Seriously. And no, I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to catch your attention. Seriously. I grew up the dumber sibling, not that I’m particularly stupid or slow, it’s just that my brother was in the gifted program, and he’s smart. And he’s quick-witted, so he can thrash you in an argument.
I was the athletic one…until I didn’t want to go to college. Once I finished high school I travel around the world for four years teaching English as a second language. Let’s say ‘teaching’ in a very generous way, it was more that I could speak English natively and therefore I could help students trying to learn in places like Thailand and China. I also ended up in France and Bosnia all before I turned 22.
And it was awesome, and I think really critical in my life to grow up in other places a bit before I went to university and tried to settle down. By the time I attended University I was 22 years old, then I graduated four years later. Then I went back to school again three years after graduating (because I wasn’t finished!!) and then I went to grad school.
That sounds awesome right? But any adult looking at my life story will be like… how did you afford it all? And that’s entirely valid. And no, I’m not a trust fund baby, so I don’t come from money. What happened was that way back when I was twenty, I married a boy and then three years later and after our stint in Sarajevo, we moved to ——— (where his family lived) and I started my very first business with him at the ripe old age of twenty-three.
So, all throughout my university studies I was also running a business. Obvious to say that I did not have that typical early twenties university experience. I had to balance my days between my classes and my accounts. We had started a carpet cleaning business on the used car inventory in town. It was a franchise from his father, and we took it from grossing 3k a month to 20k a month in eight years or so. It was waaaay to much money and foolishly I didn’t really invest it, so I have nothing to show for it now. Except the fact that we apparently were innovators and made another business from it that was eventually sold in 2018 to a larger conglomerate. Yay for me.
But along the way I never identified as an innovator. I was just good at solving problems. The first one was about how to dye a car’s carpet if the stains were not coming out. Instead of mixing every car’s carpet color by hand every single car, I found spray paint for bumpers could also be used for carpets. Now there was an art to it, and I really could only get away with using it on dark carpets or a particular light grey carpet. But do you know how much time that saved? It was incredible.
The next ‘innovation’ I did was a few years later where we lost a big account to a competitor because he had customized carpet protectors. He was able to offer these mats at a good price because he had an ‘in’ with the manufacturer. We could not compete.
Then in I swoop… just kidding. I solved our problem by working with a local print shop to print big clear stickers of different accounts we have and then we would put them on a clear carpet protector. We got our account back (suck it guy!) and then we rolled out our custom carpet protectors to all our clients and made more money.
This is not to brag, and it turns out my ex took much of the credit. But what I realized (post divorce) is that I am an innovator. I can fix problems. And I don’t look like a typical innovator, and that’s awesome.
I’ll be writing more about other cool innovators I meet along the way. Stay tuned.