Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Advice for Disrupting an Industry and Starting Your First Business with Ajay Prakash

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

In recent years, private equity has taken a special interest in old-school businesses like plumbing, electrical and laundry. Today, guest host Morgan Lavoie talks to someone who saw that potential a long time ago: Ajay Prakash, CEO and co-founder of Rinse, a company that is building the first national brand in laundry and dry cleaning. Ajay unpacks how to find, test and scale those old-school businesses that are ripe for innovation. Plus, he shares advice for anyone who has a New Year's resolution to start a company. Check out more of Ajay’s work at Rinse here: https://www.rinse.com/

I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. It's Morgan, the EP of the show filling in this week for Nicole while she's out on mat leave. A few weeks ago, Nicole did an episode about old school businesses that are finally having their day in the sun and getting real props for their recurring revenue. Businesses like plumbing companies, pest control,

and laundry. According to data from PitchBook, private equity investors have bought over 800 plumbing, electrical, and HVAC companies since 2022. Today, I'm talking to someone who saw this potential long ago, Ajay Prakash, co-founder and CEO of Rinse, a company that is building the first national brand

in laundry and dry cleaning. And you might be thinking, how excited could someone really get about running a laundry business? The answer will surprise you. My fiance Jack bought and operated a laundry business in college with some of his friends. One of his partners in that business, Aton, hi Aton, went to work at, you guessed it,

Rince after college, and you should see how excited Jack and Aton get when they talk about laundry even now. So in my conversation with Ajay, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and I have to admit, I'm kind of excited about laundry now. Ajay and I chat about how to find, test, and scale these old school businesses that are ripe for innovation. But we also go beyond that. Ajay is a really excellent leader. You can tell that just by listening to how thoughtful he is about how he manages his company and team. And as we're staring down at the final days of 2024, I wanted to get some advice. Ajay gives a framework for founders on how to set goals

for your company in a meaningful and achievable way. And also advice for anyone who's thinking 2025 might be the year they finally take the leap and start their own company. Here's our conversation. Ajay Prakash, welcome to Money Rehab. Thanks for having me. So happy to have you here.

Of course, we have to start with the origin story of Rinse. Can you take us through it? Yeah, sure. So I started Rinse with one of my best friends from college in early 2013. So it's been almost 12 years now. Wow. At that time, I knew I was going to start a company. And so I was looking at various trends that got me excited.

And I kind of narrowed in on bringing technology to old school industries and looking at existing customer experiences that were full of friction. And so I was exploring a bunch of different ideas of my own and you know, nothing that got me excited enough to take the leap. And then one day I was getting breakfast with James, my co founder. And you know, we had kind of been acting as each other sounding board,

talking about entrepreneurial ideas. And he's a healthcare guy, so I had been putting on my healthcare hat, trying to give him feedback. And he actually kicked off the breakfast and said, hey, before we talk about any healthcare ideas, I can't get this idea out of my mind about doing something in dry cleaning.

And it was just one of those moments where all of the kind of bells went off in my head. And I thought, well, dry cleaning is actually perfect for the trends I'm looking at. James was always someone I viewed as a potential co-founder, just didn't have an interest in healthcare. And then the fact that he had grown up in dry cleaning, actually, his parents are dry cleaners, his aunts and uncles are dry cleaners, gave it gave him that unique kind of unfair advantage of understanding how the supply side of this equation would work.

And so, you know, we got really excited about it and just spent that entire breakfast talking about what we could do here. He lived in New York at the time, I lived in San Francisco. He actually flew back to New York and then a week or two later, came back to San Francisco and we set up a test.

We picked 11 of our friends. We said, you know, we were gonna just just try to try to pick up their dry cleaning and laundry, clean it, bring it back and see what we learn. James was driving the car. I was in the passenger seat. I'd run up to the door as the valet and, you know, get their clothes and special instructions. We took them back to James's parents shop, clean the clothes and brought them back.

