When should I start my business?
Is this the business I should be building?
Should I partner with these people?
Should I advertise on Snapchat?
What about Twitter?
Musical.ly, what?
I’m selling online already, should I get my product into stores?
Should I open a brick and mortar storefront?
Should my business expand to another city?
Should we use Squarespace, Shopify, or build something ourselves?
Do I need an app?
iOS?
Android?
When should I hire?
Should that person get fired?
What should I do?
What am I even doing?
Where am I going with this business?
What is even going on?
Money?
Legacy?
Ahhh!!

Every entrepreneur has thousands of questions running through their mind and hundreds of decisions to make. The only thing an entrepreneur does is make decisions, and execute on them — whether themselves or hiring someone to execute for them.

Decisions, decisions, decisions; there’s no escaping it.
We, as entrepreneurs, have to make thousands of decisions and make them fast, every day, with never enough information for any person to be comfortable. That’s what makes people building anything at scale unique: the ability to make fast decisive decisions in the face of uncertainty.

Hi!

I considered writing this introduction at the beginning of this article, but saying, ‘Hi,’ didn’t seem as catchy as listing twenty-one questions; nonetheless, I figured, before I go on and help you solve your choice paralysis, I’d introduce myself.

I’m Jeremy Becker. I’m an entrepreneur based in Kelowna, BC, Canada. My childhood was spent selling whatever I could to make money. I spent my teen years building various businesses, which you can read about here, here, here, and how they failed here and here.

I believe in luck. You didn’t do anything to be born. You took no part in choosing your parents or where you’d have your childhood. That was luck. In business, nothing happens by accident. I believe there are opportunities and our ability to capitalize on the right ones creates success.

Work sets you up for these opportunities, it’s up to you what you do with them. No one will knock on your door and offer you your dreams. It simply doesn’t happen.

Sidebar: even if it did, would you want it? Would you want your dreams without the hard work? I don’t.

Legacy

So here we are. We know we need to work, we know we need to capitalize on the right opportunities, we know we have so many decisions to make that we don’t know which ones to make. What do we do? Luckily there’s a solution. It doesn’t make it black and white, but you can consider it like fog lights cutting through the mist; they’ll help keep you on the right track.

Initially, when I’m facing a decision, I run it through two filters in my mind.

1. When I’m 90, what would I not regret, or regret the least; doing this, or not doing this?
2. Do I have any intuitive gut feelings about this?

I compare the two and get started based on that. Usually, it’s about 40% question A and 60% question B. I strongly value intuition.

Sometimes things make sense on paper but don’t feel right.
You might be reading this and thinking, ‘okay, Jeremy, sounds great. But can you give me something more practical and applicable?’ Yes! Yes, I can.

Strategic Planning

I’ve always believed that when you know where you want to go, and you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, every decision is simple because you can lay it next to your goal and see if it helps you get closer or not. That is the foundation for this next part. But I’ll walk you through how to discover the Where and Why.

A few months ago, I was in a meeting with a personal mentor. He was talking about the strategic vision for his organization. He separated it into Mission, Vision, Core Values, Strategies, and Tactics.

The first two parts, Mission and Vision, are decided by the founding team. These don’t change; they evolve with the founders. It’s the core of the ‘Why’ you’re doing what you’re doing.

Mission

The mission is the why you do what you do. What are you trying to accomplish at the highest level? Think about this as your biggest north star. It’s what drives you over the next 40, 60, or 80 years of your life. It has to be something close to your heart that you’re passionate about that makes you get up every morning.

Vision

In short, your vision is the moment in your mind, a scene, a picture of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Maybe you’re a musician. Your moment could be standing on the stage. Everything is dark; pitch black as a murmur creeps through the 50,000 people waiting to watch you play. As you start, the lights turn on, and a roar of energy and excitement fills the stadium.

The purpose is to have the picture of your future as clear as day. What do you want your future to look like? What is it that you’re trying to build? And have that real moment you can go to in your mind for some inspiration.

The next part is a little bit more flexible. You and the rest of the leadership within your company discover these. Initially, in established companies these aren't fabricated or created, it’s what’s already happening in your business. Once they’re discovered, you can make efforts to evolve them.

Values

As you build your company, you will discover what you value. It’s important to differentiate what you actually value with what you wish you valued; words vs. actions.

My personal values are empathetic communication, integrity, and execution.

Strategies

This section fits partly into decisions made by leadership within your business and employees within your business.
Strategies are how you plan to accomplish execute on your mission. For example, the strategy could be to become known as a thought leader in your industry.

Tactics

The tactics are how you implement your strategies. They can change overnight. You have to adapt your tactics to the realities of the marketplace. You can’t sleep on these; you have to keep trying.

