Hi. I'm an M33 entrepreneur from India who failed my first 2 ventures. Hear my see-saw story!

[sa_ill]

Hi everyone!

Here's an introduction about myself. I read TMF because a person who I used to do business with makes $60k a month, and he recommended this book to me, saying that this book really helped him build the mindset to earn that kind of money.

After graduating in Chemical Engineering, I worked in the corporate industry for 3 years. I started a gaming blog which picked up unexpectedly, so I quit my job and worked on it full-time. We did really well for the first 3 years because we were a niche in my country. I didn't make big money, but I made enough to allow me to do the things I love, like roadtrip across US, backpack across most of Europe, climb summits in the Himalayas. But then the big media companies completely destroyed the traffic on my boutique blog. I could not compete with their teams of 50+ people, while all I had was 3 part time contributors.

I later started a business for an exciting new product. I found 2 investors. We were amongst the first companies in my country to sell this product. We made a lot of money during the first 2 years. I was working really hard. I used to wake up at 7AM to get on calls with my suppliers in China, and sleep at 3AM because during the nights I was on call with my suppliers in USA. Despite all this, I will living the life. International business trips, spending 1000s of dollars at the casino, and winning a lot. Making sales. Booking profits. I paid off a lot of my family overdue mortgage too. We grew at a rate of 300% after the first year.

Then something terrible happened. The government regulations made me shut my company, and I ended up losing some money due to a hanging inventory. My investors had recovered their initial investment along with some healthy profits. They reinvested, and lost a portion of it due to new regulations too.

I became jobless, but I had money. Which bought me to my next phase: the most massive downswing of my life.

I was in a 4 year old relationship with a Slowlaner, who wanted me to be a Slowlaner too. The relationship broke, which led to a lot of emotional turmoil. Next, I got into the habit of playing high-stakes poker. When my business was healthy, I was winning. When my business shut down, I thought I'll make some money from the poker tables. I was also compensating for my emotional diarrhoea. What a stupid thought! I ended up losing all my savings at the poker table over a period of 10 months. Yeah, I know I'm stupid. Well, atleast I emerged as a learned man who won't repeat the same mistakes again.

Then I read The Millionaire Fastlane . I belong to an entrepreural family, my dad and my grandad both are entrepreneurs, so most concepts that MJ was talking about I was already aware of, but still, WHAT AN EYE OPENING BOOK!.

This lead to my next business, my family business. It fulfilled the CENTS framework, plus the foundational work was already laid (licenses, brands, trademarks). But it has one problem, debt. My dad's personal life has been a turmoil, he's been married and divorced 5 times!! Most women in his life have taken big chunks of his earnings. And a couple of bad financial decisions (like buying luxury cars with 7 year payment plans), lead to our business, while really profitable, under unmanageable debt.

So here I am, working tirelessly to get the debt under control. We cant scale because of debt. I am on course to getting the debt under control, it should take around 3 months more. Then, I can start scaling up my business. It has potential to be super-scalable and impacting millions of lives. Our debt is mostly in the form of loans we have taken against our house. My dad made a really bad deal with the banks, because the loan is a combination of monthly payments, plus a Drop-down Overdraft Limit.

I apologise for the long introduction. If anybody has tips dealing with debt, I would love to hear them!

I'm glad to be a part of the Fastlane forums, there is a wealth of information here that I will definitely benefit from.

 

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