Shownotes
Jose Berlanga
Jose Miguel Berlanga is the co-founder of Tricon Homes, an industry leader with yearly revenues of $100 million. As CEO, he has structured deals, invested, and negotiated land acquisitions and sales transactions in excess of a billion dollars, while managing the day-to-day operations and building close to 2,000 homes to date.
A graduate from the university of St. Thomas with multiple degrees in Business Administration, Economics, and Philosophy, Jose’s discipline and methodic approach allows him to create customized strategies to maximize the potential of each project. His passion for business and life has led him to inspire and motivate his others by being an example and a mentor that consistently delivers results through a strong work ethic. He is the author of the new book, The Business of Home Building.
Summary
Jose Berlanga's remarkable journey from a childhood marred by trauma to becoming a successful entrepreneur serves as the focal point of this enlightening discussion. As he recounts the harrowing experience of surviving a devastating bus explosion at the tender age of four, we explore how he transformed adversity into a catalyst for personal and professional growth. Over the course of his career, Jose has established multiple businesses across diverse sectors, including construction and hospitality, demonstrating an unwavering resilience and a unique perspective on failure. Our dialogue delves into the critical distinctions between temporary setbacks and total failure, emphasizing the significance of embracing challenges as integral components of the entrepreneurial experience. Jose's insights into the art of execution, the importance of strategic partnerships, and the necessity of managing fear provide invaluable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned business leaders alike.
Conversation
In this engaging dialogue, Jose Berlanga shares his extraordinary life story with host Jothy Rosenberg, chronicling his evolution from a child marked by tragedy to a successful entrepreneur with a myriad of ventures. The episode explores the psychological underpinnings of resilience, particularly how early life experiences can shape one's approach to challenges and opportunities. Jose's reflection on his childhood, spent largely in hospitals undergoing painful treatments, offers a profound perspective on how adversity can forge an unyielding spirit. He discusses his entrepreneurial philosophy, underscoring the importance of execution over mere ideas and the necessity of partnering with experts in one's respective field. Jose's narrative is not merely one of triumph but is interwoven with candid acknowledgments of his failures and the lessons derived from them. He advocates for a mindset that embraces setbacks as integral components of the entrepreneurial journey, suggesting that true failure only occurs when one ceases to engage with their aspirations. This perspective resonates deeply, particularly in an era where quick success is often glorified, reminding listeners of the value of persistence and learning in the path to success.
Takeaways
- Jose Berlanga's childhood was marked by a traumatic accident that shaped his resilience and entrepreneurial spirit, demonstrating how adversity can fuel personal growth and ambition.
- The importance of understanding the difference between temporary setbacks and total failure is highlighted, emphasizing that setbacks are part of the learning process for any entrepreneur.
- In entrepreneurship, execution is paramount; a mediocre idea executed well can lead to success, while a brilliant idea poorly executed will likely fail to materialize.
- Jose emphasizes the necessity of partnering with experts in fields where one lacks knowledge, underscoring the importance of aligning with skilled individuals to enhance business success.
- Resilience in business is cultivated through embracing challenges and managing fears, as every entrepreneur will inevitably face difficulties that test their perseverance and adaptability.
- The conversation reveals that true growth occurs not in the absence of challenges, but in the ability to confront and learn from them, transforming failures into invaluable lessons.
Links
- Entrepreneur, Developer, Author | Jose Miguel Berlanga
- YouTube
- Jothy's TEDx talk - On why those with disabilities tend to overachieve
- The Who Says I Can't Foundation - Jothy's non-profit that helps disabled kids get back into a sport they love to restore their self-esteem
- Our YouTube channel
- Designing Successful Startups — Jothy Rosenberg | Author | Speaker | Podcaster - Site with all podcasts
- Tech Startup Toolkit book
- Please leave us a review
Transcripts
Foreign.
Speaker B:Please meet today's guest, Jose Berlanga.
Speaker A:I wanted to experience and travel and learn and perhaps live in different countries.
Speaker A:I wanted to do so many things, but I always understood that that required money, that I needed money in order to live all those fun experiences.
Speaker A:So I wanted to get it out of the way.
Speaker A:You're right.
Speaker A:Did I enjoy the business world?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:But my.
Speaker A:My objective was to set them up, start things, put them together, assemble teams, create something and pass them on to someone else who could operate them while I was kind of running the business from.
Speaker A:From a distance.
Speaker A:Life has a funny way to, to trick you, to.
Speaker A:To dictate where things are going to end up.
Speaker A:And 40 years later, I am still sitting here in an office running businesses.
