Interview with young entrepreneur Seth Hill from Lose your List

At the beginning of March, Seth Hill started a small business with his +15 years friend Michael Rumpke. Started as a grocery delivery service, there are a few twists that can make this type of business new. For me, it’s a perfect example of stepping outside the regular 9-to-5 jobs for which the society prepares us in school and start a business not necessarily with a unique and never seen before idea but by doing better something that has been done before. The business is called Lose your list and provides Groceries delivery directly from the Farms around Lexington, Kentucky.

Who is your typical customer?

SETH: It’s funny you ask that because our typical customer is everybody. Everybody has to eat, you know? Though lower-income families don’t reach out to us as often because we are somewhat of a luxury service, we have delivered to some who cannot make it on their own to the store.

What makes it different from other home delivery services?

SETH: We’re different because of what we offer directly from local growers and producers. We have partnerships with an organic CSA farm, a grass-fed cattle farm, a honey/cosmetic producer, a mushroom farm, a beer cheese producer, and a local grocery store. Our partners are growing daily, and the way we see it… If you can’t get it locally from our partners, you can get your food from our local grocer.

How did you come up with the idea?

SETH: Michael Rumpke(co-owner) and I just did a lot of brainstorming, really. It started simply as a grocery delivery service. Over time, we researched and contacted local growers/producers, and it developed from there(still is developing). We understood what other companies similar to us were doing, and after that, Michael and I put our own little spin on the business.

How did you find out there is a need for your services in the area?

SETH: Our business type is successful in many markets in the U.S., and there is nothing like it here in Lexington, KY. Before opening up any business in any market, I believe one has to understand the city. You have to feel the heartbeat of the city. I have lived in Lexington my whole life, so I believe I understand the city.

You are using Twitter and Facebook to market and keep in touch with your customers. How does this work for a small business like yours?

SETH: Well, it’s a must to be able to advertise without expending a large amount of capital. Facebook (especially) has aided in our local connection to our customers.

Any business plans before starting the new business?

SETH: Of course. However, I will admit most of the planning was done vocally between Michael and me. We are currently seeking to start-up capital, and we’re currently formulating something more concrete and physical as far as a business plan goes.

And what about outside help. Your family, outside counseling?

SETH: First and foremost, I credit all of my entrepreneurial knowledge to my parents. As a child, I watched my parents develop a fabric/interior design business grow from our basement into an annual $1 million + business.

So how did the first 2-3 weeks went? I know it might be too soon to speak, but any sign of success?

SETH: I’d say one of our proudest moments came within our first 2-3 weeks of operations. Both Michael and I were driving around town delivering groceries, and literally, 5 – 10 people shouted out our names and voiced their support. It was pretty surreal!

What are the benefits of cooking at home versus ordering or eating out?

SETH: Just overall health. We also try to help people save money.

You partnered with your friend Michael Rumpke to start the business. How important is it to have a partner?

SETH: Honestly, it can be very trying at times. Michael and I have known each other for over 15+ years. We competed in over 1,000 baseball games together, so our relationship is very natural. Michael and I can push each other very hard without any damage to our actual relationship as friends/business partners. This is a blessing because the stresses of starting your own business can be very overwhelming at times. Michael is an ideal partner (at least for me), so his importance is vital to OUR success as a business. With all that being said, I have been involved in two ventures that ultimately failed due to poor partnership relations. My advice to anyone considering a partner to start a business, make sure it is the right fit. Partnerships can make or break a business.

Any plans of expanding the business in other areas?

SETH: Yes. From the moment we began forming our business process, our intentions to the franchise were always present. Therefore, our processes must be very sophisticated yet simple enough to transfer into different markets.

Any advice for young entrepreneurs like you willing to start a business now?

SETH: Don’t be scared. Many people our age have this idea molded in their minds that you must go to school, get a degree and find a safe job. The problem lies within supply and demand. If everyone has a degree and is competing for the same jobs, something has to give. The only option is to create more jobs to compensate for the increasing supply of college graduates in need of jobs. Other than that, just be yourself and believe in what you offer to the world.

