Seven Toughest Lessons Growing a $50 Million Business

(I do not throw around the $50 million dollar number lightly. It’s based on four different assessment tools that calculated our company’s market value.) 

Lesson #1: You will let problems destroy you or motivate you. 

Before I became an entrepreneur, I encountered two tormeting problems: financial stress and corporate politics. 

I worked for Apple.

And every once in a blue moon I would take my family to lunch. 

One day after lunch I handed the waitress my debit card. She returned a few moments later with a very uncomfortable look on her face.

“Uhhhh, the card got declined. Something about insufficient funds?”

I got up, walked my way back through the restaurant, out to my beat-up minivan to get my checkbook. It was a walk of shame.

And do you know who I blamed? Apple. 

Within months I was $24,000 in debt. 

And the more I got angry at Apple, the economy, the government, even my own family, the worse I felt and the deeper I sank. 

A few weeks later, our only house foreclosed. 

Dave Ramsey said something that hit me like a 16 wheeler: “Live like no one else, so that some day, you can live and give like no one else.” 

But trying to follow Dave Ramsey’s teachings made one thing painfully clear: I didn’t make enough money to pay for my family’s basic needs. 

I needed a mission. A dragon to slay. A chapel to build. Something tangible to dig us out of this death-by-paycheck cycle. But what? 

And then one day my wife calls me from the grocery store, "Hey Seth, our debit card just got declined and I'm standing in front of a line of 15 people waiting for checkout."

There is one thing worse than death: living without purpose. So I was left with two choices: change your life or die on the inside. 

Then one day at Apple, my boss told me to give a verbal warning to an insubordinate employee I was managing. So I did exactly as my boss instructed.

A few days later my boss told me to meet with her over video chat. I joined the meeting and was surprised to see my direct report there as well. 

In that meeting, my boss berated me right there in front of my direct report. 

I felt so humiliated that I just nodded numbly, waiting for the meeting to end.

The meeting finished, I turned to my wife who was in the same room, and said, "That's it. I'm done. I'm building a new life for our family."

I grabbed a paint can and had just enough room to spray paint on the wall in front of my desk: "Live like no one else..."‍ 

On that day, I set my heart on becoming an entrepreneur and weeks later started my first online business: selling vapes. 

I could have let the financial stress and corporate politics push me into self-medicating addictive behaviors. 

But instead I had to make a very conscious decision: I will use the pain to motivate me instead of destroying me. 

The best motivator on earth is not caffeine, your favorite song, or a stadium of fans screaming your name. The best motivator is pain. 

Lesson #2: Be willing to do what no one else is willing to do. 

We owned one car: a Honda Odyssey for our family of six. And the clock was ticking—miss one more payment and the Honda would be repossessed. 

One day my daughter showed me an ad on Craigslist. A new rideshare company called “Lyft” had just  showed up in town and was paying generous rates to new drivers. 

What if…I used my car, to pay off my car…driving for Lyft? 

With a full time job at Apple and building an online vape business, this idea was not normal. 

But you see, if you want an extraordinary life, there is no room for normal. 

My idea was so ABnormal that when I told my wife, KK, her immediate response was, “No. 

But I wasn’t asking her permission. I was asking for her input. 

My new schedule was really fun: Get up. Read the Bible and pray. Workout. Work for Apple all day. Work on the vape business on lunch break and in the evening. Drive to downtown Austin. Cart drunks from bar to home until 3am. 

As long as you measure your work ethic, bravery, and success based on average people around you, you will feel good about yourself, but you will never build a successful company. 

Just today, 13,699 new businesses filed in the US. Some of them are gunning for your exact market. And if only 10 of them are willing to do what no one else is willing to do, do you really think you will win if you measure your grind against your buddies from college?

Lesson #3: If you’re not willing to look stupid, your fear of people will eventually kill your business 

I’ll never forget one Uber passenger asking me what I did. 

“I’m an entrepreneur,” I told him. 

“Then why do you drive for Uber?” he asked.

