Stephen Halasnik is currently the Cofounder of Financing Solutions which provides lines of credit to small businesses. He is a successful serial entrepreneur having built 7 companies over 25 years in the $5 to $20 million revenue per year range including an Inc 500 fastest growing company. Stephen is also an Amazon bestselling coauthor for the book, Crash and Learn: Lessons in Business and also hosts The Entrepreneur MBA Podcast. Stephen has been married for 25 years and has 2 teenage boys that he is actively engaged in helping to develop into confident young men who know what they want in life and are always striving for what makes them happy.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Stephen’s mentor of 20 years, Will
When business started difficulties overcame:
“the first thing you should know is I have dyslexia. I really didn’t know I had dyslexia. I knew I had an issue with learning in a certain way but over the years you tend to learn a little more about yourself. And I also had a speech impediment when I was younger. So, I had to overcome those types of things but I’ve been doing that my whole life. What you should know statistically is that 80 percent of all entrepreneurs are dyslexic”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Book by Malcolm Gladwell
- Malcolm Gladwell Books
Favourite Quote:
“the longer a business can stay in business the better chance you have of figuring it all out” Stephen’s Mentor
Recommended Online Resources:
- Google News is a news aggregator and app developed by Google. It presents a continuous, customizable flow of articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available on Android, iOS, and the web.
- Google Alerts – Monitor the Web for interesting new content. Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user’s search term.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“let’s go back to the original saying that my mentor said, that is ‘create a runway for yourself’. And what that means is… If you can eliminate the ‘where am I going to get my money from?’ or if you are not dipping into your savings to pay for your life or if you can reduce the amount of expenses that you have, hypothetically if you are very young live at home or wherever, whatever, you are going to give yourself a longer runway to make it happen, to make success happen. In general, it takes three years for a business to become it’s going to make it. And I’m talking about business to business I am not talking about retail. So, giving yourself the longer runway that’s going to be very helpful to you being successful in business ”…[Listen for More]
More About Stephen Halasnik:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” Woody Allen
Other Quotes From the Chat with Stephen Halasnik:
- “the way I’ve gotten to where I’ve gotten you got to be an incredible persistent person”
- “after my second company I actually hired a business coach to help me to become a better manager and a better people leader”
- “I think it’s important when you are building a company that you really learn how to manage people even if you are not managing your general line people and you have somebody between you and them. You still have to manage someone and being a good manager, I think is really important”
- “you have to define what success means to you. And I think too many people in this world define success especially as parents we define success is how much money you’re making… I think you’re happier if you define what success means to you”
- “being in business it’s a profession to be a business owner and it really takes you 10 years to be kind of a professional at anything”
- “if I’m starting a new business what can I do to lengthen the amount of time that it will take me to figure this out. How much cash do I have? How can I lengthen that so that I can kind of figure it out? Because when you are in a business you are always pivoting, you are always finding a new niche based on what you’ve learned and you want to have that runway”
- “now with the recession we had to retrench and slow things down a little bit and I use that in my thinking okay what’s my runway here. How long, how can we cut back so that we are here and we can take advantage of the upswing when it comes”
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