2023-07-01 18:47:28
We started this path together a long time ago, perhaps too long. And today, twenty years later, I sit in front of the computer to tell you, to tell myself how screwed up the road has been since that gloomy year 2002.
And no, don’t expect me to give you a glossary on how to succeed setting up a company without any training. Do not be an idiot. I have it, yes, university too. I speak several languages, but that didn’t make it any easier, not at all.
I just want to tell myself, and tell you how complicated it was, and not with encouragement as the English would say, to show off, if not to warn you. If by chance you still haven’t noticed, in fucking life, nobody gives anything away.
We have all had the idea, or have it, either by “The wolf of Wall Street”the why “Money never sleeps” that building a (relative) successful company automatically makes you a millionaire, lavish dinners, zarándula, celebrity, and with the forced feeling of having to own 48 restaurants in 33 cities around the world. And together with the PER card (leisure boat skipper), they give you a zodiac and a yacht to show off your palms in Saint Tropez.
And it is that my reality is much more similar to yours, than to what they are thinking, and no, it is not a joke. Having made this company successful is up to me, to those who work now or have worked with me. But what goes out the door to the outside have never been my words.
The data, the prizes, the recognitions, seeing that more and more people are working here, are the ones that shout everywhere what I have always kept to myself. And I hope to continue doing.
I bill more than the competition, and we probably earn more money than many of them combined, and I think that this is a small indication that we are doing something, and that we have done it well. But still, I have never thought that we were the best.
The world out there wasn’t always as small as it is now.
It is at least delusional when I see many companies with a few months of experience in the market how they sell themselves as market leaders, the largest stock, the best service… all that string of nonsense bullshit trying to get your head out at a fair where the hammers are carried by others. And those are none other than the customers. Let them rank you, and praise you, if you’ve done it right. And focus on them, on offering them a good product or a good service, not on the rest of the nonsense you’re thinking.
It was the year 2002…
Prisoner of my own rebellion, I have taken that thought to the last consequence.
At 22 years old I could have chosen the simplest path, find a job and specialize in something that I really like, but fortunately or unfortunately, it was not like that. I decided, we decided to create a business, as a fellow worker, Elia Guardiola, told me, “undertaking sucks, but in the end, it pays off”.
And the reality is that twenty years ago I had no idea how to create a business and I hadn’t been trained for it either. To this day I still don’t know what it says on my university degree, I never went to pick it up.
When it all started, we didn’t know anything about business plans, how a company is organized, how it is managed, marketing, marketing? what is that… And then came the positioning of the web, SEO, financial management, etc.
But above all this, it had three quite clear pillars that were key:
Never spend more than you earn (obviously) The company’s money is not your money. Never have partners.
The best thing about these three things is that surely your mother or father, or your cousin from the village, has ever told you, and we all know it. But really few people are capable of putting it into practice, there is the quid of the question.
Youth and the desire to survive out there led us to overcome all the problems that came our way. He had no experience, no money, no skills for negotiating or leadership. And when the first order arrived, we did it right, damn we did it right, and the customer repeated.
At least I had two good things, or so I thought, I was and I am, decisive and organized. But I started alone and without money. He bought, sold, cleaned and prepared the orders. Already in 2006-2007, it was my partner at the time who helped me and in 2007 we were able to hire our first employee.
They were two fucked up years, a lot of work but we didn’t waste time. In addition to working and studying, I tried to surround myself with people who knew more about the sector than I did in order to make better decisions about what, or what not to do. I tried to observe and learn, realizing that if my intention was really to grow, I had to know how to lead a work team.
No cash no party
It is as absurd as it is true. I started working with other people’s money. The setup was simple. Someone bought me a piece of equipment, with that money they paid the supplier, delivered the merchandise, and reinvested it. Saving and reinvesting in the business until we have our own small stock.
I was educated as a child to save, it seems simple, right? in practice it is not so much, but we were able to do it. And it worked. My grandmother used to say “You don’t have to be stingy, you have to know how to manage money”. It’s silly advice, but it’s good.
It’s always good to have someone around to support you.
Along with the lack of preparation about anything business related, I also ran into another problem that reading books and studying doesn’t always get you out of. Little family support. Undertaking is sometimes lonely and stressful, especially if you don’t have someone dear to lend you a hand.
I also tried to keep my friends close, but they were thinking about other things, and we drifted away. Luckily I had a lot of support from my family, mine that I had created. The support of my partner, who we continue to work together, and who was decisive. She helped me tremendously and continues to do so, and possibly without her, I don’t think we would have made it this far.
