President & CEO of DeRegnaucourt Ltd. Becky DeRegnaucourt Veltema shares her story of starting as a single mom and becoming a successful entrepreneur. DeRegnaucourt Ltd. provides custom equestrian apparel for the Saddlebred Morgan, and Arabian Horse breeds.

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From his first job flipping burgers at McDonald’s and delivering The Washington Post, Craig Willett counts only one and a half years of his adult life working for someone else. Welcome to The Biz Sherpa podcast with your host, Craig Willett. Founder of several multimillion-dollar businesses and trusted advisor to other business owners, he’s giving back to help business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs achieve fulfillment, enhance their lives, and create enduring wealth. The Biz Sherpa

Craig Willett:
This is Craig Willett, The Biz Sherpa. I’m grateful you’d join me today. I’m here with Becky DeRegnaucourt-Veltema who is the owner of DeRegnaucourt Limited. Becky started the business in 1994. What she does is provide custom riding apparel for the Arabian, Saddlebred, and Morgan equestrian industries. You see, to compete in those industries, you have to wear a certain attire for certain disciplines. And Becky’s become an expert at that.

She has 40 years experience in the equine business and she brings great talent to her business. She’s committed to providing custom riding apparel for trainers, amateurs, and youth in the show rings as I described. You’re seeing some of the pictures of what she does. She has a desire to service her clients above and beyond their expectations. She’s truly one of a kind for her industry.

I think you’ll enjoy her today as we talk about how she started the business, saw a need, and was able to ramp up to be able to meet that need and, secondly, how to finance it. Then, thirdly, how you market your business. How you really go about exceeding customers’ expectations. I think you’ll enjoy hearing her. Her husband, Bill, joined her in 2004 as her partner and an officer in the company and he brings some expertise as well. I think you’ll enjoy hearing Becky.

This is Craig Willett, The Biz Sherpa. I’m grateful you joined me today for our episode. We’re in Tulsa, Oklahoma today at the US National Championship for the Arabian horses. and I have a special guest. I’d like to introduce you to Becky DeRegnaucourt-Veltema who’s the founder and owner of DeRegnaucourt Limited. She’s the clothier to the stars here at the show and many other equestrian events. Welcome, Becky.

Becky Deregnaucourt-Veltema:
Thank you. I appreciate you having me.

Craig Willett:
I’m glad that you’d be here with us. I just can’t help but sit here and look at the covers of these magazines and think of knowing some of them having been a competitor to them, that they’re your clients. What is it like to see the national magazines with your clothes on?

Becky Deregnaucourt-Veltema:
Well, it’s interesting. It’s fun. We’ve actually gotten to a point where as all the magazines flow in, we just keep the ones that we have a cover or back cover of. The pile is huge. It’s fun. We keep an archive of them. It’s really, really interesting.

Craig Willett:
That’s got to be rewarding to you. You started this business. Did you ever think you’d be at the level you are today?

A few years ago Russell Brunson was mentoring a group of entrepreneurs and he promised them that if they published something every day for a year on their blog, YouTube channel or podcast, they would become financially free. Some of those entrepreneurs took Russell up on that challenge, began publishing every day, and became incredibly successful. One of those amazingly successful entrepreneurs was Stephen J. Larsen. 

Stephen tells his story of attending Russell Brunson’s Funnel Hacking Live event in San Diego. Stephen couldn’t afford a taxi. So, when his flight arrived he rented a bicycle, held his luggage over his shoulder, and peddled to Funnel Hacking Live through downtown San Diego. Stephen didn’t have enough money for a hotel room, so he slept on a couch in the hotel.  

I have heard Stephen tell the story of when Russell challenged him to publish every day, the challenge that changed everything for him. Before the event, Stephen had told his wife that was the one thing Russell might ask him to do that he wasn’t going to do. However, there at the event, Stephen chose to trust Russell and accept the challenge and begin to publish every day. 

As a result, Stephen has become one of the leading experts in the world on digital offer creation. In 2018 Stephen left his job to start his business from scratch, with no revenue or product. He reached $1 million in revenue in only 13 months.  I attended Stephen’s packed Offer Mind event before COVID-19 hit. I have paid Stephen to teach me how to create effective digital offers and I’ve witnessed firsthand some of the success Stephen has had because he accepted this daily publishing challenge. 