Speaker A:So how do all these.
Speaker B:Welcome to designing successful startups.
Speaker B:I'm your host, Jathy Rosenberg.
Speaker B:What if I told you that a four year old boy burned over most of his body in a horrific bus explosion in Mexico City would grow up to build dozens of companies and create a $100 million construction empire?
Speaker B:Today's guest, Jose Berlanga spent a decade of his childhood in and out of hospitals, missing those crucial formative years, missing when kids learn how to learn.
Speaker B:But instead of letting tragedy define him, he embraced it as his identity and used it as fuel.
Speaker B:Jose built over two dozen businesses across multiple industries.
Speaker B:From importing petrochemical machinery to launching Italian coffee bars, from developing residential communities to revolutionizing construction in Houston.
Speaker B:He's not just survived failure, he's redefined it entirely.
Speaker B:In today's conversation, we dive deep into the psychology of resilience, the difference between temporary setbacks and total failure, and why some entrepreneurs rush through life while others learn to balance the sprint with the marathon.
Speaker B:Jose's insights on partnering, execution over ideas, and managing fear will challenge how you think about building your startup.
Speaker B:This is a conversation about turning pain into power and setbacks into stepping stones.
Speaker B:Let's jump in.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:Good morning, Jose.
Speaker B:Thank you for joining my show.
Speaker A:Hey, Jelly, Great to be here.
Speaker A:Thank you for having me.
Speaker B:Of course.
Speaker B:This is how I always start.
Speaker B:I just think it's helpful to people to hear you say, where are you originally from and where do you live now?
Speaker A:I am originally from Mexico.
Speaker A:Mexico City is where I grew up.
Speaker A:My, my.
Speaker A:The first stage of my life was spent in Mexico City.
Speaker A:Eventually I ended up in the US I live now in Houston, Texas.
Speaker A:I'm a Texan.
Speaker A:Been here now for decades.
Speaker A:I'm going on 40 years.
Speaker A:Four.
Speaker A:Close.
Speaker A:Almost 40.
Speaker A:Next, I think next year will be my 40th anniversary here in Texas.
Speaker B:I have been to Mexico City as a tourist.
Speaker A:Mexico City is amazing.
Speaker A:It's a city that has so many layers, cultural, economic, so many neighborhoods, so many things to do.
Speaker A:You need time.
Speaker A:And it's always recommended to go there with someone that knows the area so that you can get to see some of the exciting things and understand some of the layout, because it's great.
Speaker B:If you don't mind, I would love to ask you to share with us the tragedy that happened to you when you were a kid.
Speaker B:Because I want to talk about all the things you've done and I think it's going to help people understand how you have the grit to do all of this.
Speaker B:If you would tell about this unfortunate thing that happened to you at the.
Speaker A:Age of four, sure, we can talk a little bit about it.
Speaker A:It's such a long story that we'll just touch the surface one day.
Speaker A:I.
Speaker A:I have to admit that I don't think really anybody in my life, other than my parents and my sister who was part of this incident, know the details of this extraordinary adventure and tragedy.
Speaker A:There's much more to it.
Speaker A:It appears to just be a simple car accident that occurred to me at the age of four.
Speaker A:An explosion, a bus accident that.
Speaker A:That crashed into a.
Speaker A:Another bus carrying petroleum and exploded where I was burned, most of my body covered in 30 degrees.
Speaker A:But the circumstances, the sequence of events, the details.
Speaker A:One day I will get into it.
Speaker A:I've never had the time nor the interest to get into it for a number of reasons.
Speaker A:I've been too busy living, surviving, building things that I've been putting that story aside.
Speaker A:But I'm very interested in one day just sitting down and narrating the entire process of how we ended up in that situation.
Speaker A:But it.
Speaker A:It was essentially what I said, a bus accident, an explosion where I was burned and subsequently ended up living in a hospital, recovering, spending the following decade in and out of hospitals, in reconstructive surgeries and really living.
Speaker A:Very tough, very unique childhood.
Speaker A:The big question that I am often asked and that I ask myself is if what occurred after that, the subsequent years, my activities, my business, my resilience, Was it due to that particular incident and that experience?
Speaker A:Or was I just born with those particular characteristics, those skills?
Speaker A:So I guess we'll never know.
Speaker B:That statement you just made, it strikes a very important chord with me because my next book, which, which I've been thinking about for a long time, is actually going to be a novel where I try to explore the same exact question for Me So if I had not had cancer and lost my leg and three years later my lung and told I was I had zero chance of survival versus the same me at the age of 16 if that hadn't happened.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:How would I have been different?