I felt immediate embarrassment. It took me time to start swallowing my pride and accept reality: this is my situation and I must be willing to look stupid for now, if that’s what it takes. 

After about 500 rides, I paid off our car. 

But only weeks later I felt deep discouragement. My vape business was making just enough money to pay our electric bill.

I had no extra time. 

I had zero business experience. 

And my business was doing so poorly that if they could have, my business cards would have self-destructed from shame.

One afternoon I was buying a Starbucks drink for my wife. Following the Dave Ramsey method, I reached into the envelope to pay cash. As the Starbucks employee handed back some change, my eyes fell on a dime. 

And then I got this ridiculous idea. 

The dime is the smallest American coin for its value. 

How many times would I have to double this dime to reach $100,000? I grabbed a calculator. Only twenty times? 

I re-did the math. Yes. Double a dime 20 times and you have over $100,000.

Suddenly I knew what I needed to do.

I drove home and glued that dime to the wall of my garage as a reminder. 

I walked downtown with my dime, approached random people, shared my vision, and asked them to double my dime.

Some said no, some laughed, and some said yes.

More than once, I questioned my own sanity. Who on earth walks around doubling coins as a way of providing for their family of six? I had to fight that lying fear, and remind myself of the vision God planted in my heart. 

Every time I came home, I stuffed the money I had raised into a little white envelope on the side of my desk. 

I will never forget Frank, the owner of Mr. Pfranks hot dog store. He too had just left the corporate world to start out on his own. He had never met me before. But he believed in what we were doing and doubled my dime to $400. 

I took my $400 home, researched the health and fitness market on eBay, and concluded that everyone on planet earth and in every alternate universe had all decided simultaneously to sell in the health and fitness market.

With Pat Flynn's advice echoing in my head, "The riches are in the niches," I clicked on the "Everything Else" eBay category and happened upon "Funeral and Cemetery." An hour later I discovered that tiny cremation urns hanging from silver necklaces were selling like popcorn at a baseball game.

I found a supplier on DH Gate, used my $400 to purchase my first private label inventory, cremation urns, asked my wife to be the model, and listed the urns on eBay. 

Nothing happened for days.

Then one sale came in.

A few days later, another sale came in.

A couple weeks later the sales were no better. Was I doing something wrong? I felt like an idiot. And the temptation to let that feeling move me to give up and retract back into a normal average person was strong. 

But someone had told me that you could sell new products on Amazon. So I hesitantly decided to create a listing on Amazon for my cremation urns. I didn’t expect anything to happen. 

In the meantime, my wife and I stripped our house of everything we didn't need and sold it on Craigslist, eBay, and Facebook marketplace. 

When the products wouldn’t sell, I put them in a bag and walked door to door, knocking on the doors offering them for sale to our neighbors. 

When Atalie, my younger daughter, needed to do a fundraiser for her school band, she’d join me and we’d do a double offer at each house. 

I dreaded knocking on our neighbors’ doors during dinnertime. But this forced me to get over my fear and learn how to sell, right on the spot. Looking back, I wouldn’t exchange this hands-on training and memories with my daughter for anything.

I almost forgot about my cremation urn listing on Amazon until one day I got a notification from Amazon. "Sold!" 

The next day two sales came in. The next day five. Within weeks the cremation urns were selling 10 times a day at around $10 profit a sale. This is when I knew we were on to something.

I used all the profits to buy more inventory. All the cash we received for turning our house into a ghost town we used to launch another product on Amazon.

Our Amazon store began to grow. I launched another product. And another. 

We were the very first third party sellers to bring cash cannons to the Amazon market. 

I negotiated a deal with the American supplier and they’d ship these cash cannons to our house in massive boxes. We’d prep them, slap on the FNSKU label, and then drop them off at UPS

Those cash cannons got us to over $20,000 a month at $30-$40 profit a sale. 

One of our longest selling and most stable products was Amber bottle kits I had designed. 

These kits had to be assembled but paying the supplier to do it cut too deeply into our margins. So I’d get the whole family in an assembly line assembling these kits. Sometimes we’d work until deep in the night. I remember one night walking into the room and my son Ejay was knocked out on the couch, after assembling these kits for hours. 