And every one of our friends said, Hey, that was awesome, when are you guys coming back? And so we hadn't thought that far ahead. We just wanted to see if anyone would respond positively. And so that kind of gave us the excitement and incentive to keep going. And so we then spent a couple of months just talking to as many people as we could about the lesson they did dry cleaning

or the lesson they did laundry. And what we heard in those conversations, you know, it's effectively the same thing we've heard for the last 11 or 12 years as we built Rintz. It's just the existing experiences are so full of friction. And it's not one big point of friction. It's all these little points of friction. We call it death by a thousand cuts. But what we realized was there's an opportunity to kind of systematically remove all of those

points of friction to create a seamless experience from start to finish, a customer-centric experience, a technology-first experience. And so we worked for a few months and kind of put a circle around three zip codes in San Francisco, and then we launched the service officially in May 2013. So you knew that you wanted to apply innovation

and disruption to an old school business. And we actually did an episode about this on the show a couple of weeks ago because we've been seeing a lot of business media recently really glorifying some of those kind of more traditional businesses. Like there's a lot of reporting around is the plumber your millionaire next door type of thing. But businesses like plumbing, pest control, laundromats. And I think part of the reason why there's this glorification happening in the media is because there's more PE activity around these types of businesses. So is this what you were seeing 11, almost 12 years ago that made you excited about an

idea like rinse? Well, you know, my approach was a little bit different. So when I knew I was going to start something, my exploration was in looking at the intersection of three things, right? One was the, where am I an expert? One was where's there a market opportunity? And one was where am I passionate or really excited about it? And the expertise thing, you know, sometimes people will say, Oh, you know, you have to work in an industry and you have to have this domain expertise for a long time before you can actually start something. And for me, the expertise that I brought to the table was someone who had always worked really long hours, was always really busy,

and never had enough time to do the things I needed to do. And so all of the ideas I was exploring on my own were around removing that friction that a busy consumer has. And at the time, you know, if you think about when you start a company, people will always look and say, Hey, why me? Why now? The why now at the time was, was less about, you know, P E thinking about old school industries and more about it was when Uber and Lyft were really exploding and people were looking at their phone as the remote control become ubiquitous. And so there were on-demand companies in every vertical, on-demand car washes, on-demand shipping, on-demand housekeeping, you name it. And I think, you know, for me, the idea of pressing a button and having something happen was really compelling

as a busy professional. And so, you know, I was looking, doing my research and I got great advice early on from another founder who said, hey, as you're working on things, check and see how excited you are. And then a week later, check and see how excited you are. And then a week later, check and see how excited you are. And if in the early days, you can't maintain that level of excitement when you have to

do research on the industry or have people tell you that's a dumb idea or whatever it might be early on, then there's no way you can maintain that conviction for the 10 or 15 plus years it takes to build a real company that's durable. And that was great advice for me because I would dive into different ideas and nothing really got me that excited. And I think it was a combination of

didn't feel like the right space and I didn't have the co-founder. Cause I think I knew that I wanted someone to do it with me. So dry cleaning and laundry was not necessarily in my sights, but James grew up in dry cleaning. And so when he brought it up, all of the pieces kind of fell into place. And then we started working on it and I just kept getting more and more excited as we were building. And I'm glad I did because now it's almost 12 years later and I'm still excited, but you really have to maintain a lot of excitement and conviction to weather all the storms in the journey. I love that, that sort of

check-in of, are you still excited about this? Are you still excited about this? And so you went through that process of saying, what am I good at? And then you mentioned another question you asked yourself, which is so important. And it's that question of like, is this something that's needed? Like, what do people need? And I think that that can be an easy trap for entrepreneurs to fall into if they're just really excited about an idea, they feel like they want to do something, but actually testing whether or not something is needed. Their ideal customer profile is somebody who actually needs this service. And so you did a test with 11 friends. Was there anything about that test that surprised

you? Well, I mean, first, it was a critical piece of understanding whether we want to take the leap. And there's a lot of people who will kind of build the product and they don't want to show it till it's perfect. What you need when you start a company, especially consumer facing is velocity to insights. You got to move as fast as possible to figure out if anyone cares. I don't know if anything surprised us. The biggest thing overall was people were really excited. And so we knew we were striking a chord and there was something there where people actually cared about what we were building.