Speaker B:And you're right.
Speaker B:We never know you but it's still.
Speaker B:That's why it has to be a novel.
Speaker B:It has to be a novel to try to explain that.
Speaker B:And so what the novel's going to do is have this sort of.
Speaker B:It's going to pretend the universe splits and.
Speaker B:And it would be down one path.
Speaker B:It's Jose.
Speaker B:The two buses missed each other and nothing happened.
Speaker B:And would you have built these all these companies and all these houses or not?
Speaker A:Where would we be?
Speaker A:You are far smarter and more creative to.
Speaker A:To come up with.
Speaker A:With those scenarios.
Speaker A:I don't think I.
Speaker A:To that extent I'm simply just going to try to recollect everything that occurred.
Speaker A:But yes it's a fantastic idea of trying to guess where life would have taken us had those events not occurred.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:All you could do is think about what was your personality and your behaviors.
Speaker B:But the problem you have a harder problem is that this happened to you at four and your personality hadn't really formed yet.
Speaker B:Some.
Speaker B:There's obviously some stuff that you get from your DNA and then the rest is environment and your environment for a very good part of your childhood was hospital.
Speaker B:Was a hospital.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:It was built around this.
Speaker A:This accident.
Speaker A:My.
Speaker A:My entire life was built around it.
Speaker A:And it's.
Speaker A:You said something very interesting.
Speaker A:I missed some of the most important years of a child where you form your identity where you begin to learn where you begin to understand how to learn.
Speaker A:And I spend it staring at the ceiling.
Speaker A:It took a while.
Speaker A:Not to mention I was already a distracted add.
Speaker A:Hyper.
Speaker A:Hyperactive child.
Speaker A:But it created a series of difficulties in my school years because all of her.
Speaker A:For a while I was doing nothing but recovering just staring at a wall.
Speaker B:Did you learn to read while you were in the hospital?
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:Eventually I think and this is part of where one day I'm going to tell the entire long story.
Speaker A:My parents didn't want to.
Speaker A:I was.
Speaker A:I was just trying to survive the first year I was in intensive care and just going one day at a time where they just didn't want to put more pressure on.
Speaker A:On me.
Speaker A:I believe that was the case.
Speaker A:They just didn't want to push.
Speaker A:I was just trying to go through the motions.
Speaker A:It was a very painful Back then the healing process was not the way it is now every day in order to avoid infection, they had to wrap me up with bands, with band aid bandages, but they had to remove them every other day and they would come off with skin.
Speaker A:So it was a physical torture that I went through for that I've never brought up, by the way.
Speaker A:Not because it takes me to the wrong place, but because I just, I focus more on, on who I am and what I do and, and I try to be seen for my achievements and for what happened to me.
Speaker A:So never get into the details, but you're asking a very interesting question.
Speaker A:Why didn't I spend more time in that hospital building my education and improving myself?
Speaker A:I was too busy.
Speaker A:Just.
Speaker B:I didn't mean it that way.
Speaker B:What I meant was somewhere along the way, a 4 year old child going through that for another 10 years, it's.
Speaker B:And then.
Speaker B:But you turned out to be an amazing businessman and you have a family and you have every right not to be normal.
Speaker A:Most people would not live a normal life.
Speaker A:They would have found bypass, responsibilities, obligations, weight, weight that I carry, supporting a team.
Speaker A:And over the years I've trained and hired and supported hundreds and hundreds of employees.
Speaker A:And so I've been the center of so many activities that most people would have not really tried or figure out a way around it.
Speaker A:But you made a very interesting point.
Speaker A:I grew up.
Speaker A:A lot of people have horrible tragedies that occur to them in their lifetime, later on in life.
Speaker A:To me it was everything I knew.
Speaker A:I was just barely a baby where I.
Speaker A:This became my identity, this became who I was.
Speaker A:I embraced, I understood it quite rapidly.
Speaker A:Never felt sorry about myself.
Speaker A:I never sat down till today.
Speaker A:I've never sat down to really feel sorry or ask myself why me?
Speaker A:Why?
Speaker A:As a matter of fact, I'm glad it happened to me and not to other people that were around me, particularly my sister or my parents.
Speaker A:I feel that I had that strength to handle it.
Speaker A:So I, I've never gone back to really question why.
Speaker A:I just lived with it and moved.
Speaker B:On and which is what we're going to do now.
Speaker B:Because I wanted to just let people know this happened and it's in the back of their minds now as we now talk about all the things you've accomplished.
Speaker B:So if I have this right, you have built a company that imported petrochemical machinery.
