S5E31 – The 4 Costly Mistakes That Lost This Founder $200K: The Crucial Lessons Every Founder Must Learn with Ricardo Jimenez

• (00:41) – Show intro and background history
• (04:13) – Deeper into his career journey
• (12:19) – Commercial break (TYKR mobile app)
• (13:00) – Deeper into his business model
• (19:07) – A bit about his book
• (24:00) – Deeper into his career challenges
• (29:06) – What is the trigger point for his business growth
• (31:04) – Guest hot tips
• (32:50) – Deeper into his book and guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Show Intro

Introducing Payback Time, the podcast for entrepreneurs looking to build and scale their startups, gain access to actionable tips, proven strategies, and valuable data that can help you avoid mistakes, skyrocket sales, and optimize profits. Your business breakthrough may just be an episode away.

 

[00:00:18.110] – Guest Info

If you’re building a startup and don’t want to lose a ton of money, this episode is for you. My next guest shares his founder’s story of building a toy company over the duration of about six years, where lost about $200,000. In this episode, he shares four key lessons learned that can help you avoid the same mistakes. Please welcome Ricardo Gimenez. Ricardo, welcome to the show.

 

[00:00:43.560] – Ricardo

So I’m very happy to be in your show.

 

[00:00:46.010] – Sean

Thanks for joining me. So before we dive into your background, can you tell us something about yourself that most people don’t know?

 

[00:00:53.800] – Ricardo

Yeah, I’ll share something about the present moment, which is that we’re doing I’m doing this call from a meditation center in Manzanillo, Mexico. I’m in the Asia Center. I came here a couple of days ago, and I’m planning on staying here until the end of August, so almost a month. In the journey of self-discovery, giving, and getting in touch with myself.

 

[00:01:21.390] – Sean

Now, we’re talking about this offline for context, so people know exactly where you’re at. You’re just south of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific side, is that correct?

 

[00:01:30.700] – Ricardo

It’s a few hours away. I tend to forget if I’m north or south, but it looks like you know that it’s south. So yeah, maybe a few hours south.

 

[00:01:39.460] – Sean

Okay. I was telling Ricardo offline that one of my favorite places to visit in Mexico, it’s beautiful if you can go to Puerto Vallarta and the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic. Of course, people think of the Atlantic. You got Cancun and Tulum and nice places. But gosh, it’s night and day difference on the Pacific side. So where you’re at is a beautiful area.

 

[00:02:02.020] – Ricardo

Yeah. And we were talking about Baja California. I was there a couple of years ago. And to see this mix of desert and cactuses by the sea, that’s an image that’s such a powerful image to see a cactus next to the sea. It’s really strong. It’s really break-taking.

 

[00:02:26.420] – Sean

Yeah. You know what? You’re 100 % right, because You go to, for example, we’ve got friends in Arizona. We’ll keep this short, and the audience is like, get to the good stuff. But Arizona, you got cactus everywhere. But where’s the body? Where are the bodies of water? Well, that’s not the case. But you go to the Baja, like you said, the peninsula of California, Cabo, there at the very end, which is another favorite place to visit. But you’re right. It’s the cactus right next to the ocean. It’s a very unique-Yeah. Very unique scene.

 

[00:02:56.970] – Ricardo

I love that. I’ve only been there once, but it’s just too bad. So I love to travel to Shera, and I travel a lot. And I just sometimes wish things were a little closer so I could go do in a more practical way some of the things that I love to do because I love that. There’s so many places of the world that I love to go back to. But at the same time, there’s other new places and trying to have a somewhat normal life. I’ll share you a different fun fact. So my number one, my only resolution this year was to travel less. I know this may sound contradictory because people love to travel and they want to explore the world, and I do as well. But sometimes I think we go so much to the other extreme because it’s very attracting, very entertaining. One more retreat and one more retreat, and one more friend, or business people or a new country to discover or to do a workshop here. And I feel like I’m very fortunate. So I have all these opportunities and I I want to say yes to everything because it’s more fun, but I need to balance that with maybe the more healthy regular, balanced lifestyle as well.