And I remember James saying for him, one of the big aha moments was. People actually paid us. We didn't do this for free. We charged them that cost. So we didn't make it. We didn't make money, but, but they actually paid us for the service that we literally took a week or two to kind of get set up. But what we did is we learned a lot in the process, right? We tested morning, we tested evening, we tested during the day. And like as an example there, if you're five minutes late in the morning,

you're ruining someone's day because they got to get out the door. If you're five minutes late in the morning, you're ruining someone's day because they gotta get out the door. If you're five minutes late in the evening, nobody cares. And so there were little insights like that that were really helpful. But the biggest thing was, do people want this? Is this actually solving a pain point? And then kind of learning in that testing, what are some of the things we need to really nail? Like, oh, that experience at the door

for the valet is important. Oh, when you take, like, I found we had a bunch of random laundry bags. And we picked up people's clothes and we wrote their name on a piece of paper and the service type and we threw it in there. And I found after two or three customers, I couldn't remember whose bag was who.

So it gave us the sense of, like, wow, this is operationally going to become really complicated. And so you got to build the systems to be able to manage that. And those were little nuggets we learned early on. But the biggest thing was, hey, people really want this. This is exciting. And so that kind of led us into that need finding and the journey to say, okay, let's go build this. Yeah. Yeah. Debate debatably, one of the more important steps was rinse always called rinse, or was there another idea for the name of the business

that you tossed around? It has been rinsed since after that test. And I'll tell you, I had experience at the time with consumer startups, with the last startup I was at, and also with a lot of the on-demand companies that were coming out. What we found was there were companies that were either spelling a word wrong, like Lyft with a Y. That's the only company I think that survived that but there was a company called ship with the Y and there was a bunch of those. Yeah. Or there was a lot of dot ios or dot l y's. The vision here has always been to build a household name to build a national brand, to build a durable company. And you know, I had spent years in consulting and private equity working with great

companies. And I had seen that and so it was really important for us to find a word that that worked. And so we did the search around, you know, what's going to be the core root word? Is it wash? Is it press? Is it fold? And we found that actually, there were a lot of domain names available with rinse at the time. Rinse.com was not yet available. But what we did was we in in the test, we called it Rinse Me. That was just like a placeholder. And we got feedback from people

that that wasn't a very good name. The URL originally when we launched in May 2013 was rincenow.com. That's where we put a landing page up. But we were really, you know, after we knew we were gonna do this, James and I went back and forth a lot on this. Could we create the name without the domain name?

But it was all in service of this brand that could become a national brand and a household name. So we were very intentional about calling it Rinse, about making it a word, about making it something that actually made sense. And then shortly after we launched, we actually were able to acquire Rinse.com. And that was an investment where we said,

hey, that's a no brainer, because we're not trying to be the biggest dry cleaner or laundromat in Pacific Heights. acquire rinse.com. And that was an investment where we said, Hey, that's a no brainer because we're not trying to be the biggest dry cleaner or laundromat in Pacific Heights. We're trying to be a national and global brand. And so we got to make those investments up front. That makes so much sense. And I'm so glad that you did that. And I love that you brought up Lyft because I was wondering if this story would go like we considered rinse with a Y, we considered rinse without an I, We considered rinse with no E at the end. So that's the origin story. Fast forward 11 almost 12 years. I'd love for you to sort of paint

a picture for the listeners about what the service actually looks like. So I'm in a room where I can see my laundry hamper right now. I have a puppy. We went to the dog park today. We both came back muddy and disgusting. If I want to use Rinse, can you tell me about the journey that my now muddy pair of jeans will go on? Yeah, absolutely. You can sign up at rinse.com. You can download the mobile app. If you're an existing customer, you press one button on the mobile app or you text the letter Y. And then our valets who are all W2 employees will come to your door between 8pm and 10pm and they will pick up your clothes. If you're a new customer, you get personalized rinse bags. And if you're an existing customer, you already have those bags. We'll pick them up.

