My First Business
I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I began my business career like a lot of other children—with an unprofitable lemonade stand. At another point, I started selling small clay sculptures on a homemade display cabinet outside the corner pharmacy. These endeavors led me to spend a lot of time thinking about making money and establishing a business of my own. My family was intrigued by my entrepreneurial ventures. My father was and to this day is an editor/writer of textbooks, and my mom was a nurse. We were a lower middle-class family, and neither of my parents was very business savvy, but they supported me when I eventually dropped out of college to pursue a business career.
I think of myself as a serial entrepreneur because I have continued to purchase and start new businesses consistently over the last fifteen years. Now I’d like to tell you a little bit about my “starter” business, as well as some of what I learned (mostly by failing and making mistakes when running that first business) and how this experience helped me become better at what I do today. One of the most important lessons I’ve been taught over time is that many of the things you learn in one business can be applied to other businesses and that most businesses have some opportunities for synergies. I’ll write a post on that subject later, but for now, let’s talk about SCJ Pro Entertainment LLC, which eventually became Xclusive Productions LLC.
I launched SCJ Pro Entertainment near the end of my junior year of high school along with Chris and Jon, two classmate-friends.
The three of us pooled our resources and with $1000 in start-up money, we bought our first simple setup and software (PCDJ). Then we spent time practicing. And practicing. AND PRACTICING! In the summer before my senior year, I shadowed another DJ a couple of times (and played assistant for free). This man, who was Jon’s friend, was a couple years older than us. He agreed to teach us a bit about the business. Our first gig in the fall of 2006 was a school dance. This first solo effort was tough, but we got through it okay. During our senior year, Jon, Chris, and I managed to book some sweet 16’s, bar mitzvahs, and private parties. We weren’t raking in much money, but we were having a blast. During the school year, I established a new contact while hanging out at Guitar Center/Sam Ash, and with this man’s help, I DJed my high school’s senior prom. When college now beckoned, I was the only one of the three to remain in New Jersey. As a result, I bought the gear from my two partners, and even though Jon continued to help out, he could do so only on those occasions when he had come home from school.
By spending a lot of time at Guitar Center and Sam Ash, I got to meet a bunch of other DJs, and one of them introduced me to a DJ who had found success in the private party world. During the week, he DJed at a few local bars, and on weekends, he handled bar mitzvahs and weddings. He was not generally an independent operator. Mostly, he did subs for other companies; that is, his gigs weren’t his direct bookings. Still, he was talented and charismatic. He became my mentor. Watching him in action and picking his brain, I learned a lot about how to make events work, no matter what kind of crowd you were performing for. Soon, I was working for him—mostly for the experience since he didn’t pay me much. (I continued to book my own parties.) Still, the knowledge I gained was invaluable.
I quickly realized the real money came from booking events, not necessarily performing at them, since the booker took a cut of the fee without having to do any of the actual DJing. With this lesson learned, I trained a few friends to work with me as helpers and eventually as DJs. Now I began to focus on my online presence. My website was never top-notch, but I was a good talker. I worked on establishing a solid foundation of referrals while performing at events, and I also signed up at Respond.com and 800dj.com. Both sites provide leads for professionals, connecting them to people who were looking to book parties. After having a falling out with my mentor, I plowed on and kept the bookings rolling. I became friendly with the sales manager at Respond.com and also with one of the owners of 800dj.com. Both men sent me qualified leads regularly, but I established a special bond with 800dj. It had started to book some national gigs, and I was helping with the local staffing needs. During this period, I was building my own team, which could work 800dj’s gigs in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
At one point, the owner of 800dj needed to take medical leave, which led to a new opportunity. I had worked closely with him on a contract with an outfit in Florida. Guess (Guess Factory Outlets, Marciano’s, G by Guess, and Guess retail) had awarded this Florida company a national contract to handle some of its events. I continued to fill the staffing needs while he was on leave, and I managed to make considerable money for the company. I was also successful in leveraging the 800dj national network to grow my own network of DJs across the states and Puerto Rico. When the owner returned, he actually gifted me a subcontract, which lasted for quite a number of years. I made between $50-$150 per event and was often staffing 15-20 events/week. Business was booming. I was handling both my own private events and these new corporate gigs. On December 14, 2007, I worked fourteen events (not including Guess events). They were mostly holiday parties, and I felt like I’d made it. That month, I made almost $20,000 net. (I was only nineteen!) My network was big, my subcontracted staff was pretty reliable, and some of those contacts were snowballing, allowing me to get more and more contacts in the industry. The business, of course, wasn’t without its share of problems. Sometimes, DJs showed up late for call time, and once, a DJ didn’t show at all. Even though most clients were very happy, every so often, a DJ would go rogue and not do the right thing at an event. But all-in-all, everything went smoothly.
I took advantage of the contacts I’d made when I ramped up another project I had started toward the end of 2007: Sonicfiber.com. This enterprise was a small online store for DJ equipment, live sound, and musical instruments. By this time, the network of DJs I worked with had grown, and I could pitch my wares to them in focused advertisements. For many of them, I became the main source of the gear they needed. I’ll talk about Sonicfiber more in a future post, but now I want to focus on telling the story of how this part of my career played out.
As my other businesses also began to thrive, SCJ Pro became less important to me, and so I hired a very good people-person to run the day-to-day operation of sales and bookings. She expanded our bar mitzvah and sweet 16 businesses and did a great job running things. Unfortunately, because of the expanding number of businesses in my portfolio, I was splitting my time in more and more ways, and I didn’t do a great job of supporting her needs (improving my website, for example, or managing the staff). The fallout? Quality control suffered. I lost a few of our key venues that had looked to us as the go-to DJ in the past. Eventually, we went on to rebrand ourselves. We became Xclusive Productions, but we had lost the Guess contract, and my head was in other places. We did offer more than DJ services. (We provided photo booths, for example, as well as staging, uplighting, and lounge furniture.) But it was the beginning of the end. We merged into a bigger company, and I eventually sold my remaining stake in Xclusive Production. While I got stiffed most of the money from that sale, letting go of Xclusive Productions proved to be a net positive. I was now free to turn my attention to my other businesses, which were more profitable and had bigger scalability.
What did I learn from this experience?
Let me outline a few takeaways.
- The biggest risk in business is people—staff, vendors, and partners.
- Quick success can yield mixed results. If success comes too easily, it changes your expectations. You become complacent, anticipating that all your efforts will bring similar easy success. On the other hand, when you have to work really hard to get results, you tend to appreciate success more—and so you work even harder to get to the next level.
- Being known as reliable and likable is the key to building your network.
- Your network is vital. It will get you your next team members, client, or gig.
- Following up is the crucial, separating-the-wheat-from-the-chaff step that sets one company apart from all the others. I got many gigs that I was underqualified for, but I just kept pounding the phones and following up.
- It doesn’t matter how talented your people are. If you don’t support your business and team, eventually the business will fail.
- Finally, I learned a lot about growing a business both vertically (offering existing clients more services) and horizontally (acquiring more clients). Both are important to the long-term success of your business. Growing the list of existing clients is easier and less work, but you don’t want to “keep all your eggs in one basket.”