My Story Starting a $400K/Year Handcrafted Furniture Business

Key moments:

> [A friend] invited me to stay with her and her family who had a billiard manufacturer in Ontario in a town called Goderich. This is where we set out on a novice adventure to build this chair. We had paper sketches and cheap Walmart mock-ups of the seat and that began a year and a half process that I thought would take 3 months.

> The next day I flew to San Diego to display the chairs at a tradeshow. A friend at Bradley Mountain, a company that makes wax canvas accessories, helped me get in.

He bombed at that trade show, but it was an opportunity to fail and, presumably, to learn how trade shows worked.

> The following year, I attended the Liberty Fairs show in Las Vegas. Later, to my surprise, this trade show proved to be a success and a catalyst in moving the company forward. I was written up in many publications such as GQ and landed several stores across the USA and internationally.

> I landed a deal with Neiman Marcus as a direct result of my own effort and new confidence simply by cold calling them.

His legitimate confidence seems quite clearly an indirect result of his two friends providing opportunities to learn about manufacturing and sales.

The rest of the story is typical for everybody, whether they ultimately succeed or not--trial + error, tenacity, luck. Luck is random, but having friends and mentors plugged into the system substitutes for alot of luck.