the lazy barber

1 Year

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Today marks 1 year since I stared into my grandfathers eyes as he passed away. He was the first person in my immediate family to do so. This experience had a very profound effect on my entire life. I was feeling a bunch of emotions that I didn’t know how to cope with – ranging from deep sadness to guilt. I honestly felt like I would never be able to feel happy again. But then a few weeks after his death I started to feel better. I was happy knowing that my grandfather had lived a full life of 82 years and achieved his wish of watching his grand kids grow to adulthood. I knew that all he wanted for me was happiness.

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With this new found joy and energy I decided that I needed to change the direction in which my life was heading. I decided to take a break from working with my dad and focus more on growing my web design business. I also landed a part-time job at Telstra doing tech support.

By November of 2015 I was gaining more and more clients for web design that I decided to resign from Telstra and focus on that. I had also been in talks with a barber to create a range of men’s grooming products (starting with beard oils).

This project, named The Lazy Barber, came to fruition in January of this year and has been a really great success. We’ve had a tonne of positive feedback from our customers and we are growing at a steady pace. Our main goals for the future are to bring out additional products and get our products into a range of different business’ including barbershops, general stores etc.

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I’ve also learnt a tonne about marketing through working on The Lazy Barber. I’ve been writing blog posts over at our official Lazy Blog and I’ve also been putting a lot of time into mastering social media. The key to running a business is that marketing is everything. It’s crucial that you’re able to cut through the noise of the (literally) hundreds of competing brands and stand out by being different.

Brand exposure can either be gained organically (without paying for it) or by putting money into advertising. Organic exposure is always better as it’s free and the exposure comes from people who want to learn about your brand or purchase your products. My main aim with the Lazy Blog is to grow our organic traffic and get more people interested in what we’re doing at The Lazy Barber – whether it be joining us at the events we attend or purchasing our product (or a cut from @thelazybarber himself).

Overall, the last year has been a rollercoaster for both my personal and professional life. I’m really excited for what the next 6 months will bring for me and I’m extremely motivated to go bigger and better with both web design and The Lazy Barber. I’m also aiming to update my blog more often with a fresh design coming soon.

As always – thanks for reading!

How I went from a ‘Wantrepreneur’ to an Entrepreneur

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For as long as I can remember I’ve always had plenty of ideas for a business but none of them ever came to fruition or I was simply too lazy to work on them. All that changed last year when I was finally able to break away from WANTING to start a business to actually DOING it.

You need to find a catalyst to break away from what you’ve been taught your entire life. We’ve been conditioned to follow the ‘get an education, get a job, have a family and then retire’ path. We’ve been told that failure is wrong and that we should avoid taking big risks. This is complete bullshit. Failure is amazing. Without failure, there would be no success. Plenty of successful people have failed many times, but the key difference is that they pick themselves up again and move on. Most people give up after 1 or 2 failures and decide being an entrepreneur is not for them. Heck, I’ve had 4 failures so far. I put months into some of my previous endeavours and they failed horribly. But did I let this get me down? Nope. I picked myself back up and went to work on my next projects. For all I know, Fact Apparel could fail miserably but I don’t care. I’m not going to fall into the ocean that is life and let it take me where it wants. No – I’m going to build a boat and sail against those waves; one knot at a time.

I currently have 2 other projects that I’m working on. They’re nothing major and only in the design phases at the moment, but I’ve learnt not to put all my eggs in one basket. It’s all well and good to live and breathe a business, but business’ take a very long time to grow. The average is around 3 years for completely new business’ (such as Fact Apparel). Knowing this fact has opened my eyes to the reality that if I can allocate time to 2 or 3 business’ at once, then I have a much better chance of success over the 3 year growth period. If I was to just focus on Fact Apparel for 3 years and it didn’t work out, then I would have to wait another 3 years just to get a business to the same level. Our lives are so fickle and finite that we can’t afford to waste time being a wantrepreneur. We must, as Robin Williams put it in Dead Poets Society, seize the day!

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So, where do you go from here? Well, if I’ve convinced you to stop being lazy and making up excuses then you’ll get to work on your own ideas. I know how hard it is to read something on the internet that someone you barely know has said and follow it, but I implore you to heed advice from people who have been in my position. I use websites such as Quora and Entrepreneur.com to read about real world experiences from budding entrepreneurs and apply it to my own life. As an entrepreneur, you need to keep learning. Every day you will be faced with a new challenge and some of these challenges will test the very core of who you are. The single piece of advice that I live by every day is that we, as humans, don’t get smarter, we only get less dumb. Our experiences shape who we are and who we will become so make yours count.

Fact Apparel was my catalyst, what will yours be?

– Sassal

1 Month of Fact Apparel

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It’s been a long month for me. We launched Fact Apparel just over a month ago now and it’s been a wild ride thus far. We had our launch party at Alumbra last month (which was such a huge success that we were invited to host again on the 25th of April!) and we’ve been getting steady orders since our website was launched.