As Gary Vaynerchuk would say, this is “the dirt”. Everything else has been “the clouds”, but this is the nitty gritty. How do you plan to become a thought leader? You create a podcast and distribute it on iTunes, Overcast, Facebook Video, Youtube, and Soundcloud. You create micro-content to drive people from your Instagram to iTunes. You execute on Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories.

Once you have laid out your Mission, Vision, Values, Strategies, and Tactics, you can take any decision and run it through the filter. Here is my approach:

1. Does X in any way help me accomplish my mission?
   Yes? Does X fit into one of my current strategies?
   
   -- Yes? Great. Design and implement tactics for it.
   
   -- No? Let’s create and re-evaluate strategies.
   
   No? Do other people on the team champion X?
   

2. When I’m 90 what would I not regret, or regret the least: doing X, or not doing X.

3. Does this feel right or not? (Intuition)
   Yes? Do it.
   
   No? Don’t do it.
   
   Not sure? Explore it more, and revisit a set date later.

This is the approach I use to make all my decisions. I have a personal version of this list and a version for every business I build. I truly believe by knowing all these parts you’re able to streamline your decision-making process and execute much faster.
There is so much value in moving fast. Stop debating, just make shit happen. There’s no one but you. It starts and stops with you.

I really hope you found value in this post! If you did, share it with your friends :) if you’re interested in more I have to say, you can follow me around the interwebs under @iamjbecker.

Originally posted on Serial Disruptors

An authentic tale of self-awareness by a young entrepreneur.

Shortly after my thirteenth birthday, I started to pursue my passion for music. I had enough self-awareness to know that I didn’t have enough natural talent to be a singer or musician and instead focused on event production and later artist booking/management.

Around the same time, my dad was working in Penticton and over the summer I would join him. Penticton is about an hour south of Kelowna where we live. I started to think about producing outdoor events while in Penticton and because I spent so much time there, I decided to produce a live event.

“Summer Kick-Off 2011” was born and it was going to be awesome; live music, local vendors and exhibitors and the whole nine. I had everything prepared from permits issued by the city and fencing around the park, to musicians and ticket designs. It even went in front of the city council and was unanimously approved.

Last weekend while I cleaned my apartment I found my notes and in-depth execution plans, and I was both impressed and embarrassed slightly by my ambition and lack of realism. Unfortunately, at the time I hadn’t honed my sales skills quite enough and wasn’t able to secure enough sponsors or community support and ultimately had to cancel a few months out.

Fast-forwarding to when I was 16, along with my business partner at the time, over the course of 18 months I launched and failed my startup, Taste Locally. There’s more to that journey, but I’ve written about it before here and here.

I started to work full time for a few various reasons and started to spend my time listening to various successful entrepreneurs such as Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban, and Travis Kalanick. After a while, I began to feel inspired, refreshed, and ridiculously eager to get right back into entrepreneurship with a new sense of what I thought it meant to be an entrepreneur.

During a dinner with my friend Zach, we started to discuss the idea of creating a company together. We imagined a monthly subscription that would deliver straight to your door prepped meals that all you had to do was put together and cook.

Mealbox was born.

We spent several months pursuing this idea and ultimately decided we need to scale back our initial ambitions and start with a minimum viable product that the two of us could actually tackle. We began to pursue simplifying take-out by building a technology platform company for restaurants to be able to compete in a digital-first world.

Unique? No. Opportunity? Yes.

We were ambitious enough to embark on a journey to build a B2C marketplace and spend our time marketing to both sets of customers. Our consumer-facing app was able to track your preferences and your reviews and be able to suggest you take out options that were nearby, within you palate, and didn’t compromise your dietary preferences.

The idea was actually super cool. (But in retrospect it never would have worked in our limited initial market of Kelowna)

We began to tell everyone what we were going to do and how it would change their world.

We talked and talked.

We never launched.

18 months passed and we were only a little bit closer to launching a product than when we started. We changed what we wanted to do and talked a lot about our ideas, but we barely seemed to get anything valuable done. We pushed back our deadlines, simplified our MVP, and yet no execution really occurred. Sure we spent time in meetings with each other, debated our idea, and I wrote some code. However, ultimately, we never actually started getting customers. We were building something we hoped people would use rather than solving a problem we knew existed.

We began backwards to how anyone should be starting any product-based business. We spent our time trying to find a problem for the solution we built rather than finding a solution to a real, desperate problem our target market has.

Even though I told myself and everyone around me that I was in love with the idea, I had so many doubts that turned into a loss of passion.

Doubts about core aspects of your business can cripple you and drain your passion.

