Episode #20 - Times We Almost Gave Up

Hello and welcome to the Sequoia Project podcast. Episode 20. Today we are going to talk about times in business that we wanted to give up and sort of how we got through it.

Dale: We're gonna give you a couple of examples of when we've been faced with some obstacles that we didn't want to or feel like we could overcome in business. And the picture we're trying to paint here is really just that a lot of people think that you get in business, you get some customers, you make some money and then everything turns good. That's really not — and if you are getting into business, just expect that you are going to constantly come up against challenges. But the rewards to those challenges are quite high, which makes them worth doing.

Dale: My first one — I finished the deck and I started the junk removal business. For two weeks, 14 days, nothing happened. I was sitting there just like, please, I need the phone to ring. Anyway, someone comes along. It's a guy I'd done a job for — he managed a construction supply business. He said, would you consider taking a job for $125,000 a year working for me? And I was like, I've never been offered salary $125 grand before. I almost threw it all in then. I kind of went, shit, like, do I just do this? Because like it's less risk. In the end, I thought — I've tried the business. And I want to try and grow this. I said, and if you're right to give me a little bit of time to think about it. And I committed to what I'd started.

Dale: My second one — we got a gig with a developer who wanted us to do bathrooms for him. He said, we need five more done. I was like, cool. He said, can we bundle them together, get them all done, and I'll pay you when the last one's done. I was like, yeah, great mate. You paid your account every other time. So we did the three bathrooms. Cost materials and guys labor. After we finished, he went out of business. There was 80,000 bucks worth of stuff that I had paid for out of my own personal money. And he just closed everything up and went out of business. At that point I was like, what's the fucking point?

Coby: One of the first times probably actually that I wanted to give up was just when I was doing all of the e-commerce side of things and everything. That was meant to be the easy business and that was meant to be how you're gonna make money and how everyone's doing it. I put fucking ten thousand dollars into that at 20 years old which is a lot of money. When I'd like talk to you, I'd be like, fuck, I'm putting all this money into this, can you help me with this? And you kind of let me make all my mistakes until I did kind of just give up on that side of things. The thing I do appreciate is you gave me a time limit for us to try it. And then we kind of went out of it — which I wouldn't have given myself that time. I would have either still been trying to work on something that clearly wasn't going to work, or just fully given up.

Coby: Any time I'd come back to you and I'd be like, dude, like, I feel like I'm not fucking where I'm meant to be. And you said to me that when you were my age, you hadn't even started your first business yet. And I was like, you know what? That's actually really fucking crazy to think about. I think I couldn't even count the amount of times I wanted to quit throughout the past two years, I think the only thing that kept me going was me knowing that you wouldn't let me fail.