you. It really helps you to get better if you can have a healthy perspective on it, which is really challenging to have a healthy perspective in the moment because you just see everything, the reality of what's going on around you, and it's hard to push through that. But what I can say is that if you can just stop

in the midst of whatever's going on, whatever the hard situation is. And you can slow down enough to say, just sit.

Let all of the worries, the cares, the fears, everything just stop for a minute and say to yourself, if I can just get through tomorrow, if I can wake up, get through the day, take care of myself, my family, and everything that needs to be taken care of, and then lay my head down at night and wake up again the next day.

That's a win. And if I don't quit, if I don't let those words come out of my mouth, I'm quitting. This is it. I'm done. As long as I can get through the day and not do that, then I can keep moving forward. And I remember in 2022, you know, it's just really bad for those of you who may not have heard my story. would say go back and listen to previous episodes. talk about it, but...

In short, just, thought the business was going to fail financially and I thought that maybe I was going to have to file for bankruptcy and I wasn't sure how I was going to get myself out of all the mess. Anyway, but I just, decided I'm just going to take it day by day. And so you, you've probably heard from so many people just stack your wins. And so, you know, I made it through one day, made it through day two.

Branden Sewell (11:49.814)
made it through day three, four, five, kept pushing through, kept, you know, changing up my strategy moving forward and, you know, fixing things that were broken and making them better and just getting through that time. And so maybe you're listening to this and you're in that place. Maybe you're like, you're listening to podcasts to try and figure out, man, how do I get through some

really challenging times, I've made mistakes, I don't know what to do. And, you know, one of the greatest things you can do is just keep moving forward, put your head down, work hard, do the best that you know to do and just don't quit. I can say that that's that worked for me. But I will also add that you can't you have to learn. You have to learn from the mistakes. So

you insanity they say is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results so one thing that I can say is it's not like you put your head down and you just keep moving forward and you do the same thing you were doing before you have to put in some serious work you have to you know implement things you have to take massive action and you have to get after it but that's what I did I just I you know I was like okay if I can just

put my head down and work hard, can get through this. And so, you know, I changed up so many things in my business in that time to get through it. please don't, you know, think that it's just put my head down and keep moving forward and do what I was doing before. It's, you know, reflect what did I do wrong? What were the mistakes I made? What do I need to do to fix this? And if I can

And then realizing like you can, you can definitely fix things. You can definitely overcome it, but you have to make those changes. Implement the changes that you need to make and then take massive actions. So that's lesson three. The fourth lesson I learned. This is going to go a little bit more into detail on some financial stuff for business, but.

Branden Sewell (14:10.862)
and some mistakes I made, but give me one second to take a sip of my coffee.

Branden Sewell (14:20.366)
So four, lesson four, make smarter decisions financially for your business. so I'm going to share a couple mistakes that I made and hopefully share what I was, I don't know if I'll go too deep into what I did to fix it, but I'm going to share the mistakes I made and what not to do. one, basing my marketing on

one, how do I say this, one marketing channel or strategy and that was buying leads. And so what I did is I invested a ton of money. It was easy, know, put the money in, get the leads out. And that was how I started my business. That's how I ran my business for years and it worked until it didn't.

I was spending thousands of dollars on paid for leads. And I wasn't building relationships or networking, which is just dumb. You don't have a solid foundation of relationships and networking. It's not going to be good for your business. So what I would say is if you're starting out or if that's where you're at right now and you're just

dumping all of your money into those pay per lead services, learn how to get leads yourself, learn how to market your own business because all you're doing with those pay per lead services as you're paying these companies a insane amount of money and inflated amount of money to do the very thing that you could do yourself. Learn some SEO, learn how to do just some like organic SEO. So getting yourself on

Google, the big one is going to be GMB and like Google Maps and showing up, ranking high organically for that. And then the other thing is just networking, go to networking groups, meet people, build relationships in your community, get involved in your community. Those are going to be solid things to do. And then so that's one hard lesson that I had to learn.