 

[00:04:10.560] – Ricardo

So that’s a little bit of an inner battle that I have.

 

[00:04:13.210] – Sean

Well, hopefully this month long or so meditation retreat you’re on can get you on the right track. But yeah, without further ado, let’s dive in. If you could take some time here. Tell us your career background. I’m very excited to jump into this and learn about what did you do and what lessons learned can you share with the audience. So take it from here.

 

[00:04:36.500] – Ricardo

Sure. So I’m from Spain. I lived there until I was 20. And then I went to do my last year of college to London. I did my last year of college there. It was a lot of fun, made new friends, experimented a lot. First time I lived by myself, without my parents. And then the following year, I came back And this was to look for my first job after I graduated undergrad. And this was right after September the 11th. Everything was very, very slow. Maybe I moved to London, I don’t know, maybe one, two days after. So it was hard to imagine or I didn’t know the repercussions. Everything got down. And I started looking for jobs in London, and I ended up working as a barista in a Starbucks after I graduated. And there There’s lots of lessons that I have from that time. I want to share. It was the first time that I made my first earned money. During the summer, when I was younger, I had traveled, but this was the first time that I was having my own job. And I’ll share very quickly some lessons. The first lesson is that you learn to see what is not visible, meaning if the tables are clean, trash bags are empty, it’s because someone has been doing those things.

 

[00:06:06.560] – Ricardo

You learn to appreciate so much what’s not apparent. I also learned And I learned too many. So taking my time here, I learned a couple of other things. I was promised a promotion very quickly, and it didn’t happen. Not because of my… It didn’t happen because I guess it’s always Very often you promise something and then it takes much longer. And then I realized that my boss’s boss had also been promised a promotion and it hadn’t happened for him in a few or four years. So this was the manager of the Starbucks. He had been promised to be the area manager, and it hadn’t happened for him in a couple of years. So we tend to miss… We focus on ourselves and our problems, and it’s sometimes hard for us to believe that the same problem that we’re having, we feel like there’s a guilty person that’s making their commitments, but at the same time, someone that’s far above from them, it’s meeting their commitments with them. All these new inside relationships about things work because we tend to idealize how things were supposed to be. I think when you’re young, you want to give your best, and you haven’t had this encounter with reality.

 

[00:07:24.990] – Ricardo

And then one more insight is that companies can have all the policies in the in the world that they want. They can have all these rules and they can hire, but at the end, they’re in the mercy of people. Their front people are interacting with their customers, and And then sometimes you could see that some of the baristas were not giving the drinks that had been ordered because they said, Oh, they’re not going to notice. And I’m not getting too much into detail, but it was very, again, insightful to realize that we can try to have systems, processes, logistics, rules, but at the end, companies and everything is at the hands of people. And another lesson that I have that we’re going to have time for more. There’s more. But that was my first job. Then after a few months, I went back to Spain. I worked in my first office job for Iberia Airlines, the Spanish Iberia airline company. And soon after I went to Indonesia to work in the Spanish Embassy of Indonesia, working in business relationships between Spain and Indonesia. So this was not the diplomatic side. It was, let’s say, the economic business development side of the government.

 

[00:08:51.050] – Ricardo

And I did that for a year. Incredible, incredible year. Lots of stories. Was the first time I lived in Asia, and I went to almost every country in Southeast Asia. I learned the language very quickly. You will think that Indonesian, it sounds very exotic and complex and intimidating, but they share our same alphabet, almost our similar sounds. They have no future, no past, no plurals, no genders, no articles. So very quickly, I was… I’ll say I was going on dates with girls that didn’t speak English, and for sure, they weren’t speaking Spanish. And we weren’t talking about how an engine works. It was very basic conversations, but it’s very gratifying to move to a country and very quickly learn the language and be able to move around. And after that, I moved to Miami. We started a company, an office for a company that did the first… I don’t know if you remember the first ringtones and wallpapers. This was right before the smartphones. So we were doing this. And then I took a year off to travel. And then I went to India, Italy, a few meditation retreats. And then I went to business school at Duke.