Now here I am, swallowing my pride, writing this post, and admitting out-loud something I never wanted to admit: I was faking it.

I was more in love with the idea of entrepreneurship than the execution of it.

I was wearing the wantrepreneur disguise: all talk, no results.

I went from being a real entrepreneur to some pathetic all-talk imposter.

The last two years of my life weren’t productive in building a business; I started to just repeat cool quotes from people who were actually building businesses.

Damn. I didn’t want to write this.

Where to from here, right? I’m 19 and I have no business-related success; what now? I’m fully aware that most people reading that will think, “Dude, you’re only 19. Of course you don’t have any success yet… Patience kid,” and you’re right.

If that was you, I’d say the same thing, but it still doesn’t change how I feel.

I considered leaving it out, but I felt since I was already being vulnerable and admitting I failed… (again)… I may as well be fully honest.

The past two years have really inspired me to become more transparent about my journey. To document along the way rather than writing a post at the beginning and end of every idea.

Ultimately, my fear of failure with Mealbox came when I told people “this is what we’re going to do”, instead of “this is the cool shit we are doing.”

Understanding the difference and following the latter releases you from the fear of failure. Talking about what you’ve done in retrospect leaves no room for debate. Share facts, not fantasies.

“Well done is better than well said.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

This, of course, should be taken with a grain salt. You’re not on your own because there are plenty of people in your world who want to support and help you. You have to find the balance between the two for yourself.

To me, it ultimately comes down to deciding who you want to be. Do you want to be an idea person or an execution person?

Vulnerability is tough and swallowing pride isn’t easy, but it is important when you’re wrong.

If what I wrote inspired you, or you enjoyed reading about my pain in a twisted way, it would mean a lot if you gave it a recommendation or left your thoughts below.

Small subtle update: I’m planning to document share my entire journey as an entrepreneur. If you want to follow my journey as an entrepreneur, I can’t tell you how to run your business, but I can show you how I’m running mine; mistakes and all!

Originally posted on my Medium

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about how I was tired of talking and ready to start doing.

Well.

Here I am.

Two weeks later and I’m ready to share what I’ve been doing and I’m fucking stoked.

Six weeks ago I had coffee with my friend/fellow entrepreneur/creative-genius, Michael Vlasaty. As we always do, we had a great conversation about life, entrepreneurship, and our ambitions.

Walking back to our cars from the coffee house I turned to Mike and said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to start a small box of the month subscription for tea. Something simple to play around with marketing ideas.”

Mike responded, “Why don’t we?”

After that, we chatted for another 45 minutes and figured out the basis of the business model and a list of potential people whom we could partner with that would provide us with the upfront expertise in tea. Domain expertise is a definite variable to success.

Fast-forward 47 days and we’re ready to introduce to you.

Meet Herbata

As long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with tea because with a little creativity, it’s possibilities are endless. It also makes a great products to sell because it’s generally lightweight and not intensely regulated.

Originally, Mike and I set out to create a simple monthly subscription for tea and market it. Cool. Since we knew original content was going to be a huge part of our master plan to promote Herbata, we also knew our rudimentary understandings of the tea world wouldn’t be enough. Within our ambitious timeline, there was no possible way for us to become true experts.

I’m not a fan of ‘fake it until you make it’ because people sense bullshit. They sense it fast.

We knew we needed a few other people and so we spent about two weeks and rounded out our founding team with a few more lovely humans. We had everything we needed to build something amazing.

The Evolution

After our second conversation as a team we started to discover that simply sending tea every month wasn’t that exciting. What we wanted to do was share the most authentic experience that tea provides.

That’s exactly what we’re doing.

Herbata is an expedition into the world of tea unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before. We are Artisans of Experience that will tour-guide you through your journey of discovering your palate and the world of tea.

Herbata doesn’t just send you tea, we provide you with a complete experience. From the moment you order, to the moment you receive your box, to the moment you open it, and the moment you drink your tea; every piece of the experience is intentionally designed.

We’re driven a simple belief: experiences are valuable.
I’ve designed digital experiences for years and I’ve begun to move past designing with bits and start designing with atoms. This is the first of many personal experiments testing my belief.

Let’s Test It!

Our team believes in Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). What’s the smallest version of our idea that allows people to experience Herbata without spending months or years developing something people might not actually want?

With this in mind, we wanted to launch fast and utilize an ecommerce platform that already exists. We decided to go with Shopify. Getting prepped for our launch last night while the team was working away on product shoots and some last-minute content pieces I discovered our solution for recurring subscriptions within shopify were ridiculously sub-par and in some many cases of testing it were just broken.

