I've tried a lot of businesses in my life. Some of them worked for a while. Some got pretty far. Some never really got going. And some just didn't work. I don't say that with embarrassment anymore. That's part of how I learned business. I've sold advertising. I've worked retail. I've sold business to business. I've been involved with solar. I worked on building a wholesale cellular-accessories business. I've tried multilevel marketing. I sold phone cards. I sold cards that actually had a little piece of gold in them. I tried Amway. And there were plenty of other opportunities I looked at along the way.
I've lost good jobs and tried going out on my own. More than once. The first attempts didn't go particularly well. But I kept trying things, and I kept watching. Looking back now, I realize I was getting an education.
Every Business Taught Me Something
When you've been around enough businesses, you begin noticing the same questions showing up in different forms. Where do the customers come from? Why would somebody buy this? How much does it cost to get the customer? What's left after you make the sale? How does the salesperson get paid? How does the company get paid? What has to happen behind the scenes to deliver what was promised?
How much inventory has to sit there waiting to be sold? How much money goes out before any money comes back? And one of the biggest questions: Does this actually work as a business? Something can be a good product without being a good business. Something can be exciting without being profitable. Something can sell and still not produce enough money to support everything required to keep selling it.
I learned pieces of those lessons in different places.
Cash Flow Really Does Flow
One thing you learn when you're actually involved in businesses is that money doesn't sit still very long. That's why they call it cash flow. It flows in, and it flows out. Sometimes remarkably fast. Retail teaches you that. Restaurants certainly teach you that. You sell something, but that doesn't mean all that money belongs to you. There's inventory to replace. Payroll. Rent. Utilities. Insurance. Advertising. Equipment. Repairs. Taxes. And another bill always seems to be waiting somewhere.
That's very different from looking at a sales number and thinking that's what the business made. I learned to look at what was happening underneath the sale.
I Learned From Things That Didn't Work
I've had business ideas that didn't work. I've been involved in opportunities that looked better at the beginning than they did after I understood them. I've made mistakes. I've spent money I probably shouldn't have spent. I've believed things would work that didn't. I've also seen things that were beginning to work and then watched circumstances change. That's business too.
Failure doesn't automatically make somebody wise. You can fail and learn absolutely nothing. The value comes from going back and asking: What happened? Why didn't that work? Was the idea wrong? Was the timing wrong? Was there enough money? Was I trying to do something I wasn't equipped to do yet? Did customers actually want it? Was I depending on something or someone that wasn't dependable?
Did I understand the numbers? Did I understand the people? Those questions stayed with me.
Then the Internet Came Along
The Internet changed how I learned about business. Before the Internet, if I wanted to understand a particular kind of business, I might have to know somebody in it, work in it, buy a book about it, attend something, or actually try it myself. Suddenly I could research businesses from home. I could look at industries I had never worked in.
I could study products. I could look at companies and business models. I could investigate opportunities without necessarily putting money into every one of them. That fascinated me. I could learn about a business without having to start the business. And I did a lot of that. I've probably learned as much from businesses I never built as from some of the ones I did.
I Was Collecting Pieces
I didn't know there was going to be a New Tech Advertising someday. I certainly wasn't following some master plan that eventually led here. Most of the time, I was trying to make a living. Sometimes I was trying to build something. Sometimes I was trying to recover from something that hadn't worked. Sometimes I was simply curious.
But I kept collecting pieces. Retail taught me one thing. Business-to-business sales taught me another. Advertising taught me another. Wholesale taught me another. Trying to build a solar company taught me another. Technology businesses taught me another. Different sales organizations and business opportunities gave me a look at different ways companies recruit, sell, compensate people and grow. The Internet opened the door to studying thousands more.
Over time, those pieces started fitting together.
Experience Doesn't Always Look Like Success
I think we sometimes make a mistake when we talk about experience. We look at someone's successes and call that experience. But experience includes the things that didn't work. It includes bad decisions. It includes businesses that almost got going. It includes jobs you lost. It includes opportunities you thought were going somewhere that didn't. It includes the times you had to start over.
If you're paying attention, all of that teaches you. I'm not suggesting anybody should deliberately go out and fail. Failure can hurt. I've lived enough of it to know that. But I also wouldn't erase those experiences from my business education. They changed how I look at things.
Eventually, the Pieces Started Coming Together
As I got older, something changed. I had accumulated enough experiences that I could start seeing connections between them. I wasn't just looking at advertising anymore. Or sales. Or websites. Or technology. Or customers. Or cash flow. I started seeing how one affects another. That's a big part of how New Tech Advertising eventually developed. Then AI came along.
At first, I resisted it. I was already retired and I really didn't want to go back to work. But I needed to work. So I started exploring. And for the first time, I had technology that could help me take all these different pieces I'd accumulated over a lifetime and begin putting them together. That's when a lot of things started making sense.
I've Been Studying Business My Whole Life
I can see that now. I didn't always call it studying business. Sometimes I called it a job. Sometimes I called it an opportunity. Sometimes it was a business idea. Sometimes it was something I found on the Internet and spent hours learning about. And sometimes it was a failure I would rather not have experienced. But I was studying.
I was watching. I was learning. And I was adding another piece. I've been studying business most of my life. I just didn't always realize that's what I was doing.
NTA Point of View
You don't have to hide the parts of your business story that didn't work. Study them. What did they teach you about customers? What did they teach you about money? What did they teach you about yourself? What did they teach you about the way a business actually operates? Experience isn't only what you succeeded at. Experience is what you learned because you were there.