Interview with young entrepreneur Charlie Walker from Vivid Resourcing

Charlie Walker was only 25 when founding Vivid Resourcing, and his enthusiasm and ambitious nature have enabled him to grow the company swiftly. On course for a second-year turnover of 3.5 million, having doubled monthly profits since May 2009, Vivid aims to build their team of consultants to over twenty within the next three months. Last week I had the chance of interviewing Charlie about his entrepreneurial path and the achievements of the first 2 years:

Hi Charlie, and welcome to Entrepreneurship-interviews.com. At 25, you have given up a 150k salary to start Vivid Resourcing. What is your company about?

Charlie: We provide contract and permanent staff across a range of sectors internationally. Our focus is upon the provision of niche skills with a high level of service.

How did you identify the need for your new business?

Charlie: I’d say that client feedback was the major factor. I’m under no illusions that the recruitment market is fairly saturated with agencies. However, since the mid-90’s a perception of recruiters as either smarmy ‘headhunter’ types or pushy barrow-boys seems to have become pretty ingrained with clients we speak to. I guess that our main intention was to separate ourselves from this. We aim to train and recruit our team in a manner that allows our clients and candidates to feel that they are getting trustworthy, high-quality advice on the employment market. Our competitors often fail to secure long-term relationships, whereas this is our primary focus.

How did you decide to leave a well-paid job and start on your own?

Charlie: I felt that I needed a new challenge, to be honest. I was thrilled at my old company, but money isn’t my main motivation. I felt that I’d get a completely different sense of achievement from starting something up from scratch. I’ve really enjoyed the control I have over shaping the identity and branding of Vivid Resourcing. It has been much more difficult than I expected, in honesty, but I’m proud of what we have achieved so far.

What about the recent economic climate? Do companies still need recruitment services or do more recruitment in-house?

Charlie: I’d say that in-house recruitment is only useful for companies seeking skills that are fairly widespread on the market. We focus our attention on the high-end of various sectors (i.e., where there may be only 80-120 people available who can actually do the job). As a result, a lot of effort and nous is required to locate and supply these people within short timescales. It’s surprising how many in-house teams have contacted us this year because they struggle to find skills for their client. They might claim publicly that they cover all requirements, but it’s an open secret on the market that this model doesn’t work when requirements can’t be filled simply through advertising.

Talking about the recession, what is your turnover after the first 2 years?

Charlie: Our turnover for the financial year 2009/2010 was £3.7 million.

When you started up, did you envision such a turnover? Do you remember what your initial goals were?

Charlie: To be honest, I’m slightly disappointed with our figures to date. I think the fact that I started Vivid Resourcing only a few months before the economic downturn didn’t help matters! The fact that our growth has been 139% since our first financial year looks fantastic, but I think we are capable of much more, particularly because we have recruited some excellent staff over the past 12 months. My initial goal was to make Vivid one of the top 50 fastest growing UK businesses under 5 years. I think we are currently on target to do this.

What would you say are the main benefits of using Vivid’s services over in-house recruitment?

Charlie: I’d say response time, quality of service, and the fact that our business model is geared heavily towards providing very specialist staff. In-house recruitment teams, from my experience, can’t cut it when they are asked to supply the kind of high-end skills we recruit for.

And for people looking for a job, how can they enter your pool of professionals?

Charlie: They can contact us via our (recently relaunched) website on www.vividresourcing.com or through our central switchboard at +44 (0)20 785 7055.

How did you find your first customers when starting the business?

Charlie: Through an awful lot of cold-calling! I spent the first 4 months on my own in an office with a phone networking for 10 hours a day, establishing new contacts. Unfortunately, many of my established clients over the years weren’t recruiting heavily during 2008 due to the downturn, so it was tough going. I managed to get the company to profitability within 4 months, however, allowing me to take on our first two staff.

If you were to start all over again, what would you do differently?

Charlie: I’d probably delegate a bit more effectively, to be honest. I think when it’s your own business, it’s easy to try and control everything, and I’ve had to try and curb that tendency.

Do you provide recruitment services only to the London area or throughout the UK?

Charlie: We actually provide recruitment services internationally. Over 10% of our business last year was located outside of the UK, and this is an area in which we intend to grow rapidly.

Any outside help you used? Start-up organizations, training, chamber of commerce, etc.?

Charlie: I managed to gain initial set-up capital from a team of 3 investors who have an extremely successful track record within the recruitment market. They are very hands-off regarding day-to-day input on the business, but when I’ve needed it, their experience has been invaluable both on the financial, marketing, and back-office side of things.