One product we put a lot of time into designing was the cell phone mount kit. 

And the product failed. Hardly sold a single unit. But we kept going. 

We started making more money in a few days on Amazon than Apple paid me in a month. 

Through months of learning, trying, and falling and getting up again, my single dime had burst through the $100,000 goal. 

What would have happened if I had given up the first time I felt stupid. Or the 50th time? 

When my monthly income consistently doubled what Apple paid me I fired my boss. To this day, I’ve never had a 9 to 5 job since.

Lesson #4: Until your product solves a problem that people hate, your product is not a product.

My early YouTube coaching videos were an astounding success: I gained 23 subscribers in 2 years. 

It was so bad, I cringed when my friend Lonnie promoted my channel. But Lonnie’s advice changed everything. He said, “Seth, every time you run into a problem and figure out the solution, hit record on the video camera.” 

So I did. 

In a week my subscribers doubled and within 5 months I had people messaging me every day asking if I would coach them. 

So I started offering 1x1 coaching for a fee. 

But this became a huge problem for me. 

The one-on-one coaching sessions started to eat into my day. Before I knew it, I had created the same problem I left at Apple: I was a slave to my business. 

So one night, Josiah, my son and I drove to Dominican Joe’s, one of our favorite 24 hour 7 coffee shops. We committed to not leaving until we had created a scalable plan for coaching clients. 

We ended up with so much content, we broke it into 5 individual courses. 

And the community that grew out of this program was something we could not have predicted. 

That late night in October 2016 a new coaching company was born. 

For decades, China has been the country of choice for sourcing quality products at a low price. 

But this also creates risk for an Amazon seller. 

Think about it. You're sourcing from a foreign country whose language you don’t speak a word of. 

People can lose 10’s of thousands if they send money to a business on Alibaba posing as a supplier. 

So in 2017, Josiah and I decided to fly to China, learn how sourcing works from China’s perspective, and bring back everything we learned to Just One Dime’s students. 

In China we met our first Chinese sourcing agent whom we hired on the spot. 

This grew into a team of supplier experts which gave our students a competitive advantage. 

Just One Dime arguably produced some of the most successful Amazon sellers in the world. And dozens of them become millionaires, some of them, multi-millionaires. 

WaxUp brand being just one of many examples. 

The combined community of students and coaches ended up generating more than $100 million a year on Amazon. 

But our followers wanted more. So we traveled to New York, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, and London putting on in-person business training. 

This led to us throwing our first big conference in Las Vegas called, The Summit. 

Amazon, who had reportedly never spoken at any conference but their own for the last decade, spoke at our next big conference. 

But what happened next, I never could have predicted…

• I interviewed Robert Kiyosaki 

• Collaborated with Kevin O’leary at his condo in Miami. 

• Amazon headquarters asked to fly me to their headquarters to consult with myself and 9 other Amazon sellers. 

• BMW reached out to consult on the opportunity for Just One Dime to sell BMW’s accessory products on Amazon.  

• Forever 21 consulted with us on ways to get their products launched on Amazon. 

• Flying Solo invited us to feature a clothing line we had partnered with at New York Fashion week. 

Just One Dime had entered a season of brand partnership opportunities at a level I had never dreamed of. 

But there’s something here, very easy to miss. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature could tell you that our product was NOT revolutionary. Creating a training is not a mind-bending invention. 

Then where did all this glowing success come from?

One very simple concept: We solved a problem that people hated. 

People hated learning how to sell on Amazon on their own. So we provided that training. 

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said, "Great products are born from empathy for the user and a relentless focus on their problems."

So don’t chase innovation. Chase the itch people are desperate to scratch.

If you want to build something people NEED, solve something they HATE.

But a storm was coming.

Lesson #5: Beware of new opportunities. They can destroy your company. 

The year was 2020 and I had stumbled upon a new opportunity. Little did I know that this opportunity would destroy everything I had built. 

In their book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote, “The most violated law in marketing is the law of line extension.” 