Branden Sewell (16:47.214)
financial aspect because you know, I was just spending way too much money on marketing. The other thing that I learned is, know, there's, I think there's decisions that we make that we think are admirable. And we think they're going to work and then they don't. One of the things that I did is I paid all of my guys a salary.

And that was, I had 13 employees and with the exception of one of them, they were all on salary. The other one was a sales rep. So that person was just commissioned, but, but everybody was on salary. And that was a, I thought it was going to make my payroll easier because I was like, okay, I'm not going to have to like look at everybody's have track everybody's hours. And I'm not going have to do all of that.

And I thought to myself, okay, I'll just have to run payroll every week and I'll know exactly what's going out and that will make everything easier. my goodness, that was a nightmare. You one, you de-incentivize your people to work or to get things done in a timely manner because I would say even more so than an hourly employee.

because they know they're going to get paid no matter what. And so there's not as much of an incentive. So jobs slow down. Just there's all kinds of craziness that happened with that. But when you do hourly, obviously that's going to reduce the overhead for payroll. So anyway, that was a just a dumb decision that I made. So don't put

people on salaries, unless it's like maybe one person who's like, you know, upper level management or something like that, or, you know, there's ways to justify that, but definitely not all of your employees like I did. The other thing that I would say was a big lesson for me.

Branden Sewell (19:12.334)
aside from the payroll was managing cash flow. I'm not a fan of credit cards at all, but I think in business you can use them wisely. And I think I could have kept myself out of lot of bigger problems if I would have

use credit cards in the beginning, but use them in a wise way. instead, I didn't. And then when I was in a crunch, was borrowing money that was even worse. It was a worse way to borrow money. So higher interest, the way that I was borrowing money was like faster payback terms. So it was like

a weekly draw out of my account. I had no control over that. So it only hurt my cash flow even more. It had a temporary fix of maybe one week, but then it just perpetuated the problem ongoing. so I would highly recommend to not get yourself into that situation. So here's what I do now with

credit cards and I learned this from my business coach and so what I would do before is like I would have payroll going out and I would have all this money sitting in my operations account and I would say okay I've got I've got to make payroll this week and I've got this money coming in from jobs that are going to be completed

And we have these new jobs starting and so I've got to buy like let's say, you know, $3,000 in material this week. But I also have payroll going out. And so I would be banking on, okay, this job is going to finish this week and that money that's going to come in from this finished job is going to make sure that payroll and everything else is covered. Well, something inevitably might come up where

Branden Sewell (21:38.318)
We don't finish a job on time, whether it's weather or just delays, whatever. We don't finish the job, that money doesn't come in. And now I'm in a place where I'm like, okay, well, cashflow is not there. We're not going to see that money come in until Monday and Tuesday, the following week after payroll and Friday. So I've got to figure out how to get payroll done and then get to that job getting done and getting paid on Monday or Tuesday.

So that's just the reality of business. So I would get into these, you know, pinches where I got to pay for material and still make payroll. And then that's when I would make the decision to use those like really bad credit lines where it's like you the way that the one that I had would work is like I had the credit line and then if I borrowed money from it, then I had to pay it back weekly. That were the terms. It wasn't like a monthly payment or

or anything like that. So that would kill me in the future because then I'd have these big weekly payments come out. So anyway, now what I do is on the weeks that I have payroll, I buy my material on my credit card. Now what's great about this is I get my discount from my vendor. So that's already saving me money, right? I'm getting the material at my rate. And then when I purchase it on my credit card,

I'm getting my percentage back cash back. So in an essence, I'm getting a little bit more money off of that material cost. And then what I do is I buy it on the credit card on the week that I have payroll on the week that I don't have payroll. I pay the credit card off because then I'm not as concerned about my cash flow. So I have my material jobs are getting done, payroll is getting done and then it's not.

