Lessons - The 8-Figure Bootstrapped Founder on Mistakes That Kill Most Businesses | Richard Capp - Milton & King CEO (HGTV Featured)

In this lessons episode, discover why patience and persistence are often the greatest competitive advantages in business. Understand how long-term thinking helps navigate setbacks and uncertainty. Explore the sacrifices required to build a sustainable company from the ground up and uncover practical lessons for turning small daily progress into lasting success. Okay, so as you're scaling this out, it starts to work. Then it turns into a little bit of a business. Then you're starting to apply, like, listen, we have some systems and processes. Now we're starting to make some money. Now we're, you know, finding better equipment. Yeah. What is the, outside of figuring out the basics of the business, which already seem to be excruciatingly painful to figure out, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you made when you first started out in terms of now it's working, but then I screwed this up or I hired this person that didn't work out or I don't know. Well, if somebody on the block, we didn't... we didn't have any big stuff-ups because we didn't have big budgets. Like, I didn't have any money. And I look at it now and I think, if someone had given me a chunk of cash back then, I would have, I'd be telling you a story about how I blew all the money on some dumb idea. But because it was happening so slowly, like, we had time to actually go through it. We'd think about it and then we'd go with the concept and then we'd think about it. There's time went on and we went, that's a crazy idea. Um... If there is one, there's one concept that... We did probably almost 10 years ago. We had these collections. We were selling through the Australian wholesale market. So we were selling through the few wallpaper shops that actually exist in Australia. And we were trying to figure out how we can compete with all the imported stuff, which is quite up-cheek, really. Even to be shipped from Europe into Australia, it's still fairly competitive. So we're looking at how we can do this. So we thought, well, what if we come up with custom swatch books where the shop can choose which designs out of our collection they actually like? Because rather than giving them a book that costs us the fortune to make, takes heaps of paper, heaps of time. And at that stage, we weren't good at making books. They were costing us a fortune to make just a swatch book, a walk-up swatch book. So I said, all right, let's do that. Let's do a custom book. And I got this guy to create this or build this site to do it. And... It took months for this to happen. And eventually we sort of got to the end and this guy hands over this website and I said, that is ridiculous. I'm not launching that to anybody. And we never launched it. So the concept was there. I paid the guy because he'd done the work, but he hadn't really delivered a decent product. So we sort of came to an agreement at the end and said, right, well, this is where it stops. But it's funny because we're coming back to that now. It's literally about to go live on our website. In a couple of weeks, we're going to have custom swatch books for our US wholesale market where they can go in and they can choose from our 2000 designs and go, I want that design, that design, that design. They're the designs I'm going to resell in my store to my clients. So it's funny. Yeah. Whilst we wasted the money 10 years ago, we've actually come back to it now. The business is in a point where it's actually going to work. So that's... But you know all those mess-ups, like you hear this quite often, like if you learn from the mistakes and they're not wasted, right? Now you have all the learnings of compounded over how many years. And I actually like, I really have to just highlight something. And we were just, again, very briefly before we turned on the camera, we were just speaking about how important it is to be patient. And obviously if people are listening, like none of this moved quickly. Yeah. I think that you as an entrepreneur, I think you're actually a very rare breed in terms of how you think through problem solving and the time horizon that you're committing to solve these problems. And I think that's why you're successful. Because I think a lot of people try and get something done in two months, three months, six months. It doesn't work. Okay, I'm going to give up. But you commit to this for your life and I'll figure it out. We were fortunate too. We were, you know, we had a few big advantages. We were, one, we were outside of the industry. So we weren't like, no one knew what we were doing. We were way down in Australia trying to figure out a digitally print wallpaper. So we were kind of, we were out of eyesight essentially from the rest of the industry. So we had time to sort of stuff around and do our thing. we hadn't made this big bold statement that we're going to change the world tomorrow. And we were in our 20s. We didn't have, we were both, when we started, we were both single. So we moved in with mum and dad. We put all our money together. Well, didn't have any, but we do enforce it. So whatever you... We were sharing the same baked beans. But yeah, so we were lucky that we were able to just sort of grow on. But as, and we sacrificed for the big