We'll take them. We'll do a bunch of stuff with them. And I'll tell you about that in a second. But then the plan is we'll just bring them back to you. If it's laundry, it's next day. If you pay for next day service, otherwise it's in a few days. And it's folded. If it's laundry, it's next day. If you pay for next day service, otherwise it's in a few days and it's folded. If it's laundry, if it's hanging and pressed, if it's a dry cleaning. On the operation side, it's pretty complex. You know, I think the way we look at this space and this industry is that getting started, the barriers entry pretty easy, right? James and I did it within the first week or two of talking about it.

But the barriers to scale are very high because there's so much complexity. So what our values will do is they'll pick it up, they'll bring it back. We have a central hub in all of our markets. We're in 10 major markets across the country right now. And then we work with local cleaners to clean the clothes. And for us, there's always been an element here of wanting to help local cleaners grow their business and being very thorough and saying, hey, there are good cleaners out there and bad cleaners out there.

We're going to work with the best cleaners and let them do what they do best, which is clean the clothes, and then we'll take care of everything else. We're going to help them grow their business. We get them the clothes to clean. They have rinse technology and rinse processes in their facilities. They'll clean the clothes, bring them back to us, and then our valets will deliver them when the clothes are ready. And that's something that really does sort of serve

as a heartbeat through rinse, the consideration of the people along that are involved in the processes. Like the fact that your valets are W2 employees and the fact that you actually are supporting local mom and shop businesses, because especially like you think about the time and the influences you mentioned Uber and Lyft around the same time people are getting really interested in marketplaces like Airbnb. And so I could see a world in which Rinse is a marketplace that helps people

find those mom and pop shops, or you could have decided we're going to have Rinse facilities and we'll own the space and the machines and things like that. But I love that you've kept this through line of just really considering the industry at large and the people involved to pull it off. It really shows. Yeah, thank you. I mean, it's been critical since the beginning. I mean, it started with James's upbringing and growing up in the space and wanting to really being on a mission to help the industry. And as we got started, we wrote our core values in March, 2013. And the main core value was make mom proud,

which was really an ode to James's mom who helped us out a lot as we got started. But the idea there was, whatever you do as you represent yourself and you represent the brand, you should be proud to tell your mom about, not just okay that your mom found out about it, but proud to tell them about it. And that's a big distinction for us because that's how we want to treat our

cleaning partners when we work with them. That's why when we brought on valets, we knew that, you know, having valets be W two employees was not only is it better for the customer, uh, because they get a better experience, but it's way better for the valet. They get protections as employees. And frankly, it's been better for rinse because we deliver a better experience, but it's way better for the valet. They get protections as employees. And frankly, it's been better for Rinse because we deliver a better experience to the customer. And we've actually found a lot of our valets have become operators within Rinse, and they've taken full-time jobs within Rinse. So, you know, I think that idea of doing the

right thing has always been pretty important since the beginning. Yeah, that's great. Make mom proud. That's going to be our KPI, our key performance indicator for next year. I love that. Yeah, I love it. Hold onto your wallets. Money Rehab will be right back. And now for some more money rehab. Speaking of KPIs for next year, we're approaching the end of 2024. This is a time where people, businesses are making their goals for next year. Can you talk a little bit about how you set goals as a company and use what your goals are for 2025 as an example of that decision-making process?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it certainly evolved over time. I think when we started early on, the calendar year was less important and it was more about just continuous progress and always doing better. And the way we used to do it was we would say we did 50 stops in a night. We would sit in a room and say, okay, what breaks when we get to 100? Okay, what breaks when we get to 200 or 500? And so early on, you're really just trying to manage the complexity and make sure you can navigate it

while maintaining an amazing customer experience. We've grown up a lot since then. And so now we're at a stage where what we do is we try to keep it simple. I think there's so many things we could be doing. And something I say internally sometimes is there's a lot to do, but we don't have to do a lot. And what that means is that there's only a few things

we have to really get right to have a successful year. And so what we have evolved to is at the beginning of the year, we start with a one page strategy. And on that one page strategy, we'll have an overarching company goal. We'll have a couple areas where there are key initiatives and I like to work in frameworks.

