In 2014, I was a bit stuck in life.
I had taken a semester off, living in Cambodia, not sure what the next steps were. I had been rejected from the school that I wanted to attend at NYU, I didn’t see myself working for my family and Altanx v1 had not only stalled but because our main supplier was shutting down, the existing business model had no future.
At the time I had two choices. The first was to head to NY and attend a school that I didn’t like. While I wasn’t thrilled with that as an option, it was still appealing. I like NYC, had friends and an ex who lived there. But right when I was deciding what to do, one of our customers on Guam asked if we could bulk produce 3000 basic shirts at a wholesale price. While it wasn’t something that Altanx had ever done before, we identified another factory that could and made the sale for just under $15k.
That was the first order for Altanx v2. As it turned out, there was a market on Guam for printed shirts and the biggest challenge that customers faced was there were no high quality but well priced dry-fit shirts that were available locally. At the time most print shops wanted shirts available within 1-2 business days which meant either paying exorbitant shipping prices or buying local cotton shirts. Between the market on Guam and our existing customers on Saipan, there was an opportunity to re-develop Altanx into a larger, sustainable business and so because I couldn’t say no to that, I ended up moving and living on Guam for almost two years.
Story
In 2014, the first batch of orders went well. We sold just over 10,000 shirts from September to December and established connections with a lot of the local print shops who would benefit by buying from us. Based on the early promise, I grew in the belief that this could work.
2015 though was a year of hard lessons. Thinking everything was going well, I took two months off to live in France. Beyond that, I got excited by the idea of expanding to the US; ordered 100k shirts with pre-orders for only 7k which also fell through. Between this and previous questionable financial decisions, I managed to run up a bill of $700k with my supplier with only $150k in the bank. Facing reality when things are bad is never fun. For one, acknowledging that the US expansion was a terrible idea was a blow to the ego and that just because I thought it would work didn’t mean it would. Beyond that, to make up for the money owed as a result of this failed expansion; I had to run sales, call in most of our receivables at a discounted rate and borrow an unreasonably large amount of money from my dad which took over four years to fully pay off. The disappointment I caused through my irresponsible management of Altanx to my dad haunted me for a long time and having to learn to work through that shame was a big lesson in and of itself.
2016 meant rebuilding everything. After financially bottoming out, I implemented an online portal for ordering and payments so that our cash situation would be better handled as well as systemizing our accounting, so we have better fiscal controls. Going through this process made me a more disciplined business person, but also made me realize that there are a lot of things I can’t rush in life, they just need to take their time. At the same time, even with all the changes, sales increase in both 2015 and 2016, peaking at $357k. With most things routinized towards the end of 2016, I left Guam and Altanx became a relatively routinized business while maintaining a similar revenue level with minimal work until 2019 at which point I sold the company.
Why this was important
Where Altanx v1 was more sales-focused, Altanx v2 taught me how to properly run a business. For the first time I was end to end responsible for streamlining operations, cash management as well as forecasting and finding opportunities. It put into perspective how many moving pieces there are in a business and that ultimately there’s no magic bullet to making things work. Every business is only as good as its weakest link and so emphasis should be placed on doing the basic things well.
Just as importantly though, getting Altanx to a point where it ran almost by itself meant I had the opportunity to experiment. Whether it was learning Facebook ads and online businesses through running I’d Hike That or funnels and customer acquisition with Tenex Marketing, Altanx provided a steady income that I could always rely upon. While it never became the massive multi-national brand that I naively thought it could become when I first started it back in 2011, it did provide the foundation for other ventures that would reach those heights.