Speaker B:You have another company that launched Italian coffee bars.
Speaker B:Then you had one that developed residential communities.
Speaker B:And what you're doing now is a very successful construction land development firm and you're the CEO.
Speaker B:This is what you spend Most of your time on now.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:Land development.
Speaker A:I do.
Speaker A:We do some commercial.
Speaker A:We do multifamily.
Speaker A:We do a lot of areas within real estate.
Speaker A:And just to wrap that up, often mention those because perhaps is where I spend a little more of my job.
Speaker A:Obviously the construction, the residential construction business is where I've invested the bulk of my career.
Speaker A:And we seem to bring those up quite often because they're the highlights.
Speaker A:But there are two dozen other companies, sectors, industries, enterprises that happen.
Speaker A:Some of them made money in, some of them didn't, some of them failed attempts, startups, partnerships in an array of industries that I don't often get into because I didn't spend that much time or those number of years.
Speaker A:So I fast forward those.
Speaker A:But to just.
Speaker A:I just want to clarify that it wasn't for.
Speaker A:It was a couple of dozen businesses that I either as a founder, as a partner or somehow got involved in them.
Speaker B:Yeah, obviously you don't have ADD at all.
Speaker A:I learned one day as an adult that what I had is something that a lot of people have and they're unaware of it, which is not attention deficit.
Speaker A:It's called Attention Surplus disorder.
Speaker A:Okay, that's.
Speaker B:That makes more sense.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Which is the opposite.
Speaker A:We confuse the lack of attention with your ability to have to pay attention for long periods of time.
Speaker A:Attention surplus disorder is someone who, when they capture their interest, they put a tremendous amount of.
Speaker A:It's like the difference between a marathon and a sprint.
Speaker A:ADD people are not marathon runners.
Speaker A:They're sprinters.
Speaker A:If something captures their attention, they put all their focus, very powerful amount of attention for a very short period of time and they grab the information and retain it.
Speaker A:But then they move on.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And I learned that later because it caught.
Speaker A:It would take a lot of my effort to pay attention because I wasn't interested.
Speaker A:So it is.
Speaker A:The point is a lot of people who are perceived to be add, that's because they're putting time in things that they're not interested in.
Speaker A:They just need to change the perspective.
Speaker B:Hi, the podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book Tech Startup Toolkit, how to Launch Strong and Exit Big.
Speaker B:This is the book I wish I'd had as I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years.
Speaker B:I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong.
Speaker B:You could get it from all the usual booksellers.
Speaker B:I hope you like it.
Speaker B:It's a true labor of love.
Speaker B:Now back to the show.
Speaker B:Most people don't.
Speaker B:Can't even grok the idea of a couple of dozen entities that you got involved with created.
Speaker B:Can you paint the picture for what your life was like as this was all happening?
Speaker B:What problem were you trying to solve with these?
Speaker A:No, somehow there's a mix.
Speaker A:This is a great question because I'm going to think out loud here with you.
Speaker A:I don't know what I was thinking.
Speaker A:Part of it was my interest in the business world, my inability, my lack of understanding of what it meant to turn a business into a successful enterprise.
Speaker A:Spreading myself thin, loving the concept of starting things, of getting into new concepts without really understanding what it took to build them.
Speaker A:So I would take every meeting.
Speaker A:I was a very charming young guy that had a lot of friends, that had a lot of contacts, that was one of those kind of personalities that's always getting along with everyone and, and I would hear of this idea or somebody starting a business.
Speaker A:Oh, I love it.
Speaker A:Let's work on it and let's start it and I'll put some money or I'll do the work or I'll do the.
Speaker A:I'll operate it while you do this.
Speaker A:And at some point you're doing multiple things and you're losing focus.
Speaker A:That one of my dreams, which I never.
Speaker A:Sometimes we have dreams that just never happen that you don't achieve and you either continue to pursue them or you come to terms with the reality and the fact that that was not your, your future.
Speaker A:But I wanted to own a portfolio of companies.
Speaker A:I wanted to be one of those investor slash entrepreneurs that just had an array of companies and businesses and.
Speaker A:But I was too young to understand that.
Speaker A:Yes, you can do that once you're already wealthy and successful, but at first you need to start with one business in focus and once it starts doing well, then you can organically and gradually grow.
Speaker A:Yes, I would be participating in multiple things and as a result most of them wouldn't.
Speaker A:He wouldn't get anywhere.
Speaker B:I have a strange question for you because I keep relating to what you're saying from my own experiences.
