12 Years of Business Mistakes

Hey everyone! I’m Mike. I just posted my intro yesterday, but seeing how much this community is focused on giving massive value, I wanted to dive right in and contribute.

I put together a Loom breaking down the biggest mistakes I’ve made over the last 12 years growing a multi-location music school business (and helping scale a franchise to 100+ locations). Since it's a bit long (I didn't mean to, I'm sorry!), here is a quick breakdown of what I cover so you can decide if it's worth your time:

The CAC Trap: Why my early success with dirt-cheap Google Ads in 2013 actually broke my mindset and stopped me from scaling for years because I refused to pay what customers were actually worth

The Cash Flow Equation: The exact formula I used to solve cash flow crunches while marketing aggressively: FMC > 2(CAC + FMCOGS). I break down how we front-loaded our offers with a "Discovery Month" to fund acquiring the next customer immediately.

The 15-Minute Radius Mistake: Why opening my business exactly where I lived (Akron, Ohio) made me work twice as hard, and how a simple 30-minute geographic pivot would have fundamentally changed the economics of my business from day one.

I am totally new here, so many of you advanced operators might already know this stuff, but I figured I would just give what I have in case it's helpful to anyone!

https://www.loom.com/share/b7d8e98ed8524422b28d400ee4397e5d

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12 Years of Business Mistakes