5 Business Lessons I Learned During The 2016 Year

Towards the end of each year, I love to reflect and see what things I learned and what things I can do better the following year. In this post, I share 5 business lessons I learned during the 2016 year.

Time flies and it’s finally hitting me that the 2016 year is coming to an end. As each year comes to a close, I love to reflect on the year and figure out what things I learned, what things I could have done better and how I want to better approach the upcoming year.

2016 was an eventful year for me. I ended up having my first major startup getting acquired, StatFuse. I launched a handful of businesses, opened the doors to tons of other investment opportunities and developed partnerships with many great entrepreneurs.

In this post, I share 5 business lessons I learned during the 2016 year:

1. The right people are worth everything. 

In 2016, I really got to learn about how important the people around you are. I’ve always surrounded myself with successful people, but this year I found out that not all successful people are good people or the right individuals for you. By cutting out individuals who had a negative impact in my life and building relationships with top-notch people, everything began changing.

Being a solo entrepreneur is tough, you need friendships and connections to keep you sane. Not only that, but by meeting valuable people….you open up the door to many more connections and opportunities that can change your life.

2. There is nothing more valuable than time. 

This was the year that my team and companies grew the most. I ended up adding dozens of new employees to my companies that allowed me to leverage my time so much better. I always had employees and I always delegated tasks, but this was the first year where I did more management than day-to-day work.

Leverage your money and your talent to save you time and to create more time in your life. As long as you do that, you’ll be able to innovate and pursue whatever dreams you have.

3. Never make decisions based solely on financial gains. 

Money is a huge motivator for a lot of people in their lives. Whether we like to admit it or not, money does truly run the world and many decisions everyone makes is because of currency. I have learned this year how important it is to not just focus on financial gains.

By investing my money more, I quickly learned that it’s more important to invest in people and their passions/purposes more than the anticipated financial gain. The deals that looked to have the best financial gains ended up costing me the most money because the people behind them weren’t real with me. Some of the best gains I have gotten are from investments I made because of how much I believed in the person behind the concepts.

4. All it takes sometimes is an email. 

Entrepreneurship truly is about hustle. We were very proud to announce that my startup, StatFuse got acquired by LendEDU earlier this year. How did it happen? Well, we had come to a point in our company where we felt like we had grown it as much as we could and we thought it was time to let our baby go.

We simply went out and emailed companies in the education industry that we thought had the right team and would be able to continue carrying out our vision. We would write a short email letting them know that we are interested in selling our company and give them some basic information in regards to the business. We ended up getting dozens of replies and after a few months, we were able to lock in a deal for an acquisition.

5. Patience pays off. 

I don’t know if other entrepreneurs feel the same way, but I am extremely impatient. Being an entrepreneur, you’re in control so you constantly want to take charge and make things get done faster. However, sometimes patience and going through the process is crucial to your success.

This was a big lesson that I got to learn during the 2016 year. I learned how to be more patient, how to strategically deal with situations and how waiting for the right timing is sometimes a better idea than running with something immediately.

Conclusion

With another year down, it feels great to reflect on the lessons that I learned during 2016. What are some lessons that you learned in the 2016 year?