Attitude determines your Altitude

This past Sunday I sat in church listening to an inspirational sermon about how your “Attitude determines your Altitude”…and all I could think about was how I managed to launch a t-shirt company during my junior year in high school.  Through this experience, I unfortunately lost focus and my business  failed.  I learned an important lesson, the hard way.

When I was 17 years old I decided to start a business with a couple of friends.  At the time I had a college targeted website that reached over 20,000 unique visitors daily, and a steady revenue stream to support a new venture.  My friends and I came up with an idea to develop a t-shirt business with hilarious comic tees.  At the time, these types of start-ups were all the rage.  We spent class time in our chemistry class drawing up ideas for t-shirts, and brainstorming on how we were going to handle customers.  I didn’t learn too much about chemistry as a science, but what I did learn was how to build chemistry between business partners.  We all were extremely enthusiastic about the company, and came up with hundreds of ideas.  We were laughing hysterically, all while earning A’s and B’s in one of the hardest classes our school had to offer.

Once we had solidified t-shirt ideas, the next step was to see what we could afford.  I sat in my room crunching profit margins with a piece of paper and a pen.  The only way to yield good margins was to buy in bulk, so we had to buy a minimum of 100 shirts per design.  Since we had a fixed budget around ~$3,000 in total, I calculated that we could develop 3 shirt ideas- in 2 colors buying 100 minimum shirts per design.  At this time, we were all optimistic about shirt sales- planning to scale and order our next batch of shirts (even before the first batch of 300 arrived).  We promoted the company, and ended up selling 30-50 shirts within our high school.  Our inflated attitude gave us the altitude to “fly” as a company.  We were selling shirts and we were excited beyond belief.  As time went on our uplifting attitudes began to drop, and unfortunately our sales did as well.  Initially we forecasted 10 online sales per month, when in reality we sold 1-3.  With nearly 50-70 sales offline, and hardly any sales online- our excitement  faded.  In addition to this, our high school market was drying up, and we couldn’t squeeze any more sales out of our fellow classmates.  After 6 months our t-shirt company went stale.  I ended up listing the company for sale, and received several bids for our inventory and designs.  I sold the custom shopping cart software I had developed, and also the high res designs.

The lesson I learned from this experience was that I need to stay focused on the project with a positive attitude.  If you are able to stay positive and vested in your company, you will find a lot more enjoyment-which will translate into profit.  I learned the hard way, but I used this experience to further develop my college targeted website which yielded great success. It wasn’t easy, but I built my college site up to generate 10+ million monthly pageviews- which I later sold it for mid $xx,xxx out of my freshmen dorm room…but  I’ll save that story for another time.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to post comments.

Tagged as: business, startup, t-shirts