There'll be two or three pillars at most and then some core metrics. What we wanna do is have kind of this overall, overarching alignment across the company. You know what we're working towards. Everyone has a job to do and it's in service of this broader goal. And so, you know, last year in 2024,

there was a lot of focus on unlocking efficient growth while achieving profitability. That was sort of the overarching company goal, or demonstrating profitability. And our pillars were around growth, profitability, and operational excellence. And so it was very clear, you know, if you're working on something, it should be in service of one of those. And one of the frameworks I've learned in the past is called this even over framework. When we talk about growth and profitability, they're both really important, but what's more important? And so last year, the internal conversation

and the way I described it was profitability even over growth, right? If we have the opportunity to be more profitable, have the business be stronger, we're gonna take that over trying to achieve more on the growth side. As we transition to 2025, we're still putting the final touches in place and we have all hands next week to start talking about the year and all that. But there'll be a slight change where now it's going to be growth even over profitability. We've demonstrated profitability. We know we're in a good

spot, but we still have a lot to do to become that household name and the national brand and really to kind of power all of laundry. And so there's work to be done and we want to make sure that we're focusing on the right things, but it'll always be kind of, you know, buttoned up into this very simple, easy to digest one page strategy that allows everyone to sort of know, hey, this is what we're going after.

I love how you take this sort of there's a lot to do, but we don't have to do a lot, and give people a framework that they can always sort of do a gut check of, like, does this support the overarching goal? And we had the co-founder of Club Penguin come on the show a while ago, and he said that they had a similar framework where the company was big, and they were selling to Disney, and they were getting invited to all of these conferences,

and they were like, would an eight-year-old care about this? And that was sort of their pillar. And so if an eight year old wouldn't care about it, they just sort of didn't do it. And that was how they filtered like there's a lot to do, but what are the things that we're actually going to do and what should we be putting our focus on? And I know for 2025, in fact, you may be announcing it today as we're talking, but you're doing a partnership with Barrier Free Living. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? Yeah, absolutely. We've always been focused on social impact. We've always focused on doing the right thing. We already talked a little bit about helping local cleaners and

W-2 LAs, but we've also taken clothing donations since the beginning. We've donated several tons of clothes over the years. We've provided free laundry to fundraisers. You know, during COVID, we helped get PPE to, you know, to local hospitals who needed it. So it's always been kind of one-off efforts that, you know, when we can find the opportunity, we want to do it. But the general core focus has always been, well, no, but we got to grow and we got to become profitable. And certainly, when there are things like COVID, it's like, well, we got to navigate this whole thing. But I think the nice thing is we've kind of earned the right to formalize this. And so we're actually, we're launching a social impact initiative. We call it Rinse Rise, where the idea is where can we provide

laundry, which is our core focus, to people where it can be meaningful. And so the first partnership we're kicking off this week is with Barrier Free Living in New York, and it's people who have survived and fled from domestic violence. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna provide a few months of free clothing care for them as they're kind of working through that transition. So I'm excited about it.