365-Everyday Music Tour

I recently listened to a podcast from Russell Brunson talking about a newlywed couple named Jim and Sam who had been unsuccessfully trying to break into the music industry for almost 10 years. This couple decided on a whim that they were going to do a concert every day for a year, and to create a documentary of their journey. At the beginning, the couple was performing for anyone who would listen, such as a group of tree trimmers. By the end, the couple was performing to tens of thousands of people. 

The documentary is called After So Many Days, and it was named the winner of the Best Music Documentary Feature at the Nashville Film Festival 2020. It has been an official selection at more than 30 film festivals.

In the trailer, Jim says: “So here we go, making something happen every single day.” This is profound. There is a power in doing something small every single day, and the cumulative effect of that consistency creates amazing transformation.

Read the rest of this blog at: https://www.monetizationnation.com/2-how-to-gamify-goals-to-radically-increase-our-chance-of-success/.

How much money have you lost in a day? In this episode, I’m going to tell you how I lost $11 million in one day, and some secrets that I learned that helped me become a digital monetizer.

How I Lost $11 Million in 1 Day

In the spring of 2000 I was a 25-year-old CEO of a publicly-traded SAAS (software as a service) company. My beautiful wife Crystal and I had been married for about 16 months, we had bought our first home, and she was pregnant with our first daughter. 

In just 5 years between 1995 and 2000 the Nasdaq had skyrocketed more than 500% from under 1,000 to more than 5,000. The Nasdaq peaked at 5,048 on March 10, 2000, and by October 4, 2002, had plummeted by 76% to only 1,139. By the end of 2001, most dotcom stocks had gone bust.

The Collateral Damage

When the dotcom bubble burst my company had not yet reached profitability and was dependent on investors who were funding our software development and marketing. I painfully remember losing $11 million in a single day on the stock market, all from my ownership in my company. When the dotcom bubble burst, investors stopped almost all of their investments in Internet companies. After all of our investment dried up, our investors and I lost the company. I feel horrible for the investors who trusted me and lost their investments, the great team members who lost their jobs, and the hardships that resulted for their families.

The next year, as I focused on growing a horribly unprofitable Internet business, I only earned about $11,000 total for the entire year, or about 1% of what I had lost in a single day the previous year. My family survived in part because of the generosity of others, such as my sweet mother-in-law, Laree Ullery, who regularly brought us groceries and diapers for our new baby girl.

When our daughter was only a couple of weeks old, a key employee quit. This was understandable because of our tenuous financial situation, but we didn’t have the funds to hire a replacement. My wife Crystal stepped into that role and then another, and did an amazing job at everything she touched. She worked more than 2 years, bringing our daughter with her to work each day, without being paid anything, to help us get back up on our feet. 

Our oldest daughter spent the first two years of her life coming into the office. As soon as she learned to walk she began going from office to office, pushing the “off” buttons on everyone’s tower computers. She was delighted at how quickly this got our attention. We finally got smart and started taping business cards over the buttons.

Heat Seeking Missile Aimed at Monetization

The first secret that I learned from this catastrophic experience was to be insanely focused on monetization. During the time leading up to the dotcom bubble I was doing a lot of “good” things that an entrepreneur should do, such as working with press releases and the media, raising money and managing relationships with investors, finding and operating an office space, dealing with HR issues, etc. These are all important things. However, our unprofitable business was like an airplane on a runway. We were trying to get the acceleration we needed to take off but the sudden dotcom bubble burst instantly shortened our runway. I had been so focused on “good” things, that I didn’t spend enough time focused on the most important thing: Monetization… getting us to profitability as fast as humanly possible. 

This experience seared into my soul the lesson that as an entrepreneur my top priority is to be a heat-seeking missile aimed at monetization. When a business reaches sustainable profitability it is no longer dependent on investors and to a great degree becomes the master of its own destiny. When my business was not profitable I did not have the luxury of being distracted by anything other than the top priority of monetization. If I had it to do over again, I would have locked myself in a room with my developers and would not have come out until we had a software product that was completed, working great and that our customers loved. 

This doesn’t mean that other things like HR issues are not important. However, the best thing that entrepreneurs can do to provide stability for their team members is to focus on monetization and get their business to sustainable profitability. 

Read the rest of the blog post at https://www.monetizationnation.com/3-secrets-i-learned-from-losing-11-million-in-a-day/.