 

[00:10:13.340] – Ricardo

I did an MBA there. And then went to Austin to work for a very big computer company there. After four years, I was laid off. And I had already been working on a startup with a friend and I was planning on saving. And when I had about half of the amount that I was planning on saving before going full-time with my startup, I got laid off. I got another offer to interview for other positions, but my heart wasn’t there anymore. And even though, again, I hadn’t saved the amount that I intended to, sometimes, I guess things are not perfect. And I realized that it was my time for do what I always wanted to do, because there’s lots of things that I appreciate it about working on the corporate world, and there’s lots of reasons to do it. I guess in this company, it feels the warmth, the paycheck, the benefits, the schedule, the infrastructure. I made most of my friends from Austin there. So very good and smart people, but I never had the ambition to climb the corporate ladder. And at the same time, I didn’t have the lack of, let’s say, ambition or the lack of passion or I didn’t want to play the game of just coasting.

 

[00:11:32.700] – Ricardo

It felt like none of those scenarios were the right fit for me. But mostly I felt that I wanted to self-express and I wanted to be free. I was very optimistic So I wanted to make an impact in the world, and I also wanted to get the reward for that. I think I always had a very deep desire for freedom. I didn’t know what being… I never heard the word founder until I was 28 at Duke, so I never knew what that was, but I always had the desire there of freedom, that there was more to what I was saying. I didn’t want to ask for permission to take a holiday or things like that. So, yeah, after I was laid off, I went all in with my company, and The story of the book is based. It’s the whole story from the very beginning to the very end.

 

[00:12:19.730] – Sean

Got it. Let’s take a quick commercial break. All right, the Tykr mobile app for both iOS and Android is now live. It includes all the same features as the web app, including stocks, ETFs, crypto, a watchlist, watchlist alerts, so something changes, you automatically get notified, a portfolio tracker, and a confidence booster powered by OpenAI. Plus, it includes learning modules inspired by Duolingo, in this case investing, learning modules to help you get up to speed as fast as possible. If you’re interested, you can go to tigger. Com. You’ll see the Apple and Google logos right up top, or you can go to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store and download the app for free. All right, back to the show. Well, let’s dive into this company. Is this company still operational today or did you sell it?

 

[00:13:08.150] – Ricardo

I wish I had sold it, but I just had to, at some point, turn off the checkout button and let it go to sleep. So we did toys. I had a friend in Spain. I had seen him the previous Christmas. We started exchanging ideas. We both wanted to to start a company, and we like the idea of toys in the shape of countries. We have no idea about the world of education or toys, but we thought that this is what I- Pause there.

 

[00:13:42.430] – Sean

I got to reiterate, did you say Toys in the Shape of Countries. Yes, that’s what we did. Are we talking about… Because I remember as a kid, I remember a puzzle that was the States of the United States. But give us examples here.

 

[00:13:58.330] – Ricardo

So it was a Plush Toys.

 

[00:14:01.140] – Sean

Plush Toys.

 

[00:14:02.920] – Ricardo

Plush Toys in the Shape of countries. We started with four countries: Italy, Mexico, China, and the US. And each of them had names and they had stories. And the big intention was to raise global kids. I wanted kids to learn about the world from their point of view of play and education. But what I really wanted them was to have a friend from a different part of the world. Because now something happens in Italy, you have your friends from Italy, and it And it lands in you in a very completely different way. Now, when you start having friends from different countries, let’s say now, France is not the same as Italy. Or when you’ve traveled there and you’ve eaten their food, you’ve made friends from that place, you know a little bit of their history. If you don’t know anything, everything sounds the same. So when I went to, I was thinking about Indonesia. I went to Indonesia, had never been to Asia. It just sounds like Indonesia, like a one big block thing. And as I was traveling around the countries in Asia, I I realized that they were more different amongst themselves when I went to Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, maybe others.