as big of a concern. the other thing that I will add to that is do bi-weekly payroll. Your guys might be upset about it in the beginning. They want to get paid weekly, whatever. Like my wife, you know, she's worked at the same place for seven years. She's had bi-weekly pay and look, we like, we live based on that's the reality. That's how she gets paid. And we have to manage our finances. That's not her company's

Branden Sewell (24:05.998)
problem, you know, to worry about like, you know, they're paying us. That's what they are paying my wife. That's what they have to worry about. And then we have to steward that and manage that. So anyway, do bi weekly payroll, it's going to save you a lot of headache. And in my experience, it'll give you some breathing room so you're not having to like

process payroll every single week. There's also some additional overhead if you're doing it weekly because you're running more payrolls during the year. So do bi-weekly. It'll just be better for you. So anyway, that's what I've done to manage the cash flow. The other thing that I would say is

invest your money into things that you know work and some bad decisions that I made with finances in, you know, early on in my business is I would invest money into things that were like, like it could be a new marketing campaign. And you don't know if there's a return on investment on new ideas. So that can be risky. So

And I'm not saying don't take risks, but you've got to be smart about it. So I was just not smart about it. I would say if you're going to use like loans or borrow money, use loans or borrowed money for things that are going to definitely make you money. And so what I mean by that is like, you know, buying a work van or a new piece of equipment that

produces revenue and you know it does. So like I know if I, you know, if my schedule is backed out two months, three months, and if I brought on another crew and I could knock out more work and bring in cashflow faster and take on more jobs and there's demand, we're turning down, you know, let's say our conversion rate goes from 40 % to 20 % because we're booked out too far. And it's like, okay, we lost

Branden Sewell (26:25.55)
all of these jobs because of scheduling. And if I had this crew, I could take on all of that work. Well, a smart investment would be, okay, I'm going to purchase a vehicle and equipment, and I'm going to man that equipment and get the jobs that I wasn't getting before and get jobs done faster and bring in more money. And so I've done that. You know, I went from

I had 13 employees in 2022 to where I had none. And now I'm back to three crews and it's much healthier, but that's how I built. know, that's how I would rebuild to where I am now is like, once you know there's that demand, once you know you have the business coming in and you know that there's just the simple fact of producing it.

make those decisions with that money. So anyway, I hope that made sense. just avoid taking loans out for things that like, for example, like if you're going to take a loan out to do a billboard, don't do it. You're to take a loan out to do bus stop signs all over your town. Don't do that. If you're going to take a loan out to put an ad in a publication, don't do that.

I would say don't do a loan to like wrap your vehicles. You know, those are things where like you can't, you can't easily determine the ROI on those decisions. You want to invest money into something. Like if you borrow money, you want to invest that into something that you can easily determine the ROI. I bought this van, I paid for this equipment, I spent X amount of money and we did

three, four or five jobs and made our money back. You can easily, you know, determine that and justify it. So moving on, I want to try and wrap this up in a couple minutes. The the last point that I have on here is never compare yourself. Everyone is showing off their success. Nobody is showing off their failures. You know, for for me.

Branden Sewell (28:49.962)
It's very easy to look at other success, others, other people's other business owners success and want to do that. Or I think like, wow, they've arrived, but you don't know the things that are happening. The challenges that they're facing behind closed doors. You know, if, if everybody was putting out there like, Hey, I'm failing, I'm failing. Well,

what's at risk like people listening to them or you know, potential customers being the wall. I'm not going to work with this person. They're a failure. So I don't think everybody's showing off their failures. I mean, they might talk about their failures after they overcome them kind of like I did, you know, once I overcame everything in 2022. You know, now I can talk about it and talk about how I overcame. But in that moment,

It's not like I was standing and shouting like, Hey, everything's falling apart. and I mean, in reality, maybe things were challenging and weren't going well, but, it was, I could still fix things, right? Cause I wasn't quitting. So I figured it out. so if you're, maybe you listen to a podcast, maybe you

are looking at one of like your favorite entrepreneurs in your industry. And you're comparing yourself with where you're at right now. And

that can cause you to make some really bad decisions for your business.