What was the most important lesson you learned when going from employee to entrepreneur?

Charlie: Time management! Particularly within the recruitment industry, it is quite easy to focus your attention fairly narrowly within one’s particular market. As an MD, the factors vying for attention are pretty diverse, so I’ve had to learn to be very disciplined with my scheduling and learn to say “no” to demands on my time that aren’t worthwhile.

What are your thoughts on balancing family/personal life and being an entrepreneur?

Charlie: I think it’s difficult, in honesty. I’m lucky enough to have a very supportive partner, but it’s a challenge switching off entirely, particularly when I have access to e-mail at home! As we’ve become more established, it’s getting much easier, though- my team is now more experienced, and the managers reporting to me are performing brilliantly.

What’s next? Expanding the business, starting a new one?

Charlie: Our key focus is the rapid but sustainable growth of our London HQ, having set our aims at doubling both our turnover and sales team headcount within the next 12 months. Beyond that, plans are in place to establish an international office in central Europe by early-2012.

Interview with Weldon Long, author of The Upside of Fear: How One Man Broke the Cycle of Prison, Poverty and Addiction

About a month ago, I reviewed Weldon Long’s book The Upside of Fear: How One Man Broke the Cycle of Prison, Poverty, and Addiction. I now had the chance to interview Mr. Weldon about the book, his entrepreneur path from being a convicted criminal to a successful person.

Hi Weldon, and welcome to Entrepreneurship Interviews. I had the chance to read and review your book The Upside of Fear: How One Man Broke the Cycle of Prison, Poverty, and Addiction. So what is the book about?

Weldon: Well, it’s really a book about how we can all live our dreams if we are deeply committed to achieving them. In a nutshell, I spent 20 years broke, homeless, and drunk. I was your garden variety loser who spent 13 years in prison. About halfway through my “prison years,” my father died, and I decided to change the course of my destiny, and that’s what I did. In fact, I walked out of the joint in 2003 without a dime to my name, built an Inc 5000 company with over $20,000,000 in sales, and got home on Maui. The book outlines the journey and the tools I used to transform my life.

So you went from the lowest point in society to becoming a successful entrepreneur. I have to ask, what is your business about?

Weldon: Ironically, the first company I built was in an industry I knew nothing about. I tried to sell a sales and marketing system I had developed for heating and air conditioning contractors but couldn’t give the damn thing away. I had no track record and little practical experience.
After a few months, I came home and told my wife, “Honey, we are going to open a heating air conditioning company!” She, of course, noted that I knew nothing about the industry. Once I got her on board, we opened a little heating and air conditioning company in our living room. We generated $2,000,000 in sales in the first year, $3,500,000 in the second year, and $7,000,000 in the third year. Within 60 months, we had generated over $20,000,000 in revenue and were selected by Inc Magazine as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in America. It turns out my little sales and marketing system rocked. Our competitors are still scratching their heads and trying to figure what hit them.
Now I am doing sales training for one of the largest heating and air conditioning manufacturers worldwide using the same system I couldn’t give away six years ago. I also do a lot of personal and business coaching, keynotes, and motivational speaking. I am trying to help others live their dream just as I am living mine. Bottom line: if I can do this thing… anyone can.

Family balance. I know from the book that you started improving your life when you realized your child needs to grow with you as a parent taking part in his life. So how important is the family balance for a successful life?

Weldon: I think all the money in the world is useless if we have no one to share our lives with. My relationships with my wife and son have given me immeasurable enjoyment and fulfillment. As I outline in The Upside of Fear, my desire to build a relationship with my son was one of my primary motivators to get my act together, and the payoff in all of this is watching him live the life I never lived. It’s awesome.

Can you describe in a few words what the process was to improve your life and live the life you always dreamed of?

Weldon: Emerson said, “We become what we think all day long.” Once I realized my thoughts created the quality of my life, I got serious about thinking the right things. To do this, I recommend a four-step process I call FEAR. Get FOCUSED on what we want in life and what we want to become in life; Get seriously Emotionally committed to those things; Take consistent ACTION towards achieving the things we want; and accept RESPONSIBILITY for how we respond to life’s challenges. I have discovered that success in life is a reflection of how we respond to life’s challenges.