 

[00:15:09.150] – Ricardo

So they were so different amongst each other, and I have never predicted that. So the intention was to inspire kids about the world in a placeful way. But also something that I like is that I thought there was a lot of opportunity in the product line. So I thought we’re going to start with four countries, but it’s very easy to I go to 200 countries. And then I thought Americans love their states, so we could do anything that has a shape, like states. We could do toys as well for states, even college campuses, I thought. Americans love their universities, their colleges. So I could see how the product line was infinite, and I also wanted to connect the kids of the world. And then as soon as you start getting into seeing possibilities for your brand, everyone is your customer. Everything is ideas. You’re whole reality. You filter it through your big vision. And then I could see how we could have a theme park, movies. Yeah, the sky was the limit. So I thought there’s a lot of opportunity. I care of this. This is something that we can both start on the side.

 

[00:16:12.330] – Ricardo

It will take some cost of capital to get started. Everything ended up being much more expensive. That when we thought, I read this book called The Art of the Start by Kawasaki, and it talks about math, milestones, assumptions, and tasks. And I remember we were always very milestone-driven. We And very linear, very linear. So we had an idea. Let’s find a designer. Let’s develop the concept. And we build prototypes. My friend, my partner at the time, was living in China. He went to five, I think five factories there. We gave them our They give us designs. They gave us prototypes. They looked nothing, nothing like what we requested. So you will ask for a spoon and they will give you a jar. It was nothing like what we wanted to We found three factories. We chose three, three rounds of iterations with each of them. And then we got a product that we believed in, that we liked. So then we shipped it. We always imagined a very international company. So we We structured 12,000 units of our toys because the minimum order quantity was 3,000. So four toys, 3,000 of each. That was the minimum.

 

[00:17:24.730] – Ricardo

And it felt like they had colluded because you don’t want to start a company with an unproven product with that big expenditure. We negotiated and we asked them to do a smaller unit quantity, and they said no. And coincidentally, all factories have the same number as their minimum order quantity. So we were forced to do the 12,000 units. We did that, and then we shipped 8,000 to a warehouse in LA, and about 4,000 to a warehouse in London. Because we wanted to ship to our final customers closer to where they would live. And so we got all these logistics, and then it was time to sell, and then that didn’t happen. That’s when reality made the road. So the whole book is a story of an entrepreneur, which was me, trying to bring this product to market. I would think about different markets. So toys, travel. We were in education. We were in some schools. Gifts. We were in lots of different stores, and we have some very small successes in lots of different areas, but we never got that traction. So being an entrepreneur, I think that I enjoy building products, but with experience, what I realized is what it’s really hard is really hardest to actually sell.

 

[00:18:53.670] – Ricardo

And I’ve heard this quote, first time entrepreneurs focus on the product, second-time entrepreneurs focus on distribution. And I can see how that’s really what the Robert Mitzler rule.

 

[00:19:07.230] – Sean

Yes. Okay, so to zoom out here, the book, what is the title of the book?

 

[00:19:13.190] – Ricardo

So it’s Crash Course. It’s always with me. We’re going to be in a meditation retreat here in Manzanillo. Crash Course, a founder’s journey to saving your startup and sanity. And what I like to talk about the book is that there’s lots of books about companies, how to build a company. How to do product market fit? How to talk to an investor? How to do a business plan? But they don’t talk about the person who has to do all those things. And we completely miss that it’s so hard doing those things. And we have all these expectations as founders. We are optimistic. We have so much desire. We believe so much in what we do. We give everything to it. And most likely, in over 90 % of the cases, your expectations are not going to be met. So So when your expectations are not met, whether you’re conscious or not, whether you want to accept it or not, emotions are going to be generated, and you’re going to start feeling sad, frustrated, lonely. You’re going to question yourself. You’re going to feel bad. And what we do is run away from that. And we try to feel better by actually accomplishing our goals, let’s say, and making the external world accept our product, which is what we really want.