Speaker B:Do you feel at all like you were in a real hurry to do all this because you somehow had from way back from what happened to you, this need to hurry up and live?
Speaker A:Wow, that is a deep question and I think you nailed it.
Speaker A:I'll.
Speaker A:Yes, I'll try to describe what was going on in my mind when I lived in such a hurry in my earlier years.
Speaker A:You are so correct.
Speaker A:For example, I wanted to graduate and get a degree, but I wasn't really focusing on school.
Speaker A:So I rushed through the Whole process of getting my degree, I didn't make the best out of my education.
Speaker A:I was just focusing on passing and getting a diploma and moving on.
Speaker A:And I was doing something very similar in some of these businesses.
Speaker A:I wanted to make a lot of money and move on.
Speaker A:From the topic of building web, I saw that as a stepping stone into the beginning of my actual life of living what I wanted to live.
Speaker A:I wanted to experience and travel and learn, perhaps live in different countries.
Speaker A:I wanted to do so many things, but I always understood that required money, that I needed money in order to live all those fun experiences.
Speaker A:I wanted to get it out of the way.
Speaker A:You're right.
Speaker A:Did I enjoy the business world?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:But my objective was to set them up, start things, put them together, assemble teams, create something, and pass them on to someone else who could operate them while I was running the business from a distance.
Speaker A:Life has a funny way to.
Speaker A:To trick you to.
Speaker A:To dictate where things are going to end up.
Speaker A:And 40 years later, I am still sitting here in an office running businesses.
Speaker B:So how.
Speaker A:How did all these decades go by?
Speaker A:I'm not quite sure, but I'm still here.
Speaker A:And you write, I wanted to rush the process.
Speaker A:I wanted to rush the pro.
Speaker A:I move on to other things that now I'm beginning to really identify why I was in such a rush and beginning to actually blend those two.
Speaker A:So a mistake I made, I should have done a little bit of both, lived a little more, worked a little less, and perhaps balance life, which I never had, that balance.
Speaker A:And we, we continue to search for it.
Speaker B:But there was somewhat of a transition because you have built a very large business that makes a hundred million a year, and you have a large team and you've built a lot of houses and you've, it sounds like, done some really serious revitalization of parts of Houston.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And by the way, our business model is very different now.
Speaker A:And to go back just to wrap up the subject of why I am doing all of this, I'm now running a company in a completely different model that requires a lot less effort.
Speaker A:We live and learn.
Speaker A:We figure out how to achieve the same results with less effort.
Speaker A:That's part of becoming a better entrepreneur.
Speaker A:When I was attempting to build companies one day, I realized that I needed to focus on one at a time, which is when some of these concepts did well and eventually turn into successful exercises.
Speaker A:Our construction company did very well.
Speaker A:And for many years, I focus the bulk of my time in building it.
Speaker A:But we had a lot of employees and a lot of overhead in a very complex organization that eventually we face.
Speaker A:Out of that company, I moved on to other activities.
Speaker A:And now this new model allows much more freedom because we're outsourcing most of our activities, which is a very new concept.
Speaker A: I think between the: Speaker A:And when the economy came back, a lot of us realized that we could do things with a lot less staff and that we could start doing the same thing, but instead of full time employees, we could start outsourcing services and not have that obligation to feed the monster and to have to do all of these projects just to keep your staff busy.
Speaker A:So this new cycle, and now this was reinforced by Covid, when you could operate remotely and most people were able to be just as efficient from home or from an.
Speaker A:Or from an island, from abroad.
Speaker A:We have people that work with us and for us that you don't even live here in town.
Speaker A:And we operate the company quite well.
Speaker A:So that's the difference.
Speaker A:Now that I'm doing some of the similar things and activities that I did in the past, but with a lot more efficiency.
Speaker B:You've written a book about this industry and it's.
Speaker B:It's fairly recent, right?
Speaker B:It's just come out.
Speaker A:Yes, the business of home building.
Speaker A:I wrote a book to honor this industry of home building because it's very underappreciated, underestimated, it has such a little barrier of entry.
Speaker A:There's a number of reasons why I wrote it.
Speaker A:I needed to validate so many years of effort, so many years of focus.
Speaker A:And throughout all those years, I saw so many companies come and go, come in the business, go out of business, move on to something else.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And I realized that anybody with a little money that you can raise from friends and family and buy a small piece of land and get some permits, and you're a builder.
Speaker A:And that always annoyed me that in order to become a doctor, a professor, an architect, an engineer, an attorney, anything, or even a top executive, you have to invest years of your life perfecting your craft and do it to perform that activity.