picture. Like we weren't taking money. We had put nine years before we went on payroll. Like tell someone that who's trying to start a business, say it's going to take a decade. But tell an employee, it's going to be 10 years before you get your first paycheck. Don't be ridiculous. I'm out of here. We didn't know that when you started to take that low before you actually start by income. But essentially, we've been sales funded, very slow sales, but we've been sales funded in our growth. So we've just sort of moved along slowly. You've developed something, you launch it, that sort of pops you up again, and then you cruise along, and then you go to the next stage or the next stage. The problem is you then get to your 40s, and you've put everything into your business, and there's actually nothing in your business. in your private base camp, but your business is still going. And that's the thing, we're still cruising along. And people probably look at it and say, oh, they're so lucky to have done that. But we missed, we pretty much missed every party in our 30s because we didn't have the money to get to them. You know, you sort of lock yourself away to get this thing going. And now it's starting to pay off because we've had the vision to actually see it through. But it's come with a huge amount of sacrifice. People don't see that. They see the venture-backed, you know, SF tech companies that IPO in five years. And people are overnight millionaires, decamillionaires, centimillionaires, billionaires. Overnight by, you know, any objective standard, five years is a pretty quick time to build a business. But... Then they get burnt out. And I actually, I love the fact that you said it took you nine years to go on payroll because I've said this in different ways many times. Like if you commit to anything for 10 years and you find ways to learn from your failures and you iterate through all the problems that you have, you will find a way to become some level of success if you commit 10 years to anything. Like it's very hard to screw it up if you're a smart person. It keeps learning. So you just got to keep showing up. And that's what it's about. Like I had a landlord in Brisbane at one time who said, I just do one thing every day. In his business life, he just works on the fact that he does one thing every day that actually counts. And as long as you've got that sort of mentality, all right, we're pushing forward all the time. Yeah, it just sort of starts to build up. And then eventually you get to that 10 years and you look back and you go, Wow, like we've come a lot of that. And so my mother's actually, she came for a visit this week. And we were in the office last night and she hadn't been in before. She hadn't been in the US to check out what we've been doing. So we've had this facility here in Dallas for going on nearly two years. And she sort of walks in and she was blown away because she just didn't expect really what was so set up. She just didn't have that in her head. And you think, well, it's only been two years and it looks like it's been around a whole lot longer than that. But then you think back 10 years and it's... Yeah. Well, because you start to see, you know, like if you look on a chart, like you start to see you'll have this like marginal, marginal growth. And then all of a sudden, like when things start working and you start investing more and more into the business, you do that hockey stick growth curve, right? And that's where you're at after 10, 20 years of doing the business. But that's a beautiful place to be. But people would never, most people would not want to sacrifice nine years of their life without taking a paycheck. Oh, no, no. Well, we were surviving, but we definitely weren't doing it in stock. Like it was like... what have you got on this weekend? All right, well, you're going to have the money this week. You go, yeah. And there's, I'll stay up. You're budgeting which events they're going to go to. So, yeah, that was the thing. We did it essentially with sales funded the whole way through. And that really determined. It was always so dreamable then. It was always five years. Well... Well, your flat was always profitable. There's been some losses in there, but it made sense to keep going. So, yeah. And, yeah, it's all about, all right, that's our goal. That's where we want to be. What have we got to do to do that now? And we've never, Bryce and I have never had the mentality we're going to get rich from one sale or one client or anything like that. We've got to put lots and lots and lots together to make this actually work. And that's what we've just been trying to do. So, yeah, it's getting better. Now we have systems in place and we have a really good little team of people that know what they're doing. We're not doing all the work ourselves and everything. But, you know, I spent a lot of time working night shift doing customer service for the US. Now, even telling someone to get out of bed at 1 o'clock in the morning or 2 o'clock in the morning to sit in front of a chat, you know when the live chat comes up? Well, yeah, we're there. We're actually talking to you. And I'll be sitting in the dark at home in winter with my hoodie on, answering the talking on chats. You know, that's all that. It just takes... It just tucks. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.