(Line extension means adding new products under an existing brand.) They go on, “...line extension weakens the brand and can be the beginning of its end." 

The bigger your company is, the bigger a threat new opportunities become to your company. 

According to consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, few companies gain revenue when they expand beyond their core product. Yes, business news won’t let you miss the memo when a company experiences monumental success launching a new product. But this is the exception, thus, why it’s news. 

There are three primary reasons for this: 

1. The new product can cannibalize your brand.

Consultants call this “strategic misalignment.” Let’s say you have a thriving business. A new product launch idea lands on your desk. If you lean on the prospecting side of Myer Briggs, you’re probably thinking: this could boost our brand reach, increase our brand valuation, and potentially double our revenue.  

But if that product sends a message that goes against your core brand, it’s going to COST you. And not just in dollars.  

Picture this: it’s 1996, and McDonald’s, the king of Happy Meals and kid-friendly vibes, decides to get fancy. So they launch the Arch Deluxe—a burger “for adults” with fancy ingredients and a $150 million ad blitz. One commercial even showed kids rejecting it like broccoli.

But here’s the twist: the adults didn’t want it either.

Why? Because McDonald’s isn’t fine dining—it’s Happy Meals and playgrounds.

This new-opportunity-product collided with the McDonald’s brand and the Arch Deluxe flopped hard.

It’s a textbook case of what happens when you try to be something your brand never was.

The same thing happened when Colgate launched Colgate Kitchen Entrées. They tried frozen meals—and failed. 

2. The new product can drain your resources.

You cannot add a new product without also adding costs in time, money, and staff, pulling resources from your core business. 

And what happens when you pull too many resources from your core business? The same thing that happened when doctors in the 1700s bled out their sick patients. 

Starbucks tried this in Australia. But their rapid expansion with industrialized coffee instead of the bean quality Australians prefer led to store closures and a loss of $105 million. 

The third reason new opportunities can destroy your company…

3. The new product WILL complicate your operations.

Every time you complicate anything in business, your risk of failure spikes. 

No one proved this more clearly than Amazon with the Fire Phone—a product way outside their core. It strained their systems and cost them millions. 

Yes, if done strategically with a clear connection to the original product and distinct market differentiation, launching a new product line can succeed. But this is not what happened with my company. 

In the year 2020, a fashion company in Los Angeles asked if instead of training them how to sell on Amazon, our company would build out the Amazon arm of their clothing line. 

Around the same time an entrepreneur who won an investment on Shark Tank, asked us the same thing. 

A few months later a student of Just One Dime told us they didn’t have the time or expertise to build a store. But they had the capital and we had the experience. 

I realized in that moment, a door had just been opened: if we could teach clients to sell on Amazon, why couldn’t we build the entire business for them? 

Now if I could go back today, and tell the 42 year old Seth what the 47 year old Seth knows today, history would be different. 

But what made it even more convincing, COVID was fueling third-party Amazon sales to grow at nearly double the previous year’s pace. 

So after much deliberation, I set Just One Dime’s mission to launch a Done For You service that builds Amazon businesses for clients. 

I went live on YouTube announcing the Done For You service, and a flood of applicants came knocking. 

In total 7,429 clients applied and 13% of those became clients of our Done For You service. 

At first, these clients' stores went from zero to booming in record time. 

• Some clients' products sold out in 25 days. 

• One client did $65,000 in 8 months. 

• Another client did $32,000 in 2 months. 

• Another $1,000 in one day only 3 days after launch.  

But then something happened in China. 

Surging online spending drove up overseas demand. Increased overseas demand raised the cost of raw materials which raised the cost of products. 

And it wasn’t just products. Shipping costs skyrocketed. For example, a shipment for a single shipping container would go from $3,000 to $30,000. 

Shipments were delayed not by weeks but months.

Due to Covid outbreaks the Chinese government shut down suppliers manufacturing our products. 

All of this created massive delays as we tried to manufacture and ship tens of thousands of products. 

If we didn’t launch these products, we wouldn’t be able to pay our operations with 350 staff. And if we couldn’t pay our staff, the entire operation would shut down. So I poured my personal assets into the company to try to increase its runway. 

