📈 2 Stories of Startup Struggles

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Every single entrepreneur will tell you that starting a business is tough.

Here are two stories of things going wrong in the early days of my company, Greenbox Storage.

Story 1: Dealing with Weather

It was January, 2020 in the middle a New Hampshire blizzard. I was one month into building my company. We ran into a MAJOR issue:

I had about 40 customers at the time. They were expecting their stored items to be returned that day. We loaded up the truck the night before with about 125 items. The next morning, we quickly realized that we might have some very upset customers...

Our first deliveries were scheduled for 9am. At 8:30am, my friend (who I hired to help) and I realized that our 26' Uhaul truck was stuck in about 10 inches of snow. It's now 8:55am. We're SCRAMBLING to get this truck mobile so we can start drop-offs.

We're running around trying to find shovels (what kid brings a shovel to college?) We're rummaging for sticks to put in front of tires to gain traction. I'm scrambling to text and call customers to let them know we're running late. It was a mess.

FINALLY after about two hours, we get the truck moving. Now we're driving around campus in a blizzard, delivering items to our customers. Sweating our asses off, sprinting up and down stairs trying to make up time. I loved every second of it. I'd just started my own business!

We managed to complete the drop-offs and the customers were okay with the delays. It was the first struggle in my entrepreneurial journey. Little did I know, it was my first of many.

Story 2: The Double Car Accident

This story is set in the Fall 2022. We are about to conduct the biggest drop-off season in our company's history, returning over 1,300 items to customers at our Dartmouth College branch.

At this point, I'm a grad student at Bentley University, about three hours away from Dartmouth. I get a call from our lead employee at Dartmouth. Turns out he had been out until 3am the night before the biggest day of the year.

While driving the Uhaul truck that we use to transport items, he pukes from being hungover. He cleans it up, but him and the other employees have to ride in a truck that smells like vomit the rest of the day.

A few hours later I get a call from another employee. He backed the Uhaul into a parked car. The cops come and try to sort out this whole mess. Drop-offs are delayed, customers are wondering where there things are. This is getting messy.

It doesn't stop there. I get another call about an hour later from another employee. We have ANOTHER Uhaul accident. Our second truck is backed into a parked car, get delayed. What a mess.

At this point I make the decision to drive to Hanover, NH to sort everything out. I arrive on campus at roughly 10pm. For the next four hours, I'm dropping off items outside customer's dorms. I finish up at around 2am.

It certainly wasn't smooth but we figured it out. To be successful, you have to find a way to get it done and that's what we did. Credit to the team for battling through adversity.

Pro tip: Always purchase extra insurance on moving trucks to ensure that any damage is covered.

There are a million stories like these I could share with you. Startups come with a lot of difficulty. You need to push through and learn to deal with adversity.

Watching money hit your account for something YOU CREATED is the best feeling in the world. If you have any inclination at all to start a business, I highly encourage you to dive in. It could change your life, as it has mine.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. The Startup Toolkit: This comprehensive course provides you step-by-step directions for how to launch and grow your startup. Through trial and error, I’ve developed these methods to grow my startup to $1M+ revenue.

2. Offshore Hiring Guide: Learn how to hire inexpensive ($6 / hour) offshore talent in 3 weeks or less.

3. Promote your business to 1,500+ subscribers by sponsoring my newsletter.

Cheers,

Collin Rutherford

PS. Ice cream with a side of cringe.