Why I'm here

[Badbeat777]

Hi everyone!


I have been in the forums for a while now just reading stuff other people has wrote here. I have about two hours of free time right now so I figured why not to introduce myself and tell a little bit where I'm coming from.


First of all, I am 31 years old man from northern Europe. I started my working career when I was 18 and have been in the same field of business ever since. I always liked working and trying to be best in whatever I do, which was not the case when I was in school. In school, I always was more interested in partying than doing anything serious. Now, I have a day job as a CEO and I am also an owner in 4 different companies.


So to my story,


When I started my working career, I was earning 1300€ per month and were happy about it. I never had any money before that and when I had 400€ left after taxes and paying rent etc. I felt rich! After 6 months or so, I was already the best performing in my work among the 100 or so employees. There was no bonus system or anything like that in place, so I just trusted that if I do my work well enough, somebody will notice and raise my salary. I was wrong. After 1 year of working in that company, I finally asked for a raise. After 3 discussions with my boss, I finally got a raise! A whole 50€ per month more than I used to have. Now my salary was 1350€ per month and after 30€ more than I used to have.


I left the company after 18 months of working because I had to do that mandatory year in army. In army, I continued the effort to best in everything. I was not the best of sports or weight lifting, but I got promotion for showing leadership skills. I was in charge of my own fire team and my team was the best in almost all the tests.


After army, I called my old employer and asked if I still had a job. They were happy to have me back and I scheduled a meeting with my old boss to be in two weeks. The salary would be the same 1350€ per month and my old boss also offered to give me a raise after the first 6 months! I was happy that I still got a job and started a two-week vacation.


During my vacation, I met one of my friends that I used to work with before army. He told me that he, and a 3 other people left the company and changed to a new company on the same business. He told me that the salary was much better and people were a lot happier over there. I asked him to tell me the name of his boss and email address. When I got home, I went to their website and saw that they didn’t have any openings for new employees. I wrote an email to my friends boss anyway telling him that I’m the best on my field and he will make a big mistake if he would not take me in to job interview at least.


After one week of waiting, I got an answer from my friend’s boss asking me to come to the job interview the next morning. I was super happy for the chance. The next morning, I overslept and woke up an hour later than I supposed to. I took basically all the money I had left and called a taxi. Taxi ride cost 39,80€ and I had 45€ with me. I was left with 5,20€ for the rest of the week. That was okay because I made it to the job interview on time and I was there 5min before it started.


The job interview went well and I was offered a job. Monthly salary raised to 1700€ per month and they also had a bonus system. I accepted the job offer and called my old boss. My old boss was angry that I decided to go to a different company that was also competitor. He offered me a salary raise to 1750€ per month from the beginning, but I told him that I already promised to go to the other company.

I started my new job in the new company a week later. It was a little bit different than my old job and it took me 3 months to earn my first bonus. After the first one, I never had a month without one. After a year of working, I was one of the highest earning employees in the whole company. I made around 3000-4000€ salary per month with the bonuses. I even took a competition with another of our employee, which one of us could get closer to 10000€ bonus in a month. I did a crazy amount of overtime and focused 100% to my job. I lost the competition with 9450€ bonus coming to me. The winner had 9700€ bonus coming.


I got used to the salary between 3000-4000€ per month. My expenses quickly expanded to match the salary increase. Every month my account was showing zero or even minus something because of the credit cards.


After 3 years I started the job, the business changed and the chance to earn bonuses came a lot harder. I still earned nicely but I was bored in my job. It didn’t offer any challenges anymore. I started to think what I would like to do with my life and quickly realized, my job was not it. I started to read books about business and investing. I quickly opened an account to stock broker and started investing. I did a huge amount research for every investment I made and I was able to make a profit. Not a lot but something. The amount I could invest was limited by the payments to the credit card debt that I had.

Investing was fun and I was sure I could make some money in the long run. I calculated that it would be easy to be a millionaire when I turned 50 years old.


I also read a lot about entrepreneurship. I realized that I need to understand business much better than I did at that moment, so I started to take more responsibility in my work and started to think how I would do things if that were my own business. I took some of these ideas how to make more money or save some, to my boss. After about year of doing this, the executives of the company started to ask me to join their meetings to give my ideas and views in certain business areas. After a while, I got a promotion and a salary increase! Or actually decrease. I was not able to earn bonuses anymore but my base salary was 2500€ per month. After just a year in my new job as a manager, I got another promotion. I was now responsible for several different teams instead of just one and my salary was 3000€ per month.


During that same time, I continued to read and learn about business. I read everything from bookkeeping, sales, marketing, finance, leadership and so on. I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

My very good friend had his own construction company and I started to ask and learn a lot of things from him. I wanted to have my own business and I was constantly looking for business ideas. After a while, that same friend of mine asked me, if I would like to join him and another guy in a new import/export business. I was super excited! Finally, a chance to do something of my own. We calculated everything, found out about different laws and regulations, contacted freight companies and so on. We had everything set up and a customer waiting. We just needed money to make the first order. Me and two of my business partners collected money from all the places that we could think off. I borrowed around 15,000€ from my relatives and took all my own money. I was ready to invest in to our new business and to the first order. The thing was that the customer was in a different country, so we organized everything with them online. We had some contacts who had done business with the buyer before. For us, that was good enough to move on with our deal. We calculated that even in the pessimistic scenario, we would make nice 5,000€ per person in two weeks. Not bad for a 2 week’s work in a side business!


So, we moved on with the deal, paid for the goods and shipment and everything else. The shipment started and I felt so good! I still remember the feeling; soon I would have made my first money on a business! I knew that this would be much faster way to get to be a millionaire than investing.


Everything went well, the shipment arrived in time to our customer and he received all the goods. We were just a week away from the date we should have our payment. I waited the date to come and counted the days. Well, when that day came, the company we sold to, our customer, went bankrupt. We lost 100% of the money we invested + the money we borrowed. I tried to fight the truth and contacted all the authorities in that country and tried to find a way to get my money back. I didn’t have any money left after I put my own money in to this deal + I owed 15,000€ to my relatives that I promised to pay back in few months with interest.


I was depressed. I was now in debt with no money or investments. Thankfully my relatives agreed that I would pay them back in monthly payments with interest. I continued to work hard in my day job and continued to do my best. I didn’t have any money left for investing after I paid my credit card + other new loan payments but at least I was able to survive.


After a year or so I got another promotion in my day job. I was now a leader for 70 employees and I was earning 3250€ per month with a promise that my salary would raise “soon”. I continued to work in that company for 2,5 years more with that same salary.


Then the owner of the company I worked for, sold the whole company to a new owner, which planned to make it multinational corporation with offices in several different countries. Just after the deal closed, the old owner called me and offered me a job as a COO of a new company in another country in Europe. I gladly accepted the job and my new salary of 3750€ per month with great benefits! I quit my old job and when I was doing that, I was offered a salary of 4000€ if I would stay. I said no and told them that I promised already to take the new job.


So, I moved to a new country and started my new job. My job was to build the whole company and hire all the employees. My first two people that I hired, were software engineers from the company I used to work for. They moved to the country I was in and started working there. I also hired bunch of other people from that country and started to make a sellable product. We had a great team and the project was moving forward very fast. After only about 6 months, we had our product ready and it was ready to be sold. The company owners tried to sell it to a lot of companies, only to realize that the market was far from ready to start use our high-tech solution. I mean this product we build was just above normal in the country we came from, but in this country, they were maybe 10 years behind in technology infrastructure. So the company soon announced, that it would be closed.


To be continued….. ( when I have time to write)

 

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