It's gonna be, hopefully it's a great partnership we can build on, but more importantly, hopefully it's the first partnership of many under the umbrella of Rinse Rise where we can really have an impact. I do think that that is such a smart way to provide that social impact because I remember even when I was going to college, my mom moving me in my freshman year, the first thing she said was you have to make your bed because that's what makes you feel like you're having

this fresh start in your home. That's really amazing. I'm sure between your social impact work and the growth and profitability goals you have for next year, 2025 is going to be another great year for Rinse. And again, like this is the time of year where businesses are making their goals for the year. Individuals are also making their goals for the year. And we hear from a lot of listeners who are like, I've always wanted to start a business, it's 2025, the year that I actually do it. Can you give advice for a founder in those shoes or a would-be founder about how to know

when it's the right time to make the leap? Yeah, I mean, I think it is scary. It's not for the faint of heart. I think it's one of those journeys that is, it's incredibly challenging, but also incredibly rewarding. But it's one that you don't want to limp into. And so I think first it's important to understand there is never a good time to start a business with life because you're always busy.

Maybe you're thinking about family. Maybe there's financial considerations. There's always something that can kind of hold you back. And so I think the key is to really understand if you have conviction and excitement over taking that leap. So don't just kind of limp into it because it sounds cool, because it's very, very challenging.

But if you have that feeling, if you've been thinking about it a lot, I would encourage people to just do the work. You don't actually have to quit your job and move somewhere or do something totally different to start learning and seeing whether or not there's something that gets you excited. Because to me, this is about waiting for those bells to go off and knowing that this is the thing I want to actually take the leap with.

And so early on, if you're talking to customers, you know, need finding, you're figuring out what your field of play is going to be, what's the area I want to get into, and you're understanding if there's a pain point that gets you excited, you can do that just through conversations. You don't have to take massive leaps to do that. And then I think again, gauge, if I'm excited today about something, let me see if it's still in my head and let me see a couple of weeks later, am I still thinking about that thing? Because ultimately it's not about stepping away and I'm going to go raise money tomorrow and I'm going to go build a product. There's a journey and you really want to make sure first and foremost that this is the thing you want to

dedicate your time to and take that leap with. And so I think if you're feeling that itch, I also, by the way, I have the thing that got me to take the leap. There was a great line from a business school professor that stuck with me as I was thinking about this. And it was it's the idea that regrets for the things you do can be tempered with time. Regrets for the things you don't do are inconsolable. And for me, there was this feeling of like, no, man, I got to do this at some point, I really want to do this, I got to be, I got to have that experience. And so if, if you have that itch, you want to minimize regret and take a shot at it. But I think I think you don't just go in blindly, right? Be really intentional, wait for the bells to go off, you know, gauge your excitement along the way, make sure as you talk to customers, they actually care

and there's you're solving a need here. These are all steps in a longer process. Yeah. And what about founders or potential founders who are in discussion with friends about starting a business together. I know that this is of course something that you did with James, you had known each other since college. And I think people worry if I start a business with a friend, how do I make sure that neither suffers? The friendship doesn't suffer, but also the business doesn't suffer because of the friendship. So what advice would you give to friends who are considering starting something together? Yeah, I mean, it's a it's very different starting a company with someone than it is just

being a friend with someone. And so I think one of the things that got me excited and confident with James early on was we had such a long history together, that there was a very strong foundation value alignment and trust. And I think that was really important for me to even want to take the leap. But but this, this whole founder journey, it's, it's a lot like a marriage, right, you get into a marriage because of some initial things that that's that make it seem like there's a really strong foundation. But it takes a lot of work. And you learn a lot about the person as the

journey goes, goes along. And so for James and I early on, you know, we knew there was implicit trust there. We both thought highly of each other, but we had never worked together. And so we spent a lot of time just early on kind of talking about, hey, what are your working styles? You know, what are the, what do you want out of this? What are your expectations? Does this have to be a unicorn in a couple of years? Or are you trying to build a long-term business? How long can you go without taking a salary? There's all these questions that are not like the things that would come out

when you're going out to dinner with a friend or hanging out. And so we had a lot of those conversations early on, but I think the key thing has been that the communication, that was sort of the start of really good communication throughout. Because what has happened as we've as we've kind of scaled and worked together so closely is we know how each other works. We're very different in terms of our working styles, and how we like to receive feedback and how we like to communicate. And we have to we have to kind of learn that from each other and provide that feedback to know, you know, just like a marriage, you have to know how to communicate. You have