 

[00:20:28.860] – Ricardo

But we could be so consumed by all these emotions that we are not operating from clarity. So even though you’re not doing this for the right reasons, I would encourage everyone to stop and see what’s happening with them because most likely there’s a big turmoil going on inside them. And you don’t want to live with this. Again, it’s healthy for you. You don’t want to carry that energy. But if you, even, again, when I talk all the wrong reasons, even if you only want to do it for yourself, but for your company, that will bring a lot of clarity and productivity. And I share a lot of times, maybe to work the further for the… I was with this startup six years. But yes, since idea, from the end, yes, it was over six years.

 

[00:21:17.580] – Sean

Wow. Okay. And then you came to a realization that this isn’t going anywhere, and you got it. As you phrased it, you turned it off. You turned off the engine.

 

[00:21:26.890] – Ricardo

Yes. But it took a lot because… Let me elaborate on that and bring some memories. It took a lot because when you believe in something so much and when you want something so much, I told myself that I’m going to work on this for the rest of my life. And that’s the idea that I have. I’m going to work on this until I make it happen. And we all hear that the number one quality that the entrepreneurs need is great resilience, determination, capacity to overcome obstacles. And I did feel like I had that. And I wanted I wanted to see myself as someone that would solve obstacles until the end of life. But at some point, after six years, so I had run out of my savings, I had run out of my loan, and it was time to find some more money again, but more than anything, I realized that that wasn’t the life that I wanted for myself anymore. So at one point, I stopped optimizing for my startup, and then I started pointing the finger back at me, and I started thinking about my life and what I wanted for myself. And this is not something easy to do because for many years, all you do is make decisions based on what’s best for your company.

 

[00:22:40.550] – Ricardo

You neglect yourself. You don’t, or I didn’t take care of myself as much as I would have been ideal. I made sacrifices. So at one point, I realized that I wanted something different. And this is not a very easy transition because lots of times we stick to things that don’t work And it’s very hard to admit that they don’t work. I always like to say that it takes a lot of self-honesty to start something new that only that’s what you believe in. That’s when most startups fail. So you need a lot of, I would say, courage. But it also takes during the journey, most likely even the most successful entrepreneurs will often say that things did not go as they expected, that things were a hundred times harder than what they could have imagined. And again, these are all unspoken expectations that when they don’t go your way, they generate uncertainty, fears, questioning. And we don’t look at ourselves when we’re having all these emotions. And then again, the final step is it also takes, again, a lot of self-honesty to put something to sleep. And I admit that I’ve worked for six years on this.

 

[00:23:49.130] – Ricardo

I put all my money, all my energy, all my friends know about this. The only thing that I’ve talked for six years is this company. I feel like I just don’t have the… I don’t want to do this anymore. This is not the life that I want for myself.

 

[00:23:59.570] – Sean

So I put it. You’re giving a look under the hood. Building a startup is very hard. It takes a lot of courage to not only start it, but also to tell yourself, this isn’t going anywhere and you have to say no. I’ll give context. I’ll keep this real short because it’s not about me, but I did that in 2000. I want to hear it. Yeah, I tried a startup in 2013 that was a competitor to Groupon. The concept was Groupon would take 50 % of the yield sales, but Everybody not came up with an idea. Businesses should take 100 %, but they pay a monthly subscription of 100 bucks. And businesses were like, oh, my gosh, yes, that’s what we want. We’ll pay 100 bucks and we keep all the sales done. Subscription model. We started selling this thing, pre-selling hand over fist. And then when we went live, it was crickets. The reason is we didn’t have the consumers, the shoppers, like you and I, regular people just going on to the platform. And we started trying to raise venture capital. Vcs were like, cool idea, but you’re four years late to the party.

