“The only thing worse than starting something and failing….is not starting something”.
Many people dream of starting their own enterprise, be it anything from a coffee shop to a slick Silicon Valley tech giant and everything in between, to have your own financial freedom and decision-making power is a dream worth chasing and so many do…
To be entrepreneurial has been a buzz word for decades now and stems from a French word most likely coined by the French economist Jean-Baptiste, who describes the word quite fittingly as an “undertaker” or “adventurer”. I suppose I see the irony in the etymology of the word since so many start-ups fail within their first year, although that is certainly not what Jean Baptiste was referring to. To be entrepreneurial is in essence to see a problem and then try and “work out a way in how to fix it”.
Matt and I first met in 2011, we spent 9 years working together and building up a strong professional relationship and ultimately a solid friendship, we spent many years enjoying great successes and internal promotions raising through the ranks whilst working for one of the best companies in the industry if not the world, but our successes didn’t come without its fair share of failures. We shared many gut wrenching disappointments and when we sat down over a beer on this particular afternoon to reminisce about our careers, not surprisingly, it's mostly the transactions in all their forms where we unsuccessfully achieved the desired outcome which spring to mind, “why did it happen?”, “if only” and so on, of course when things went well, and they often did, it was because they were designed to do so, it was our intention from the beginning, so no surprises when they did what we had predicted, but the disappointments are hard to leave behind…
Learning from your past failures is key to future success, and whilst I won’t speak for Matt, I have plenty of them in my backpack to draw inspiration from.
Back to our beer…during this particular catch up, Matt and I both realised that we had evolved as agents and as individuals, what we championed years ago that worked so well no longer sat true to our core beliefs anymore and we started discussing the industry in the UK, London, the US, Israel, Dubai and Asia along with any other countries and cities we could draw experience from, we compared and contrasted the markets, we effectively created a SWOT analysis ( A management term for undertaking a study to identify the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities) on the industry over a beer mat or ten and we realised that not only did we both have a yearning desire to start up our own company, we wanted to have the control to do so differently, it was our Jerry Maguire moment (cue Cuba Gooding Jr shouting “show me the money”).The answer was fewer clients. Less money. More attention. We wanted to pick and choose our clients as much as they chose us, no BS, no corporate politics no decisions based purely on self-serving motives, if we could build up a business based on these core values then the rest would come naturally.
The only thing stopping us marching into our respective offices and handing in our notices right then and there was lack of funding, timing, and guts.
It took us 5 years more before Matt and I seriously considered setting up what we discussed all those years ago and the decision and execution was bold and swift. We now had the finances to survive for a period and the timing felt right both personally and professionally, this was it, our moment to do something we loved… differently.
In January 2020, our first day back in the office following the Christmas and New Year’s holiday, Matt, and I both agree that we will tender our resignations on this very day. We say hello to our colleagues in our respective offices, engage in some small talk and then get to work finalising the end of a combined two decades working for the same company. In a bizarre twist of faith, our resignation letters landed in the inbox of the same person only a few second apart, completely unplanned, and totally awkward.
The next 3 months involved a lot of business planning. We went into this venture with our eyes wide open, but also without any real experience of what is required to set up and then run a real estate business in the UK. There were the legal frameworks we had to adhere to, various certifications we needed, accountancy (and this was a big one). The last time I did accounting was for two semesters at Business School 15 years ago, this was real life and bad accounting can sink a company fast – cue hours and hours on YouTube and QuickBooks watching self-learning videos to get a grip of how to run a business, and lets not forget the copious amount of emails and WhatsApp messages between ourselves and our poor accountant who effectively gave us a crash course in accounting 101 in a very short period of time.
As the 1st of April quickly approached and the basic framework for us to operate was in place, we were dealt the mother of all setbacks…
Former world Boxing heavyweight champion Mike Tyson said it best “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.
On the 23rd of March 2020 Prime minister Boris Johnson effectively locked the whole country down for the first time since the second world war and we were up the proverbial creek.
We had cash flow for about 6 months which included some money saved away, and a few loans taken out to survive. We had no backers apart from ourselves and with the country in full lock down mode we had no idea when we would be able to start trading and the projections on our bank accounts were looking bleak at best.
As luck would have it, Matt and I had met with several boutique agencies in London (initially purely out of interest) in the 3 months preceding our launch, who are now offering the well-known American model (self-employed broker model), what makes this model so effective is that you can start up without any real costs to your own business, the barriers to entry are incredibly low and in return for access to on line portals and the ability to market your property listings, along with an office to work from, experienced colleagues to assist when needed and photos costs covered, you cut the brokerage house a percentage of the income you receive from your fees. This as it turned out was our saving grace and bought us the time, that we needed to get set up on our own without haemorrhaging our personal finances. We also got a good taste of what self-employment was about.
During this stint in our business cycle, the learning curve was exponential. We had to learn how to be marketeers, videographers, content providers, accountants, AML (anti money -laundering) experts and designers just to name a few and that’s on top of the usual requirements for us to just do our normal job.
The most interesting thing we both noticed early on is that our stress levels dropped almost instantly, but the pressure levels went through the roof. Whilst you may think the two are the same, they are at least in my experience inherently different. Stress can rewire the brain, leaving you more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems, not the ideal ingredients for making good decisions or producing excellent work. Pressure on the other hand causes adrenalin to surge through your body on a regular basis, perhaps not the best for your heart, but certainly gives you at times an almost clairvoyant mind and pushes you to get the job done.
In the next 12 months, Matt and I established our client base, finalised our branding and website (that was a big one and a long process of which we are very proud of) and company ethos (no, not a corporate document that lists our beliefs, but a general agreement between us both on what we are setting out to achieve and how to achieve it).
We learned from many early mistakes of which the hardest one was getting our mindset to switch gears from the corporate mentality that we endured for the entirety of our previous careers to thinking more like pirates, but most importantly, we got our time back. We could work whenever we wanted from wherever we wanted (I’m writing this very blog 30,000 ft in the air somewhere over Germany), the key to our success is that we trust each other implicitly so neither party must feel any guilt about who’s working when and where and both parties are united in making a success of it. Time is the only thing you never get back and now we finally have some control of it.
September 2021 saw the launch of Smith & Ericsson as a brand, a year and half later than initially planned. We are still partnered with a brokerage house, we believe in co-operation with fellow entrepreneurs and to have a platform where we can share ideas, sales listings and meet up for a drink or two every now and again, stops us from feeling completely isolated and we both believe it’s an important cog in the wheel in making this, our eponymous business succeed in the future.
So, was it worth it…?
Absolutely… 100%! Not a day goes by that we have any regrets about our decision, apart from the fact that we should have done it earlier. It has been an incredible challenge, so many unknowns, so many mistakes and countless sleepless nights but it has been and continues to be so remarkably rewarding and intensely satisfying. We have no idea what the future holds, but for Matt and me, hopefully just the beginning of a lifelong dream come true.
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