How I started my business while everyone else was partying

People ask me how I got started, and they usually expect a story about a big break or a lucky deal. There is no such story. Here is what there is instead. I am twenty-five years old. I am single. I am living in Southern California, and Southern California in those days was one long invitation. Beaches, nightclubs, beautiful people everywhere, and friends spread across that whole enormous map who always seemed to know where the fun was that night.

And I want to be honest with you about something, because it matters to the story. I loved all of it. I was young and free, and I really did love the ladies, and nobody ever had to drag me to a good time. I was not some machine who felt nothing when Friday night rolled around. The pull was real.

So how does a guy like that build a business while everyone around him is partying? Not by pretending the party does not exist. By deciding when he is allowed to show up to it.

The schedule

Here was the routine. Up at 5:30 in the morning, into the office, straight into the work, and I would put in somewhere around a twelve hour day. Then, instead of going home, I went to night school until ten o'clock.

Why night school? Because at that time I did not know how to read or write properly. I was functionally illiterate, and I knew it. So while my buddies were lining up outside a club somewhere, I was sitting in a classroom learning how to get an education. How to actually study. How to understand my fellow man. How to become a better communicator. All the things I had never learned, I went out and got for myself, one night at a time.

Then home, to bed, up at five, in the office by 5:30, and do it all again. Monday through Saturday. Copy, paste. Copy, paste. The business got built in the daytime. I got built at night.

Come on, Tom

The hardest part was not the early mornings, and it was not the classroom. The hardest part was Friday night. I had friends living all over Southern California, and every single one of them seemed to call me. Come on, Tom, we are going to this nightclub. Come on, Tom, we are doing this, we are doing that. Come on, man. Come on.

That is what I kept getting invited to, week after week, and week after week I turned it down. Not because I thought I was better than anybody. Not because I did not want to go. I wanted to go badly. I said no because I had a deal with myself, and the deal was not finished yet.

The deal

The deal was simple. Before my weekend was allowed to begin, everything I had started that week had to be finished. My sales cycles, done. My production cycles and my deliveries, done. My bookkeeping and my administrative work, in place. I refused to let Monday morning inherit anything from the week before.

And here is the part people always leave out of stories about discipline. Once all of it was done, I went out. Believe me, I went out, and I made a proper job of that too. I probably enjoyed those nights more than anybody, because nothing was hanging over my head while I did it. My buddies partied first and worried later. I finished first and celebrated free and clear.

That is the whole trick, and I want you to see it clearly. I never gave up the party. I just made it wait in line behind the work. Same fun, different order, completely different life.

Forty-one years later

You want to know something funny? Forty-one years later, I still do the same thing. Before my weekend is over and I am ready to start the new week on Monday, I clean the decks. I make sure everything that needs to get done is done, and that the people who own their pieces have their pieces done too. Back then I had one company to close out every week. Today I am dealing with nine of them, and you can imagine the insanity of that. The rule has not changed one inch.

I cannot tell you I like it. It is a pain, and it was a pain when I was twenty-five. But I went from having absolutely nothing to running nine companies, and when I trace the line back to where it started, it does not start with a lucky break. It starts with a young guy in Southern California saying no on a Friday night, finishing what he started, and then going out to enjoy himself with a clear head and nothing left undone.

So if you are starting a business right now and everyone around you is partying, here is my advice. Do not become someone who hates fun. Become someone who earns it. Put the work in front of the party and keep it there, and one day you will look around and realize the order you kept is the reason you have something worth celebrating.