A serial entrepreneur who built seven companies with annual revenues ranging from five to twenty million dollars, Stephen Halasnik shares his success secrets and his advice to aspiring entrepreneurs and growing businesses.
BACKGROUND
Over the past 25 years, Stephen Halasnik has built seven successful firms including, Financing Solutions, Elite Funeral Funding, AI Di La, Credential Agent, HEALTHCAREseeker.com, Expertseeker.com, and DigiPrint.
Halasnik also co-authored the Amazon bestselling book, Crash and Learn: Lessons in Business, wherein he shared the ups and downs of building his businesses.
Currently, he focusses on his podcast, The Entrepreneur MBA Podcast, and his latest venture, Financing Solutions, wherein they provide lines of credit to small businesses and nonprofits.
BUILDING HIS BUSINESSES
At the age of 17, Halasnik already knew what he wanted for his life: go to college, get a degree, work for a big firm, and start his own company.
So, he followed it by working in Xerox for eight and a half years, wherein he learned to strategize and win government bids. However, as his political skills were not good, he decided to change his path and built his own company.
At the age of 30, he created his first firm DigiPrint and followed by six more companies.
“I don’t know anybody who’s an entrepreneur who doesn’t calculate risk. You know, I mean, I don’t take all my net worth and because I believe in this idea, take all of that and plow it into the business, you know, I make sure the business is working.”
While gaining these successes in his companies, Halasnik was also motivated to learn from other people by actively participating in the Entrepreneurial Organization wherein they meet once a month to discuss their businesses. He had also completed a 3-year entrepreneurship program from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ADVICE FOR BUSINESSES
1. Build a practice.
Have a practice that will help you in doing specific aspects of your job, like documenting and training people. Then, you should also review and update a niche, depending on the time and situation.
“A lot of people build these processes and then they never look at them again or they build these best practices and they never look at it again… What I used to do was take our best practices, which were the most important ones, and go back in three months later, six months later, and make sure that we are following those.”
2. Always plan your next steps.
In managing a business, you’re also leading a group of people. With this, you need to plan everything as it doesn’t only affect you but your employees and clients as well.
“Always plan what your next step is and always take time out of your week too. You look at that plan, especially now when we’re going to air this at a time when the country’s going to go into a major recession.”
3. Hire the best people.
In employing different kinds of people, you need to understand what that person would be doing for your company, including the type of business partner you will be bringing in your businesses as well.
“I made sure that every time I hired somebody we had a position, results document in place, which told me what the person is going to be accountable for, what the role is, what their expectation was, those types of things.”
4. Focus on the goal.
Hold yourself accountable for every decision and activity you make, as it will affect the overall state of your company.
“If you want to be good as an entrepreneur, you have to be a, you either have to be really productive or you have to be able to be someone who gets really deep into a subject matter and stay focused on it while people around you are working on the details.”
RESOURCES
If you want to watch the full video of the interview with Stephen Halasnik shares his success secrets and his advice to aspiring entrepreneurs and growing businesses, then be sure to click the links below:
053: Stephen Halasnik – Serial Entrepreneur Teaches How to Build a $10M Revenue Firm
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