Speaker A:To become a builder, you can start it overnight with no previous education, no training, no licenses.
Speaker A:And I speak a little bit about how it's not as easy as most people think.
Speaker A:And I explain not only my story, but I educate people who want to enter the business to really understand what it means.
Speaker A:I talked about we wouldn't just one random morning decide to build our own car.
Speaker A:One of the examples, somehow this logic doesn't apply to building a home.
Speaker A:Everybody, anybody can just one morning, hey, I'm going to build my own house.
Speaker A:And once they're in it, they realize that nightmare that they ended up engaging in.
Speaker A:Especially particularly when you add time limitations and budgets.
Speaker A:Because anybody can do anything when there are no time constraints or budgets or numbers or no limits, then yeah, anything can be achieved.
Speaker A:But when you add those two components, time and money, doing it and consistently being successful and turning a profit, it turns into a science.
Speaker A:So I use this particular industry as the example of how to start and build a business successfully and understanding what you're getting into prior to just jumping into it and not really fully doing at least some research.
Speaker A:So I had fun doing it.
Speaker A:And I think it's helpful for any entrepreneur that wants to start a business.
Speaker B:Not just a building business, but any business.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:The word failure to a lot of people is a very negative word, but it isn't to you.
Speaker B:You've had businesses fail, you learn from it.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Well, what is your attitude about failure?
Speaker A:I'm going to admit that I still don't enjoy it.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:As.
Speaker A:As I understand the concept of adversity, setbacks and failure, even today, after decades of living a life of headaches, I'm not going to admit that they're fun and that I process them with, without, without any effort.
Speaker A:I don't enjoy, just like everybody else.
Speaker A:I don't like problems, I don't like setbacks, I don't like fate.
Speaker A:But I understand it and I embrace it.
Speaker A:And I gotten to the point of understanding that it is inevitable, that it is just part of our daily routine.
Speaker A:I don't think I have many days in my life, even today, when things work the way that I intended.
Speaker A:That where my day is smooth and I don't run into some form of a headache or a delay or a financial setback in one way.
Speaker A:Even today in my business, we're going through a lot of issues.
Speaker A:You would think that after four decades of operating companies, I would get it right.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:With interest rates, with political issues, with economic uncertainty, with changes in our industry, with all of kinds of things that are happening, I am still dealing with a bunch of headaches every day.
Speaker A:They're inevitable.
Speaker A:So how.
Speaker A:How I deal with it is awareness.
Speaker A:And something that I really think that all of us need to understand, first of all, that they're inevitable and that you need to just go in knowing that you're going to face a sequence of setbacks before you start succeeding in any activity.
Speaker A:That process of pain, that process of frustration goes with the territory of success.
Speaker A:It is not possible to reach goals, to achieve anything without going through that process.
Speaker A:And the better you understand it, the better you prepare your mind and avoid living in denial and believe that things are going to happen the way that you anticipate it.
Speaker A:The better off you are, the better chances you have just sticking to an activity and becoming better at it.
Speaker A:Otherwise you get discouraged very quickly.
Speaker A:The moment that things start going, going wrong, you walk away from any circumstance.
Speaker A:So that's one thing.
Speaker A:Awareness, knowing that it's going to be easy, that it's not going to be easy, that things are going to be tough, and in just taking a break every now and then.
Speaker A:But the most important part is that when you utilize these bad experiences, they can turn into phenomenal assets.
Speaker A:The word failure, I'm going to try to describe it because there is such a thing as failure.
Speaker A:Fatal, I call it there.
Speaker A:There's a difference between temporary and total failure.
Speaker A:Total failure is when you walk away from, from the process because now you are not utilizing the experience and the setbacks to your advantage.
Speaker A:So if you start a business, if you start training for a sport and it becomes difficult and you walk away from it altogether, that's behavior.
Speaker A:You're not trying, you're not pushing yourself or allowing yourself to, to get to the next level.
Speaker A:But if you fail again, let's talk about the other scenario.
Speaker A:And everything went wrong.
Speaker A:You fell off the horse and you beat yourself up, but next day you get back on it.
Speaker A:That's not failure.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker A:That is far from it because you're still now.
Speaker A:It just became a process.
Speaker A:As long I'm one of those people that feels like walking away from so many things that are difficult in my life, I'm not the exception, believe me.
Speaker A:Even with all of this experience, I feel like walking away from difficult circumstances and deals and businesses and activities and conversate, tough conversations that I don't want to deal.
Speaker A:But if you, if you suck it up and if you stick to it, those eventually, in retrospect, become the best lessons and the foundation for progress.