Branden Sewell (30:38.56)
If you can't do something in a wise way, don't do it. Period. If you've got to really evaluate like the risk and everything that's involved and

And you know, maybe I shouldn't say don't do it, but just be ready. Be ready to go into whatever risk you're going to take and know that it's going to be hard. Don't expect that like the people that you're looking at who are, you know, in your eyes successful and think, wow, they don't have any challenges. They're not going through anything hard. It must they've arrived. It must be easy. What I would say is that the people that are on another level

that you want to be at are probably either have probably just gone through an incredibly hard and challenging time, or they're about to, or they're working through something currently, that's a big challenge that would maybe make you quit or make you want to quit. it's like things I think now like things that I've gone through now, if I would have experienced someone I first started business, probably would have quit.

But you kind of go through this process of, and it is a process, you go through like, okay, this little failure and you overcome. And you go through another failure and you overcome. And then as your business grows, the failures, the risks, the potential losses get bigger, but you overcome. And then you're like, okay, I can do this. I can take on more. I can take more risk. But the reality is, is like, it's going to be hard.

Do not think that when you look at somebody who's successful that their journey has been like free of challenges or that they're not facing something that's, you know, that might make you want to quit. So just keep that in mind and don't compare yourself. You have your journey in business as a entrepreneur, as a leader, and that's your journey.

Branden Sewell (32:50.898)
unique to you, unique to everything that you are and what makes you who you are. And the person you're looking at is completely different from you. Their personality, their character traits, everything, their disciplines, routines, where they are in life. Everything could be completely different. You know, I think a good example for me is somebody I really look up to and you might be listening to this and know who this person is and

You might look up to him as well, but Tommy Melo is very successful in the home service industry. Built a very successful garage door company and sold it for big money. Now I've even heard Tommy say this and I've heard other people say this, but you know, you can look at Tommy and see that level of success, but you don't see or, know, those who don't know him or those who maybe don't know his whole story or don't listen to enough.

of his content to know this. You don't know that he's, you know, I he's in his early 40s now. He's never been married, has no kids, know, lived in a small apartment on a property that he owned when he built A1 garage doors. And so you have to ask yourself like, okay, well, I see this person's success.

But do I really want that? Like I could say for myself, I wouldn't want that. Like I got married when I was young. I love my wife. I would never change that. I have two kids. I would never trade any amount of success for them. I love my kids. And so that wouldn't be, that wouldn't make sense to me. Like I wanted to get married. I wanted to have kids.

and so that wouldn't have been an option for me. So I say all that is like, can look at that person, but do you know their story? Do you know their sacrifices? It's like, you could look at me, and maybe where my business at is at, but do you know my story? Do you know what my life looks like? Do you know why I was able to do some of the things I was able to do and make the decisions that I was able to make?

Branden Sewell (35:17.966)
and unfortunately, unless you know me and know more of my story and more of the details, you know, it might not be as clear and evident, to you just listening to a podcast. so don't compare yourself. Be you. Be uniquely you and chase after your success. And I think,

You know that put simply is be the best that you can be. Get started. Don't quit and just keep moving forward and. Only you can define what success looks like for you and that's going to look different for somebody else. So anyway, those are five quick lessons that I learned in business. There's.

I could share probably for hours on things I've learned, but I felt like those would be some pretty good just foundational fundamental things I've learned in business. So I hope that is helpful. I have been recording these episodes either like the night before. This is actually the morning of so I'm about to edit it really quick and get it out there, but thank you guys so much for listening.

to the Off the Ladder podcast. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you find value in it, I hope that you will like this content, share it, share it with somebody else so that they can benefit from the lessons learned here. And then also, if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please rate and review the show. That'll definitely help us to reach more people and to make the podcast better.

I appreciate you so much. I'll see you next time on the next episode of the Off the Ladder Podcast.