What is worst than making $500,000 from blogging? I’m sure you can name a million things but I think Sherry Comes of CoffeeCakes.com has the ultimate answer – she started her own Internet Cafe back in 1995 that took the concepts of Kinko’s and Starbucks and combined them together. By the time her five year lease was up, she had lost over half million bucks.
Sherry shared her story with us at the Performance Marketing Expo during her session: If you build it they will come: How I lost over $500,000. As you no doubt guessed, Sherry built it and they didn’t come. The lessons learned have helped Sherry to eventually build a successful business.
The main takeaway from Sherry’s presentation was to learn from others mistakes, so you don’t have to pay to learn from your own mistakes. Good advice instead. Most people learn from other people’s success (that’s why you come to this blog). However, learning what not to do can be just as important as learning what to do. Other key points to help you include:
- Think big, start small, scale quickly.
- Luck helps A LOT – Capitalize on it.
- Keep making continuous improvement.
- Set up strategic alliances, partnership with people or company that can help you.
- Never stop learning.
- Analyze everything.
- Risk & mitigation planning is a must.
- Time is precious – use it wisely.
All great advice for sure. However, the biggest takeaway I got from Sherry’s presentation was not to start an Internet cafe that combined Kinko’s and Starbucks. 🙂