Speaker A:So there is the definition.
Speaker A:You don't call it failure, you call it a process.
Speaker A:I don't care how many times things go wrong and how bad it gets and for how long.
Speaker A:You can struggle and run into problems for years before you become good at something that's not failure.
Speaker A:You, you can tell yourself or assume that you are a failure because you're not moving Forward.
Speaker A:No, you're just a student.
Speaker A:You're just going through the process of getting better.
Speaker A:And one day, one random morning, and it's happened to me where all of a sudden, I look back and I go, wow, I did all that.
Speaker A:I didn't even realize how far I was moving along because I was caught up with the suffering, with the anguish, with the anxieties of all of these problems that I was solving as I was going, thinking that I was failing.
Speaker A:But all of a sudden, they started coming together.
Speaker A:And one random day, you are getting closer to where you want to be.
Speaker A:So note setbacks and adversity.
Speaker A:And in any financial or personal.
Speaker A:For example, even in relationships, you.
Speaker A:You have a bad marriage, a bad relationship, a bad friendship, and you see it as a failure.
Speaker A:As long as you keep trying and moving forward to the next one, it's not a failure.
Speaker A:Only if you quit and never try it again would it officially be considered a failure.
Speaker B:I resonate with that.
Speaker B:In fact, I like to say that one of the things that I think distinguishes this book from other entrepreneurship types of books is that I'm very honest about all the mistakes I've made, and.
Speaker B:And some of them are very much recoverable.
Speaker B:They asked me to.
Speaker B:Actually, my first gig as CEO was a turnaround, which is a dumb idea, by the way.
Speaker B:When you're first the CEO and you're doing a turnaround, you're making a big mistake.
Speaker B:But anyway, I did it, and I had it more or less turned around.
Speaker B:And then they decided, the investors decided, it's been taking too long.
Speaker B:We're going to shut it down.
Speaker B:You're done.
Speaker B:And I was pissed.
Speaker B:But there was some IP that we developed, so that felt like a failure.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:But there was some IP that we developed that was new.
Speaker B:And the investor said, oh, you want to buy that?
Speaker B:Sure.
Speaker B:That'll be a million dollars.
Speaker B:I said, that's too much for that.
Speaker B:But I had an idea for how I could take that and start a new company.
Speaker B:And we did something.
Speaker B:Instead of filing bankruptcy, we did something which is better for everybody, pretty much called liquidation.
Speaker B:For the benefit of creditors.
Speaker B:And the attorneys that were doing that, I asked them, hey, how much are you planning to sell this IP for if I don't buy it for a million.
Speaker B:And the woman said, you've been so helpful to me as the former CEO, I'll tell you the truth.
Speaker B:If you wait about three weeks, I'll sell it to you for $65,000.
Speaker A:It's a big discount.
Speaker B:I bought it for $65,000.
Speaker B:I started the next company, which seven years later we sold for 125 million.
Speaker A:Wow, that's a nice exit and a very nice transaction.
Speaker A:Yeah, he's on that.
Speaker A:But you, yeah, but you kept, kept moving forward.
Speaker B:It's just there were lots of those kinds of things, including one I'm dealing with right now on, on startup number nine, where it was, we all thought it was gone, we thought it was over, it was done.
Speaker B:I let, had to let everyone go.
Speaker B:It was just down to me.
Speaker B:And now we've got an offer to buy it.
Speaker B:So what you said is perfect.
Speaker B:I'm hoping everybody who's, who listens to this, listens to that part of what you said very carefully.
Speaker A:And something that I want your audience to hear is that it is okay to feel scared, fearful.
Speaker A:Even now I still have anxiety and worries at night that keep me up late at night about certain moments in time, certain deals that we get into that I don't know how we're going to pull it off.
Speaker A:It is okay to feel worried and stress and anxious and scared.
Speaker A:That's okay.
Speaker A:Don't think that.
Speaker A:I don't want people to think that, oh, I don't have that ability to not feel anything, to just surf through problems and turn them into positive experiences.
Speaker A:No, the trick is to manage that fear and not to avoid it.
Speaker A:It's okay.
Speaker A:We're humans.
Speaker A:You're going to feel the pressure.
Speaker A:We all live.
Speaker A:The difference is that some people tolerate it, some people understand it and still move forward, and some people avoid it.
Speaker A:So the trick is to get work on getting a little more comfortable with those anxieties and those fears and tolerating pain a little more.
Speaker A:Just practicing getting, putting yourself in difficult situations, difficult circumstances where you develop little by little your comfort level with the business world and with life itself.