 

[00:25:05.000] – Sean

And I invested. I’m going to ask you a question here about dollar amount, but I invested about $30,000 over a year. I quit consulting. I went all in. I’m like, this is going to be a huge company. I went all in. I drained my bank account. I went in the debt. Again, this is 2013. And I had that moment. I had to say, okay, this isn’t moving forward. I got to turn off the engine and to move on and go back to corporate contracting. And that’s what I did. And I was emotionally beat up for a bit. But it made me, and maybe you had this moment, too, is made me realize that I let emotions as business cohabitate, and I can never do that again. I have to move forward based on logic. If you have a logical path forward, then move forward. But if you move forward based on emotions and feelings, and I believe in this, if you don’t have data to back it up, it’s not worth moving forward. So it was the correction I needed in my entrepreneurial journey. That sucked. 2013 was a rough year.

 

[00:26:09.430] – Ricardo

So let me say something about the emotions, because I think this This is what I think. I understand we need to make decisions based on logic and a clear mind. However, in order to be in that state, we need to have made room for emotions to move through, to to channel them, to regulate them, to connect with them. We cannot just tell emotions, you’re not welcome here because you’re not convenient and you’re messing up my clarity. You need to disappear. Unless Yeah. So we want to pretend that… I think we want to imagine that we are immune to those, but we are not black boxes. No. Nothing permeates, nothing happens. So So this is why I think it’s so important, because we’re trying to make a logic decision. But if we’re boiling inside, there’s not going to be any logic in there. It’s just going to be you’re trying to come with a quick, I don’t know, a quick relief You may think that you’re doing a good choice for your business, but unconsciously, all you may try to do is find a desperate way for you to feel better about yourself. And this may not be the best decision.

 

[00:27:26.180] – Ricardo

So you need to take care of yourself first, calm down, go back to clarity. And from that this point, then, of course, then it’s ideal that you will have, let’s call them clean calls, clean decisions.

 

[00:27:40.100] – Sean

Can I ask, how much money did you invest in Plush Keyes?

 

[00:27:43.790] – Ricardo

Yes. So I had a partner. I don’t know the specific numbers, and I was thinking about this. I would think first $60,000.

 

[00:27:53.090] – Sean

$60,000?

 

[00:27:53.910] – Ricardo

For them. And I would think, again, this was a few years ago. I think this was all the savings that I had, either for the company and for my cost of living because it wasn’t the same. There was no money coming in. It was all losses. So to live and for the company. And I would think my partner did the same at the time. Then after a few years, things were not working out with him. I’ll share one of the founder, partner, little discussions, arguments that we had during most of the time. So we started with the I’m not going to finish with the other thing. So first, let’s say, it’s 60, and then I got a loan, and then I put in another 50. But I always feel like money… I don’t know where. I feel like I always needed money, and money was coming in, and I don’t know from where. Maybe I will get an inheritance from all the money. I don’t know. I felt like money was magically sometimes appearing, and then everything will go back to the company. But let’s say maybe 150 to 100K.

 

[00:28:59.030] – Sean

200k? Maybe.

 

[00:29:00.420] – Ricardo

Maybe. Or maybe a little less, a little more. But everything that was coming my way was going. If you do my cost of living, then yes.

 

[00:29:07.320] – Sean

This is good. And I really appreciate you comment on because not a lot of entrepreneurs that fail at an enterprise are willing to share their story. But at the end of the day, it’s not a failure. It’s really you’re giving people a roadmap. And I’m going to summarize here a bunch of good tips here for the audience, because I usually do roll up, I break the fourth wall, speak to the audience. You’ve created a win. You’ve created a roadmap on what not to do. And of course, people can listen or they can go their own way and try to do their own thing. But it’s like, you got some good takeaways here. So thank you for sharing. What was a trigger point that you were like, that’s it, Ricardo. I’m putting this to bed and I’m moving on. Was there a definitive moment that you had to tell yourself, that’s it?