In spite of delays, most of our clients understand what we were up against. But some went legal, sending us demand letters and eventually lawsuits. Our legal costs spiked which only accelerated the cash flow problem. 

In a hail Mary moment we tried to file chapter 11 which would give us a chance to reorganize, hold off lawsuits, and successfully build these stores. But the timeline we needed was too long and our company had to file chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Lesson #6: Realize that online criticism will only hurt you,if you let it.

Angry clients blasted us online calling us everything under the sun. 

And the bankruptcy added fuel to the fire of online criticism. 

When people come after you, you need to make a decision: Will I choose to let this hurt me or make me stronger? 

If you allow what others say about you to control your behavior, you have already lost. 

Search the halls of history and see if you can find a single person who accomplished anything noteworthy, who was not vehemently criticized. Steve Jobs. Abraham Lincoln. George Washington. Martin Luther. Galileo Galilei. Socrates. 

Do anything of significance and someone will criticize you. That is the cost of leadership. 

And when it happens, consider that during Jesus’ life, more hated Him than loved Him. And yet, He changed the course of history. 

3,000 years ago, King Solomon wrote, "The fear of man brings a snare, but he who trusts in the Lord will be exalted.” 

Fearing people is a trap. Don’t give them that kind of power.

“But Seth, this person is slandering me.”

So.

“But Seth, what they are saying is a lie!” 

Okay.

“I need to defend myself!”

That’s what they hope you do. Your reaction feeds their sick addiction to negativity. 

The only person on this planet who can make online criticism about you, damaging to you, is you. 

So when someone throws a brick at you, catch it, stack it, and use it to build a stronger foundation.

Here is the funny part. We feel like the world is over if a few dozen people attack us online. 

But the reality is: you are almost invisible. Think about it. Hardly anyone knows who you are. Hardly anyone knows who I am. 

Let’s say that 1 million online people know who you are. Seems like a LOT of people, right? No. You’re invisible. 1 million people is only 0.0121% of the total world population. That's 83 times less than 1 percent! Put that on a bar chart and the bar graph representing one million is so small it's not visible to the human eye.

So let’s say that 1 million people do hate you. Does that silence you? Does that stop you? Of course not. 

Just go find 1 million other people who appreciate what you do. And ignore the rest. 

How do you do that? Choose your topic of interest and serve people relentlessly. 

I want to let you in on a little secret: between criticism and praise, praise has far more power to destroy your soul than criticism. Mankind is the closest to his own destruction when he is full of himself. 

Charles Spurgeon wrote, "A sensible friend who will unsparingly criticise you from week to week will be a far greater blessing to you than a thousand indiscriminating admirers, if you have sense enough to bear his treatment and grace enough to be thankful for it."

Lesson #7: It's okay to get knocked down. If you choose to get up again, you will rise stronger.

I lost a $50 million dollar company. 

But that loss ended up being one of the greatest gains of my life. 

Through that loss God reminded me that my worth does not come from my accomplishments but from what He did for me at the hill of Golgotha. 

He was murdered so I could live. He was tortured so I could be forgiven. 

Only God can use tragedy so perfectly, that it draws you closer to His side. And for this alone, I have eternal gratitude. 

My real battle was not angry creditors, fork-tongued lawyers, or people who try to build their fame off of someone else’s downfall. 

The real battle was inside of me. 

When you view life this way, you only get stronger. 

When filing bankruptcy, the form asked me to,“Enter amount of cash on hand.” I had no cash. My wallet was empty. 

And I was about to write $0 when my eyes fell on a dime sitting on my desk. 

So I wrote, “10 cents.” 

I was back to just one dime. 

But something unexpected happened in that moment. 

I had total clarity: I can start over again. 

And do you know what’s cool? If I had not gone through that experience, I would not be here today, teaching men of faith how to turn their expertise into a course, and sell it for a lot of money while changing lives. 

And may you never forget: you can change your life, even if all you have to start with, is something as insignificant, as just…one…dime.

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