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We have photo-shoots booked almost every week and are constantly on the hunt for new promoters for our brand. We have a great number of promoters already (including names like Marcus Bontempelli, an AFL player for the Western Bulldogs and popular Melbourne DJ’s such as Stan Gravs). We have just started our PR campaign which involves contacting bloggers to help us spread the word about Fact. You can view our Media Kit here! We also held our first giveaway for 2 weeks and it was a great success!

But it hasn’t been all sunshine and lollipops. As some of you would know our Instagram account was disabled for some reason a couple of weeks ago.

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It was a quiet Saturday night around 7:30pm when I was suddenly kicked out of Fact’s Instagram account. I thought it was simply a disconnection and attempted to log back in but to my horror I was prompted with the message above.

I immediately rang Taulant and asked him to attempt to log in but he was also getting the same message. It was from this moment on that my night became extremely distressing. Taulant added Francis and Adrian to the call and we informed them what had happened. We were all in a state of shock and disbelief as we had done nothing to deserve such an action and we weren’t even given an explanation.

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After about 20 minutes of deliberating we decided to wait until the Monday night to start a new account as Instagram had an extremely strict policy in place which stated once your account is permanently banned you will NOT get it back. I still decided to submit an ‘I have been hacked’ report in the hope of getting the account back.

So, Monday comes around and we launch our new Instagram account at around 8:00pm. This was hard as we had lost all of our videos/photos that we had posted and needed to post about 15 photos to just showcase our brand. Also, we couldn’t even use the same account name! Everyone was pretty understanding and we managed to get back to around 700 followers out of the 2000 we had previously in just a day.

We had finally accepted our fate but then a couple of days later at around 3:00am I recieve an email for Instagram stating that our account had been reactivated.

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I was absolutely shocked. This was nothing short of a miracle! I immediately posted it on our Fact facebook group alerting the others to what had just happened but unfortunately it was 3:00am and they were asleep so I had to wait until the morning to celebrate.

So that was the great Instagram clusterfuck of ’15.

Aside from that, April has been quite kind to us. Our goal was to reach 2000 Instagram followers by the end of the month and we have done just that! We’re currently sitting at over 2100 with 2 days left. Follow us @fact.apparel!

We also learnt a valuable lesson from this entire ordeal. We were focusing too much on one medium (Instagram) while letting our others slide into obscurity. So to combat this I made a pledge to reach 100 followers on Twitter by the end of April (starting from 3) and I’m pleased to say that we are currently over 100! We also committed to growing our Facebook page a bit more but, unfortunately, that has been harder than anticipated. If you want to help us out like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

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Twitter has been a much bigger medium for us than I had anticipated. We have been getting steady traffic from Twitter and have actually been getting some good engagement on our tweets.

Personally over the last month I have been figuring out just what I want to do full time while Fact grows. I have picked up a few website building jobs and also have some part-time work as a digital marketing consultant but I still need to find something to do full time. I have decided that I pretty much want to work as an SEO (search engine optimization) specialist for a company because it is an extremely specialized field and can open up doors into other I.T related areas.  I also possess extensive knowledge in the field that I have gained from working with Fact and Appliances Express.

This turned into a much longer post than I had realised but I hope you all enjoyed reading it! I will make a concerted effort to update this more regularly 🙂

– Sassal

Staying Grounded When All You Want To Do Is Fly

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Sometimes it’s hard to stay grounded. You have all these hopes and dreams for the future that you play over in your head and some of them are achievable while others seem impossible. You ask yourself questions like; Are my dreams possible? Can I actually achieve this? Am I prepared for the real world? You have no real answers to these questions – no one does. You just have to do the best with what you’re given.

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The key is to not live in a fantasy world if reality is a bleak mess. Eventually you’ll have to face what you have been trying to avoid and it just makes things worse. Dealing with an issue as soon as it arises is extremely important. Nothing stays buried forever.

Lately a few things have happened in my life which have caused a lot of excitement and I often find myself day dreaming about what could be and not what actually is. I think about the money I could be earning or the people I could meet. I sometimes get nervous that I’ll be dealing with really important people and they won’t take me seriously. I start fantasising about things like this and it’s fun while it lasts.

Unfortunately the fantasy doesn’t last long as I’m pulled back down to earth relatively quickly. Remaining ignorant doesn’t help either. Ignorance is only bliss until the bliss is slowly chipped away by reality.

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I’ve learnt how to deal with this by simply foregoing excitement about could-be’s until they become reality. By doing this I am also able to prevent my hopes from being let down since they weren’t high in the beginning. This is the key to staying in reality. Without learning this you’ll always find your mind drifting off and you’ll never actually do the work to get to make your fantasy a reality. Smart, hard work is a must.

If you’re afraid of chasing your dreams then I ask you; why? What have you got to lose? Are you nervous? Do you think you’re not good enough? Are you happy just cruising through life not knowing what you’re capable of? Why do that? You only get one life and theres so many things that can kill you – so why waste it watching TV or lying in bed? Get off the couch!

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Educate yourself. Use the internet to learn about anything and everything. Break away from the thinking that you need to go to University to learn. Companies these days are looking for experience over a degree. Every person and their dog has a degree. Separate yourself from the rest.