 

[00:29:58.530] – Ricardo

When I look back, I’ve seen lots of startups that had a really bad, let’s say, this grace moment. Someone would tell them they committed for a big check and they didn’t, or a customer would pull out last minute. But in my case, I always think it was a death in a thousand cuts. But so again, it was just one more day, one more car. It was just one struggle after another struggle. But I do remember the moment in which an entrepreneur friend told me that what I was doing had a cost of opportunity, and it gave me very fresh perspective to think, well, it’s true. It’s true. My life is not so determined that I just… This is not the only thing I can do. So instead of looking backward about this idea that I had fallen in love with many years ago, I started thinking, it’s true that I could be doing so many other things, and I’m going to open up and stress that there’s other, let’s say, things that could be coming to me that could be more or aligned with a happier life. Let’s call it like that.

 

[00:31:04.640] – Sean

I love it. I’m going to do a quick roll up here, and then I’m going to ask where the audience can reach you. So as I mentioned, I like to break the fourth wall. I’ve got four Really good takeaways here for entrepreneurs that can help them build their business or avoid running into what you ran into. And again, thanks for being so vulnerable here. This is good. So number one is, this is key, you I touched on this a little bit about your journey and what you’re doing right now is take care of yourself first. No matter what you’re doing or what you’re working on, take care of yourself first. You mentioned you kept your day job for a while. I did that. I did that with my current company. I kept my day job for three years. Did I want to keep my day job for three years? No, I wanted to keep it for three months, but it turned into three years. Maintain within this first point is maintain work-life balance. Sounds like the meditation retreat, you’re getting good at that. I tell people all the time, make sure you’re getting good sleep, good nutrition, and good workout routine of some sort.

 

[00:32:03.150] – Sean

That’s key. Number two is start with distribution, not product. I love this quote. We didn’t talk about this, but perfect is the enemy of good, is a phrase used. And don’t ever go for a perfect product. Make it good and then try to sell that, because if you work on perfect, you’re going to work on it for the next 20 years. Number three, don’t fall in love with your business. You did that. I did that. You learned from that. Don’t fall in love with it. Number four is think about opportunity cost. You could be working on something for 5, 10, 15 years and not get anywhere. You got to think about, Okay, how can I pivot? Which is what you did. You pivoted to a book to package the value, and now you sell that. So I thought that was a genius play. All right. Speaking of the book, is this book available on Amazon?

 

[00:32:54.590] – Ricardo

Yeah, available on Amazon, and I would love all your audience to consider it because I speak a lot about the emotional journey of the entrepreneur, and all these things that I learned in the meditation with tweets in the following years after the book, I’ve incorporated, I’ve moved them into the book. So I think that’s a lot. What makes it different is that we look at the emotional, we look again, we look at the person. We look at the person who has emotions. We’re founders, we’re people. So I think it’s good to take a look at the humanity and to take a look at ourselves. And one more thing, if I may. I think the book is inspirational, but more than inspiration, what I wanted to was companionship. I wanted to write a book for the person, not for the company. So I hope that your audience will get this book as a book for themselves, not just for the company, but for themselves.

 

[00:33:43.980] – Sean

Yeah. Again, the book is titled Crash Course. You can find it on Amazon, really focused on the emotional side of an entrepreneur’s journey. This is definitely needed. More books like this are needed. So thank you for that. Can people also find you? Do you have a website or LinkedIn?

 

[00:33:59.260] – Ricardo

Yeah. My website, first and last name, RicardoGimenezh. Com. And there’s links to LinkedIn, Instagram there. Ricardogimenezh. Com.

 

[00:34:11.890] – Sean

Perfect. We’ll make sure we’ve got all those links in the show notes down below. But Ricardo, thank you so much for sharing your story here, packed full of a ton of value. Entrepreneurs listening, follow these rules. Try not to lose money on your operation. His journey here has really been helpful. So thank you, Ricardo.

 

[00:34:30.660] – Ricardo

We’ll see you. Well, thank you so much, Sean, for how many in your show. It’s a lot of fun.

 

[00:34:36.420] – Sean

All right. We’ll see you. Hey, I’d like to say thanks for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. And if you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review? The more reviews we get, the higher this podcast will rank. All right, stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you.