to know you build the trust along the way and you have to make sure you're really putting in the work and nurturing it. I think that's the important piece. If you lose sight of that, the founding journey, the entrepreneurial journey is a pressure cooker and it'll exacerbate any sort of negative things within the relationship. So you got to always be working and making sure it's strong. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And that is something we've talked about a bit on the show. We do both business content, personal finance, and like you're saying about a marriage, it's so important to once you feel like you're ready to put a ring on it, lock it in. It's

like, how old do you want to be when you retire? What are your expectations about like what our lifestyle will be like in retirement similar to like, do you want this to be a unicorn? How long can you go without taking a salary? It's really helpful to be on the same page there. And so, let's talk to some, not would-be founders, but founders. You say that one of the priorities for you is ruthless prioritization. Can you explain what that is and why that's important? Absolutely. I mean, I think the idea of ruthless prioritization is being incredibly intentional with how you spend your time and making sure whatever you spend your time on has an impact and moves the needle. It's very easy as a founder or early in the journey to spend a

lot of time perfecting a product and not talking to a customer as an example, but you got to talk to the customers to see if they actually care about what you're building. And so, you know, the one thing that's very kind of constant about a startup is that if you give it 24 hours in a day, it will take it. And so as you are building it, you need to be incredibly thoughtful and intentional. And there's always going to be challenges. I mean, the second you become the CEO of a startup, you're going to get invited to a bunch of networking events and a bunch of dinners.

And as you start building your company, you're going to get a bunch of feedback from everybody about why you should do X or why you should do Y. And it'll come from smart people. And you got to be really smart about where you're spending your time, where you're placing your bets. And, and there's also things around, it would be exciting to do certain things that you haven't quite earned the right to do yet. And so, you know, I, I mean, I found with some of my earlier experiences, we would spend a lot of time doing things that bigger companies would do as

opposed to doing the things that allow you to become the big company. And so really focusing on the things that move the needle is super important. And so, you know, I think that is the idea of ruthless prioritization is to make sure if you're going to spend time doing this, make sure the things you're doing actually matter. We end all of our episodes by asking our guests for one tip that listeners can take straight to the bank. That is such a good one. But if there's any other piece of advice that you could leave our listeners with on career or business, could be anything, fundraising, starting a business, what's one tip that you would leave listeners with today? Yeah, I'll give you a few. If you're early in your career, I think the main thing I would

tell you is that you just need to be excellent. As you are working in your various jobs, just go above and beyond, always be excellent. And what you'll find is that your reputation is going to follow you everywhere you go. And so if you're early in your career, that's really important. If you're early as a founder, I think the key thing is you have to be ready to manage your psyche because this is a really hard journey and you have to be willing to ask for help. I've met a lot of founders who don't want to ask for help and they want to kind of show this perfect product or show that they already know the answer. But the reality is it's just like parenting and raising a kid, it takes a village. You want to lean on that.

If you're building and you are a founder and you're kind of building your company, I think one of the things I've learned over time, I like to say is fix the roof while the sun is still shining. You know, make sure that you actually, when you have capital or you're in a position of strength or you're early on in learning, make sure you actually go after the hard things. The hard conversations are the only ones worth having and you want to address those things that can hurt you later. And then I think in general, it is an all encompassing journey. Being a founder, it's very, very tough. And we talk about

ruthless prioritization in the job, but I think it's also really important in life. And so one of my favorite quotes that I think it helped me along the way is that, in life, you're always juggling balls. Career is like a rubber ball. If you drop it, it'll bounce back, so you don't need to necessarily overthink it.

But things like family and health are glass balls. If you drop them, they break. And so just being really smart and intentional about how you prioritize your time is probably one of the best pieces of advice I could give anybody. Money rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lapin. Money rehab's executive producer is Morgan LeVoy. Our researcher is Emily Holmes.

Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me. And follow us on Instagram at MoneyNews and TikTok at MoneyNewsNetwork for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. No, seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.