The road to happiness isn’t straight. You have to fight until your last breath; and then fight some more. The world doesn’t owe you anything. By being born healthy in a first world country you are already luckier than the majority of people on Earth. Don’t take that for granted.

You’re just a blink in time – wake up and do something.

– Sassal

3 Common Weaknesses You Can Turn Into Strengths

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Everyone has weaknesses that they’d rather live without. Even the most successful people. The key is to conquer these weaknesses and turn them into strengths.

One – You’re a control freak

So you love to control everything and everyone around you. You don’t know why but losing control of a situation makes you mad and get’s your blood boiling. This is a very common weakness and is actually a very strong trait once properly harnessed.

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So what can you do to turn being a control freak into something positive? Embrace it. Work in jobs that allow you to have control. Don’t be someone who just listens to a boss all day and follows orders. Be someone who collaborates with a boss and asserts their own dominance over their peers. Positions such as executives are perfect for control freaks.

Side note: If you’re a control freak then I highly recommend you never join the army.

Two – You’re the jealous type

Jealousy can be an extremely powerful emotion. It’s often seen as a bad trait and that you shouldn’t be jealous of others.

I think it’s a good trait. Use your jealousy to motivate you to be better. If that guy at work just got a promotion and your jealous of him then work harder. Work smarter. Motivate yourself to be better than him. Keep telling yourself that you have the same or better potential. Don’t just get jealous and then give up.

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Three – You’re lazy

You’re not lazy. That’s the excuse you keep telling yourself in order to not do something because its easier that way. It’s a vicious cycle. The lazier you are, the lazier you will become.

You can beat laziness. The hardest part is to break away from laziness initially. It’s like a muscle. The more you exercise it; the stronger it will become. Every day that you decide not to be lazy is another day that you’ve progressed towards it just becoming a routine rather than a conscious effort.

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It can take months or even years to completely get out of being lazy but you can do it. Once you’ve built up a proper routine it becomes second nature.

Treat weaknesses like a challenge – not a curse.

– Sassal

7 Tips to Stay Healthy and Balanced While Building a Business

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Great post 🙂

The Zeit

Stay Healthy and Balanced While Building a Business Stay Healthy and Balanced While Building a Business

Starting a business requires consistent dedication and focus to meet your goals. Unfortunately in many cases that means pushing your health and well-being to the side. We can get so caught up living our lives and doing what we ‘have’ to do that we can end up with no energy, losing motivation and burning out.
It’s time to take accountability and make sure you look after yourself to ensure you are getting the most from your new business while maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

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Starting an Apparel Brand

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It was a few months ago that I got involved with Fact Apparel. Back then it was just an idea. My friend Francis came to me with it. I hadn’t met the other two yet.

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Then one night Francis and I were grabbing a coffee from McDonalds (I know, professional right?) and he decided to call TJ (one of the other guys in Fact). TJ came down and we had a business meeting inside McDonalds!

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I ran through everything that I would be able to do for the company and also how much I’d love to see and help a company grow from ground zero. We spent a couple of hours talking and I was invited to their next proper business meeting.

During the time between the McDonalds meeting and the next I was thinking of a way to truly impress them and show them just what I could bring to their company. I came up with the idea to draft a cost analysis plan based on figures that I thought were ball park. This included all relevant fees from things like credit cards and postage. I drafted it up to the cent. After all, a business exists to make money so a cost analysis would be highly valuable.

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I brought it to the next meeting and they were truly impressed. I was offered the position right then and there. I was blown away with happiness. My first real business venture. This is what being an entrepreneur is all about!

And then the next meeting came around – I was offered a % share in the company.

And then we’re here. Around 6 weeks from launch after months of hard work. It started at McDonalds and I have no idea where it will end up. But I’m excited. I’m ready. I feel alive for the first time in a very long time!

fact sampleOur first sample can be seen above. The day all our work came to fruition.

If you ask my friends or family about it they’ll tell you that I’m the last person they would of thought to start an apparel company as my background lies in I.T and a bit of business.

But that’s just it – I used my strong points to make myself an asset to an already great team.

That’s the most important part about starting a business or being involved in one – make sure you stick to what your strong with. I have limited design skills and I’m not great at promoting something offline but that isn’t my main role. I manage all business related activities (replying to emails, registering things with the government etc) and I also manage our online activity such as the website and social media.

For those of you who may be worried or think it might be hard starting a business I can only agree with you. It’s hard, it’s time consuming and it will test your limits – and that’s coming from someone who currently runs two! Appliances Express takes up the bulk of my time but with Fact’s launch around the corner I predict that will ramp up pretty fast as well.

I’m not afraid though – I welcome the challenge. I could of easily finished my degree and gotten a job somewhere in the world of I.T but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to manage my own businesses. So far it’s been a wild ride and I only started about 6 months ago. I’m still a noob. I’m still learning a lot and I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning.

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Business is an ever-changing game. What works today might not work tomorrow. You have to adapt. You have to evolve past the simple thinking of 9-5 work hours. Owning a business is a 24/7 job. You will lose sleep. You will lose friends and you will have to sacrifice going out with your friends to work on the business.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

– Sassal