Speaker A:So you can't hide from pain and from problems.
Speaker A:So the more you train yourself, the better you're going to be able to solve those problems in life.
Speaker A:Maybe one day we'll talk more about my, my tech.
Speaker A:Tech experiences.
Speaker A:I have been involved in startups.
Speaker A:I've attempted to build companies in the technology field and give one recommendation since this is your area, your field of expertise.
Speaker A:My, my mistake.
Speaker A:I always preach, I always talk about never getting into a business that either you don't understand or that someone that you trust runs and operates or someone that, that, that specializes in that field that you're going to partner with.
Speaker A:And, and we came up with a wonderful concept that actually worked.
Speaker A:We had a template, we had a prototype of a company.
Speaker A:And it did very well.
Speaker A:But we had the wrong engineering team.
Speaker A:We outsourced the service rather than having our own in house.
Speaker A:And if, if you ever get into.
Speaker A:Into that particular area of technology, if you are not the programmer, if you're not the engineer or have someone in your team that truly knows what you're doing, it doesn't work.
Speaker A:It doesn't work.
Speaker A:It's very difficult to outsource these type of services because we were talking about outsourcing a lot of things now in the world, but building and creating technology in that particular field, it's very difficult to find someone that is going to translate your concept into your vision.
Speaker A:I had that failing experience.
Speaker A:Speaking of which, at some point we had put so much money into it that we had to walk away from, but we were not able to find the right group of people that could take this idea and build it and take it to the next level.
Speaker A:So partnering with the right team is a key ingredient in building a company.
Speaker B:I certainly agree with that.
Speaker B:That's a truism.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And at some point you learn to stick to what you.
Speaker A:As entrepreneurs, sometimes we have a lot of ideas and we all know that this is.
Speaker A:This has now become more common knowledge that ideas without the proper execution will go nowhere.
Speaker A:It is in the execution.
Speaker A:You can have an amazing idea with poor execution and it's not going to work, or you can have a mediocre idea with amazing execution and it can go places.
Speaker A:It can turn into something great.
Speaker A:So the action, the process of making things happen is more important than any brilliant idea.
Speaker B:What I say a lot is vision without execution is just dreaming.
Speaker A:Mental Olympics.
Speaker B:Jose, thank you a million times over for your time, this great conversation.
Speaker A:We're.
Speaker B:We're friends for life now.
Speaker B:You're.
Speaker B:We got too much in common.
Speaker A:I know.
Speaker A:This has been great and I hope we can do it again.
Speaker A:I will keep you posted on.
Speaker A:On my upcoming books because I plan to write.
Speaker A:This is crazy that people like, like you and I with such busy minds where our brain goes faster than our ability to actually do things.
Speaker A:But I have several books already in detail in my mind that I just need to make the time to start putting together.
Speaker A:So that's one of my life dreams.
Speaker A:It's on my bucket list to write several books and eventually just spend more time doing that.
Speaker B:I love it too.
Speaker B:It's been fantastic.
Speaker A:All right.
Speaker B:Your toolkit for startup founders.
Speaker B:Tool number one, reframe failure.
Speaker B:Stop calling setbacks failure.
Speaker B:As Jose says, there are only two types, temporary and total temporary failure is part of the process.
Speaker B:It's tuition you pay for your entrepreneurial education.
Speaker B:Total failure only happens when you quit entirely and walk away.
Speaker B:As long as you're still in the game, learning and adapting, you're not failing.
Speaker B:You're just a student getting better.
Speaker B:Tool number two Execution trumps ideas.
Speaker B:You can have an amazing idea with poor execution and go nowhere, or a mediocre idea with incredible execution and build something great.
Speaker B:Stop falling in love with your brilliant concepts and start obsessing over making things happen.
Speaker B:Vision without execution is just dreaming, as we like to say.
Speaker B:Tool number three Partner with expertise.
Speaker B:Never enter a business you don't understand unless you have someone you trust who truly specializes in that field as your partner.
Speaker B:Jose learned this the hard way in tech outsourcing.
Speaker B:Critical expertise rarely works.
Speaker B:Either become the expert yourself or bring the expert onto your core team.
Speaker B:The right partnership can make or break your venture.
Speaker B:Remember, setbacks are inevitable, but they're also your greatest teachers.
Speaker B:Keep moving forward.
Speaker B:The show notes contain useful resources and links.
Speaker B:Please follow and rate us@podchaser.com designingsuccessful startups.
Speaker B:Also, please share and like us on your social media channels.
Speaker B:This is Jothi Rosenberg saying TTFN Tata for now.