On the other hand, my business circle, from which I surely learned so much at first, later I think it became too small for me. And I don’t say this in a bad way, simply if some people are guided by God, I was guided by ambition. And at that moment I thought that the best marketing strategy was to differentiate myself from the rest, and for that, I had to stay away. The temptation to copy the neighbor and have similar results is very greedy. I went with everything, both for better and for worse.
Who do I trust?
Entrepreneurs are people, with doubts, problems, insecurities, just like you. My solution to escape from all this was to soak up the books and study everything that fell into my hands to understand what each department does, what its powers are, and how to manage it.
Over time, one learns to trust himself and in a way, not to give up. Without sounding pedantic, I think the difference between those who win and those who lose, sometimes is that the first ones jump in, without fear of what might happen.
Once you dive, you dive, win or lose, you’ve seen it, you know what’s behind the dark door. And that courage will always be with you. Just as an athlete wins by competing, an entrepreneur makes decisions, right or wrong, and learns. And as Oscar Wilde said: “Experience is nothing more than the name we give to our mistakes”. Yes, and if you are also smart, you learn from them.
The business world is not, nor should it be, cyclical like that of an animal. It is born, grows, reproduces, (wins) and dies. Here to live is to succeed, to stay, is to succeed, an ephemeral success of a year, a day, a few months is worth nothing. Not long ago I heard on the radio that the average life of companies created in Spain has a life of 2 years, more or less. Dear friend who is reading to me, we have been around since 2005, and we are in 2023, do the math. We have never burst the market, you have not seen us on TV, or maybe yes, we have not done commercials with famous people. But each year we have grown, quietly, little by little. That person who came to work with me 7 years ago and is still here, is to succeed. May your project be theirs, is to succeed. Not giving up is winning. Surviving when others don’t, damn, that’s success.
But not everything is wonderful in the kingdom of heaven, not everything goes well and sometimes there are people who want to deceive you or whose intentions are not sincere and they are simply going to take advantage of you and go on with their lives. You will have them too, but be prepared. It happened to me, they were complicated moments of great stress, but in the end in a company, if it is well organized, nobody, and I repeat, nobody, is essential.
That’s why try to surround yourself with people who always know more than you without fear that “they might steal your idea”. When you work with people you can trust (difficult but possible) everything becomes easier and more fun.
never stop studying
When you’re young, it’s the last thing you’re thinking about. There is always something more interesting to do than study, especially when you feel compelled by the university, your family, institute, etc. But sometimes there comes a point where curiosity, and above all necessity, join hands for the common good. That as I said before, it is your own survival. That of your company, your employees, your family, or your own.
And all these hours of study pseudo forced by circumstances did not make me a crack in all these areas. Sales, marketing, SEO, SEM, accounting, web design and a long list of topics. You cannot know everything in life, but what did help me, and continues to do so, is that nobody “sell you the motorcycle”.
When a company comes to sell me something or to convince me that what they offer, do, create, is the ostia, I have sufficient analytical capacity to know if what they sell me works for me. If it’s good but it’s not worth it to me, or if directly, it’s crap. And believe me that knowing “filter” saves you a lot of trouble.
Don’t stop, ever.
One is not always right, one does not always make the right decision at the first change, I repeat, businessmen also make mistakes, and by simple arithmetic, when making many decisions a day, the balance is not always positive.
And precisely for this reason, and with this we are ending, we must not stop, we must not stop making mistakes and learn, we must not let one mistake, one bad decision or twenty-seven bad decisions weigh me down, weigh you down, screw us and stop us
At infocomputer we carry out many projects at the same time, of all kinds, in all departments. Whether in sales, warehouse, technical service or the marketing guys, not all of them turn out well, not all of them give us what we expected, others do. But we keep going, we keep thinking, we keep creating and we keep on with the fucking restlessness of the first day.
Life in general, as you may have already realized, is continuous learning, and in the business world, the same. But here you still play a little more. We are almost 50 people working, who in a way have linked their time and enthusiasm to a project called infocomputer. And the one I can’t afford to play the idiot and let him go to hell, either due to inaction or my bad decisions.
That’s why one with time, and I insist, above all for the simplest need of all, survival. I have developed a mental state, a mindset that sounds better, that does not allow me to stop. I can’t stop thinking, creating, having birds in my head in the form of ideas looking for a way out. Cannonballs in my brain trying to shape something that is there, and I still can’t visualize.
And I don’t know what will happen when those ideas don’t flutter inside me, when I don’t have a notebook full of projects to implement, when the mindset in which I’m up, loses its lead…
This slab of responsibility is sometimes hard, sometimes it is too heavy, but I want, desire and need for all those around me that this continues to grow.
See you soon.
Mihai Traian Rusu, Founder, President and Marketing Manager Infocomputer
#Letter #years #News #Economy