BIO: Collin Mitchell is a 4x Founder, Father of 4, and host of Sales Transformation.
STORY: Collin’s first business was a huge success, bringing in annual revenues of $5 million in just 26 months. He decided to diversify the business and got into print services, something he had zero experience in. He hired a consultant to help him do the job and paid him tens of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, he never saw any ROI; instead, he accrued so much debt he had to pull the plug on the new service.
LEARNING: Know the industry first before delving into it. Understand your core competency before diversifying.
“Just because you think your idea is the best idea ever doesn’t mean it is. Validate it first.”
Collin Mitchell
Guest profile
Collin Mitchell is a 4x Founder, Father of 4, and host of Sales Transformation.
Worst investment ever
The first business that Collin and his wife built got to $5 million annual revenue in 26 months. This was fueled by sales and $0 spent on marketing. Now you’d imagine that they’d continue doing what they were doing since it was working. Nope! Collin was trying to develop all these ideas of diversifying the business and getting some recurring revenue.
Since the business was selling IT products, it made a lot of sense to get into IT services. Collin found these different companies to partner with and be their sales engine. The business kind of fell on his face. He spent some money trying to figure it out and didn’t have a lot to show for it. Then Collin tried another service selling backup recovery and cloud backup. He had a little bit of success there.
Collin later decided to venture into managing print services. You ship the consumables such as toner cartridges to the customers and have technicians that service the machines. Collin did a bit of research and found there was interest in this kind of service, but he didn’t have the experience to do it on his own. So he started looking around and found a consultant. He seemed like he knew this space and had some clients that were similar to Collin. Collin paid the consultant tens of thousands of dollars to get him to build this offering for these clients. He didn’t receive much value from the consultant. He went on a spending spree on marketing, purchasing fancy tools that the consultant recommended, redoing his website, and more to become an expert in something that he didn’t know a lot about.
Eventually, Collin closed that program down after building up some debt and didn’t have much to show for it. The money didn’t hurt as much as the failure to deliver and all the time and energy that could have been spent doing something else.
Lessons learned
- There are no shortcuts in business.
- Please don’t rush into a new industry quickly without educating yourself about it.
- Before you launch a product or service, first understand the needs of the clients, your capabilities, and the staff, knowledge, and experience that’s needed.
Andrew’s takeaways
- Many things appear more straightforward in business than they are, causing you to jump in without enough research.
- Know your core competency.
Actionable advice
Do your research and market validation before you take action on your idea. Just because you think your idea is the best doesn’t mean it is.
No. 1 goal for the next 12 months
Collin’s goal for the next 12 months is to change the way people sell through relationship building. He’s on a mission to launch 100+ podcasts.
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