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Rich Dad Radio Show: In-Your-Face Advice on Investing, Personal Finance, & Starting a Business
The Risks I Took to Grow My Business (Including Smuggling!)
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Entrepreneurship is a wild ride—you think you’re scaling smoothly, and BAM! A curveball hits. That’s exactly what happened to me. In this episode, I share the unexpected challenges my business faced when it took off in Canada and how we problem-solved...
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Getting a business that works and starting to scale is great until you hit unexpected challenges. That's what happened with me. So earlier in the previous two episodes I showed shared with you how the business that we started, how I used entrepreneurship to get me out of a really tough situation and how the business started to make money. What I wasn't expecting is that as we started to grow, we were going to face kind of crazy challenges. You're listening to the Rich dad radio show. The good news, the bad news about entrepreneurship. Here's your host, Tyler Jorgensen. One of the first things that happened was the business started to take off in Canada. I wouldn't have guessed that that was going to happen. But here's the thing with entrepreneurship, you don't know what's going to happen. And so the business started to do really well. It we were selling product all across the United States and we started to get and growing increase an increasing number of buyers in Canada. Apparently we were one of the few people willing to ship there. There were some unique challenges dealing with duties and taxes and all kinds of stuff. And we navigated each one as it came across. And we started doing so much business in Canada that we actually opened up distribution there. I, I worked with a friend of mine. By distribution I mean I found an old buddy of mine who lived in, in Canada and, and said, hey, do you want to make a few extra bucks? And we would ship product up in bulk to him and then him and his family would, would ship the product out to the customers. This was really cool because instead of having to deal with duties and, and tariffs, we were able to say ships from Canada duty free. And all of a sudden we, we took over all of the, we were the obvious choice for this product anywhere in Canada since everyone else was shipping from the States. So that led to us starting to have multiple new opportunities coming our way. So we had, all of a sudden we had a retailer reach out to us and say, hey, I see you're the top selling product in Canada and we'd love to have you guys on our store shelves. We weren't set up for retail. These products didn't have barcodes. We didn't have boxes, we didn't have pamphlets. They were just bottles being shipped in a, in a normal poly bag. Right? So, but like any good entrepreneur, we just started solving the problem. And me and my operations manager, a good friend of mine, just started solving the problems. We'd say, what do you need? Okay? And we just find, you know, Google was our friend and we would Just look up and find the pro, find the solution, solve it and do it. And we started getting purchase orders of pretty good size from this retailer. And it was great until we started having problems getting the product from the United States to Canada. So when we started sending larger quantities, all of a sudden the border wasn't loving, wasn't as forgiving as they had been in just shipping across. And the products weren't illegal, right? These were products that were totally good products, totally legitimate products. But there's still steps, right when you're working with two different countries and with their, you know, up in Canada, of Health Canada and you have all these different things for importing. And we needed to move fast because we had purchase orders to fulfill. So we had, at this one point we had, I think it was like 15 or 16 large boxes full of the product that we had to get across and they weren't, it wasn't working. Like every time we were shipping them, they were getting rejected and pushed back and we needed to get this, this purchase order filled. So what we did is we realized that we could ship to near the border and then we just hire someone to go get it and drive it across and hopefully it'd be okay that time. Again, I don't recommend this, but I do recommend finding creative ways to solve problems, right? So we found this guy on Craigslist. That's back when Craigslist was a lot more popular than things like Facebook Marketplace. We just said, we just put out an ad on Craigslist. Hey, looking for a driver. Pick up packages here and take them here. We got a bunch of interest. And we found a guy and, and he said, yeah, I can do it. I drive that way all the time. So we shipped all the products up to a UPS store just near the border and we had, you know, 15, 16 large boxes full of product. And this driver went down and got them. And then the first time got across fine. So it was like, okay, cool, we got a solution. This is going to work for the, for the short term of what we're doing. And the next order, I think we had like 30 a pretty size, pretty large size boxes. So filled up the entire back of a large full size pickup truck with a, with a shell on the back on the bed, right? So we got a call from, you know, our, our contractor that was doing the delivery saying, hey, I can't get it across. And we're like, what, what happened? Well, it turns out that this guy probably shouldn't have been leaving the country. He had had some Past challenges with the law, right? Nothing that was jeopardizing the product, but enough that it was jeopardizing the transportation of the product. And so man moving product across, here's what end. Here's what we ended up doing. And this is the thing. You should do things the right way. You should do them the right way the first time. But again, sometimes you're learning as you go. So we learned, man, shipping product across the border was not awesome, that it introduced so many complex problems. So what we ended up doing, learning from our mistakes, was we ended up manufacturing the product in Canada, and by the end of all of this, we ended up holding multiple Health Canada natural product numbers, NPNs and having probably over a dozen SKUs in this retailer and across other retailers being sold to multiple distribution partners. And so in the process of learning how to do it all perfectly and by the book, we. We definitely made a lot of mistakes. And here's the thing. When your business grows, so do your problems. And so many people will stop from they. They won't ever start because they're imagining all of the problems instead of just giving it a go and solving the problems as they come. And so if you want to really thrive in entrepreneurship, you've got to be willing to sometimes build the parachute as you've on the way down, right? You've take the leap and figure out the solution. I'm again, I'm not saying break laws. I'm not saying to do anything you shouldn't be doing. But what I am saying is stop trying to think. You have to have it all figured out before you take the first step. You're gonna make mistakes. Embrace it. It's part of the process. And being willing to make those mistakes means you're gonna learn, right? And so learning and failure and making mistakes is part of the process. If this is new to you, if business and entrepreneurship is new to you, you're going to make mistakes. Please, please, please start making the mistakes instead of sitting there and thinking about starting. And you're so worried about starting, about making mistake, that you never do. So I'm encouraging you in this episode that if you are considering business and entrepreneurship, it's time to go. It's time to start. Now. You are always going to have challenges and problems, but. But, you know, do it anyways. In the next episode of despite all of the challenges that we faced while we were growing, challenges with merchant accounts, challenges with shipping and international relations, right? Challenges with not understanding retail and not understanding how to make sure our SKUs are the right type of SKUs and not. There were so many things that we had to learn. But even though we had all of these challenges, this. This business. This business. This business gave me something more valuable than money. Freedom. But that freedom didn't come easy. And in the next episode, I'm going to break down for you exactly how I designed my business around my life, instead of the other way around. Thank you for tuning in to Rich Dad Radio. I'm your host, Tyler Jorgensen. I'll see you next time.