I know there are debates over what the prison system does for rehabilitation. Does the system work, or you have to have the desire to become better inside?

Weldon: I hear a lot about prison reform and sentencing reform, and I believe the prison systems could do more to prepare inmates for real life. Nevertheless, if we fix the individual, it doesn’t matter if the system is ineffective. Again, success for ex-cons is a reflection of how they respond to a dysfunctional prison system. At the end of the day, we are individually responsible for building productive lives. I can’t imagine a more hopeless situation than counting on the government to help us fix our lives.

You’re now a speaker and driven motivator. What could people learn from you?

Weldon: If this knucklehead can do it… anyone can. End of story.

From my experience interviewing entrepreneurs and from my own entrepreneurial experience, I know it’s very hard stepping outside the comfort zone and taking control of your life and do what you always dreamed of. I said in my book review that most people are a prison of the society rules, working 9 to 5, never really accomplishing their dreams, some “mind” prison. How could one escape the “society prison”?

Weldon: To escape from any confinement, mental or physical, we need to understand that our power of creative thought can help us achieve things we never thought possible. Think about it: pretty much every component of our body serves a purpose. Is it unreasonable to think that our ability to dream things that haven’t happened yet or visualize something in our mind serves some purpose? I believe it does. Otherwise, we have to assume our mind’s ability to imagine amazing things serves no purpose but frustrates us with dreams we’ll never reach.

OK. I know that when working towards your dream, you will also have hard times. You say in the book that the difference between success and failure is not the number or the importance of the problems that come along, nor about luck, but about the way you approach difficulties. Can you explain?

Weldon: Absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, I believe our success in life reflects how well we respond to challenges in life. Here is the reality: EVERYONE in life has problems. We’ve all had health problems, money problems, and relationship problems. You name it. But what separates the winners from the losers in life is how they respond to those problems. Successful responses result in successful outcomes. It’s not rocket science.

Do you think entrepreneurs have a mission? What does it take to be a successful entrepreneur?

Weldon: Yeah, I think we do. That mission is to create something out of nothing. I can’t think of anything more satisfying than taking an idea and turning it into jobs and revenue. It’s crazy when you think about it. One day there is nothing but an idea, and the next day there are buildings and equipment or whatever. It’s like magic.
I think successful entrepreneurs all have one thing in common: the ability to dream and communicate that dreams to others.


What about being a successful person. My view is that you shouldn’t compare with other people “success” but make your own definition. What does it mean for you: being rich, having a great family? Living on the beach?

Weldon: Everyone’s definition of “prosperity” is different. For some, it may be money; for others, relationships. I certainly don’t think money is the root of all evil. Hell, bill collectors are the root of all evil!
For me, it’s about quality of life and the way successful business lets me live the way I want to live. I love to work; I just enjoy being able to define how and when I work.

With the crisis more and more people think their life is turning for the worse. Any advice?

Weldon: For the person who sees crisis, the only crisis exists. For the person who sees an opportunity, the only opportunity exists. We all see what we expect to see, don’t we?

What about people in their late 40’s Is it too late for them to start improving their lives?

Weldon: No way. Hell, I walked out of the joint seven years ago at 39 years old – broke and homeless.
I just got back from an event in San Francisco sponsored by Hay House Publishing. Louise Hay was there and told the story of how she started her company at 50 years old. Today she is in her 80’s and her company is incredibly successful. Tell her 40 is too old.

So if you did it, anybody could do it? Or there has to be something special?

Weldon: Two things: desire and a method for your madness. For me, I was driven by my desire to be a father to my son, and my method was the FEAR thing. Find a system and use it daily. We don’t have a knowledge problem… we have an implementation problem.

After reading the book, I said I’m somehow hoping for a sequel to see what the future will bring into your life. So will we have a sequel?


Weldon
: I am working now on a new book called Discover the Secret of YOUR Greatness. It’s kind of the “how-to” part of my story. I’ve already begun producing a live weekly show, which we broadcast on Monday nights. It’s amazing technology. It’s basically a television show that’s completely interactive. Folks can check it out on Monday nights at www.WeldonLong.com.

One last question. How is the weather at your home on the beach in Maui?

Weldon: I just got back to Colorado from Maui a day or two ago… it was a constant 80 degrees. Perfect golf weather, but then again, all-weather is perfect golf weather.

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