Ah! The heartache. We decided to continue pushing forward and launch today anyways. Therefore, right now, any purchase is just a One-Time Purchase.

We’re working on adding the recurring subscription in the coming weeks! So stay tuned for that!

Join Us

I want to personally invite you to join us at Herbata. If you’re interested in subscribing for yourself, we’re launching a One Month Subscription for $20. If you’re interested in getting this as a gift for a family member, we’re also launching a 3 Month Gift Subscription at 15% off! Instead of $60, get it for $51 right now. It’s the perfect Christmas present!

Sales pitch aside, the amount of effort and love the team has poured into Herbata to make it something special is tremendous. I’m so proud the work the team has done.

We moved magnitudes beyond our original idea of a box-of-the-month tea subscription and into a whole new realm with what we’re launching. Visit us online at www.herbata.co.

I’m so excited for you to try it.

Originally posted on my Medium

The journey of rediscovering Kelowna.

How it works.

Each deck of Taste Locally contains 52 cards. 20 cards are good for $10 off your meal price at that restaurant that is on the card if you spend $30 dollars or more, not including tips, tax, or alcohol. There are 9 free coffees in the deck and 15 wildcards We approached local restauranteurs and pitched our idea. Bam! suddenly we started to gain momentum. This meant, I started to loose some sleep.

Each restaurant sells Taste Locally decks in their stores and accepts cards and offers out the discounts for as long as the deck is valid. Logan and I really pursued this with the idea to increase traffic flow to local businesses during the hard months. Because of this, we managed to develop a way that there is absolutely no upfront expenses for anybody that has signed up.

In addition to increased traffic flow and free marketing, each business owner stands to make 50% off every deck they sell. We’ve had people not even believe us when we described the idea. Is it ambitious? Absolutely.

How could I forget? You can even play any games with these cards! Neat, eh?

Why?

This is the grand question isn’t it? I’ve lived in Kelowna for over 10 years, I love it here. The people are gold! True, honest, and proud of the community. Because of this, I wanted to find a way to give back. Having invested hundreds of hours into the creation of websites, mobile web apps, card designs, and various other things, I truly believe in the idea.

Kelowna is currently on the edge of change and it’s time that we make a decision: (ps, there is only one right answer).

1. Continue down the rabbit hole of buying all of our food that we dine out on at huge global chains and support international CEO’s buying their fourth or fifth estate
2. Support the local entrepreneurs. The mom and dad who are working to have their kids in hockey, dance, and soccer. The local business graduates that are starting their first business and working at paying off their students loans.

Don’t get me wrong. CEO’s of large companies have done an incredible job building business empires, I respect their wisdom and knowledge in the business world. However, it’s time we go back to our roots. No longer will we need to eat food imported by trucks that drive across the nations and deliver food, when we can simply eat the food from out backyards that are being served in the local businesses.

Oh, and did I mention that $1 from every deck sold goes straight to the Kelowna Food Bank. Bam. What a Win-Win-Win! You saved money, supported a local business owner, and even helped the food bank. Way to go you!

The Big Dilemma.

From the beginning Logan and I chatted about where we should get these decks printed. We knew we had to get them printed in Kelowna. After calling almost ever print shop in Kelowna having quotes up to 700% over our budget it started to seem hopeless. We had quotes to print in China for 200% under our budget. It was tempting, but we simply couldn’t do it.

I sent out a tweet and some texts to friends. The most common response was I received back was Kelowna InstaPrint. Logan went over there the next day and explained our situation to Tyler. We emailed some, I sent him some mockups and he got back to us and met us exactly at the top of our budget. It was incredible. Huge thanks and shout out to them!

The Invitation.

I want personally invite you to our Taste Locally launch party that is taking place on November 15th, 2013 at The Bike Shop Cafe. We will present deck six month edition of our deck. This is really our trial run to see how the community responds. Do you think this is a great idea? Come out and support us! Buy a deck or two. They are fantastic as stocking stuffers. Wow, you totally forgot Christmas is soon, hey?

Get Involved.

I want to challenge you. Rather than buying a coffee at a huge chain restaurant, check out a local coffee shop. Whether they are part of the deck or not, we should be supporting local businesses over the large amounts of international organizations that are just working for the margin! Get in the game. Buy a deck from www.tastelocally.co (when the website launches in a few days. I’ve just got a few more pixels to push and some characters to type.), eat out, redeem, and feel great! You are a champ!

UPDATE: Unlike previously posted, we have updated the price for the Christmas season! Decks are available for $25 online www.tastelocally.co or in store at any of the restaurants. If you want one for yourself and one for the stocking of your loved one, you can get two for $40.

Originally posted on my Medium