10 Powerful Truths Learned from Building (and Closing) a Dream Business | Entrepreneur Chronicles #14
Three years ago, a simple phone call changed the trajectory of my entrepreneurial life forever. Now, after an incredible journey full of highs, lows, and countless lessons, the Warrior Flow School is coming to an end.
The Warrior Flow School
Before I dive into the lessons learned, I just want to say how incredibly proud and grateful I am for this experience.
The Warrior Flow School wasn’t your classic yoga school. Our programs were accessible, adaptive, trauma-informed, and size-inclusive. Social justice was a key pillar of our teachings. That means we didn’t attract your “classic yogis.” Our students and faculty members were people who either felt they didn’t belong in the mainstream yoga world or genuinely wanted to help others.
This uniqueness meant that I had the chance to collaborate with and be around people with big hearts.
Together we talked, we learned, we laughed, we cried.
Three Impactful Years
There is so much I could share about this adventure. I probably won’t cover it all, but I want to start with some numbers:
In 3 years, we hosted 7 x 200-hour yoga teacher training cohorts and 1 x 300-hour yoga teacher training cohort.
We had close to 200 students trusting us and taking our trainings from about 15 countries around the world.
We collaborated with more than 30 yoga teachers and experts, who we compensated fairly for their work.
We generated more than $60K during the first year of activity (2022) and over $100K in the second year (2023)—all that with no paid marketing!
We offered scholarships to approximately 50 people, representing more than $100,000 over 3 years.
I received countless messages from graduates telling us that we made a huge difference in their lives and communities.
I’m really proud of all that. 🙏🏼
Lessons Learned
Looking back at it now, this is what I would qualify as my first proper experience in entrepreneurship. Going from ideation to execution, from 0 to 1.
We discussed different starting points and business models, created the LLC, strategized about our first product, contacted people because we simply couldn’t do it all alone, and eventually announced our product to the world! We did all that with no starting capital, apart from a few hundred dollars to get the LLC going and set up a few software tools.. The capital we started with was “human-capital”—Adrian’s network of 20 years in the yoga world and an email list of 10,000 people. That was more valuable than any money to start with!
Reflecting back, here are the 10 key lessons I’ve learned from this experience.
Creating a business with someone will be hard at some point. I loved what Adrian and I did together. I don’t believe either of us could have accomplished what we did without the other. We complemented each other in so many ways, and between the two of us, we covered a lot of ground, which was awesome. If you’ve read the book ‘Rocket Fuel’, they talk about the idea of visionaries and integrators. Adrian was the visionary; I was the integrator. Great match. Great couple. You might find it funny that I use the word couple, but I chose it intentionally. Because when you create a business with someone, in a way it’s another kind of marriage and relationship. We spent countless hours talking and texting, sharing so much. Like any relationship, there are ups and downs. Two human beings cannot always agree. Most of the time it’s fine—it’s even beneficial as we have different perspectives. But sometimes it can also be challenging to navigate, especially when you become close and attached to each other, and particularly when you both have strong personalities like we do.
📸 Adrian and I in Miami, January 2024. The one and only day we ever worked from the same place during the whole life of the School. You cannot do it all alone. Starting a business is not straightforward. Running and growing a business is hard. There are so many things to do, so many things you need to know outside your area of expertise. It’s humanly not possible to know it all, or at least to be good at all of it. Surrounding yourself with people who believe in you, who are willing to tell you what you need to hear, and who can support you is crucial. But pick the right people. Because just like in every situation in life, your environment and who you surround yourself with significantly impact who you are, what you think, and therefore what you do. Also, depending on the nature and scale of your business, there will probably come a time when you need to delegate and hire people.
Hiring and firing is mega hard. Which brings me to this point! Hiring is challenging because I personally find it very hard to assess someone’s skillset in just a few hours and decide if they’re the right fit. Everyone has a good CV; everyone can behave or act a certain way during a conversation to make you believe they’re perfect. Then, when you hire someone, you need to manage them (to a certain extent), which isn’t always easy because we deal with people who have emotions and egos. As the business owner, I also felt responsible for people on the team—not just financially, but personally too. I wanted to make sure they were okay. It can be draining sometimes. And when things don’t go as planned, you need to have difficult conversations, which can be especially tough when you genuinely care about the person. I’m pretty direct and usually fine telling someone what I think, even if I know they won’t like it. But in the context of a business, as a manager/employer, I found it very, very hard.
Be strategic about what tasks you delegate. For someone like me who loves to control everything, delegating isn’t my cup of tea! I like to do things myself, so I know they’ll be done the way I want, and I’ll only have myself to blame if things don’t go well. I’m like that in my personal life too, ask my wife! 😆 So yeah, deciding to delegate doesn’t come naturally. We delegated a bunch of tasks in the school to focus on what we thought was more important. Looking back now, I think we could’ve handled it differently. At the early stage of a business, any financial resources you have should be reinvested to grow. We delegated some “mundane” tasks to focus on the bigger picture, but we weren’t experts in growth and scaling. If I had to do it again, I would suck it up, do the “boring” stuff myself, and spend the money on experts to grow the business.
No one will care as much as you do. When you work with people and feel super excited about what you’re building, you want everyone else to care about it just as much. But that’s impossible. Don’t get me wrong, people will care. We had amazing team members who genuinely believed in our mission. But at the end of the day, you cannot expect everyone to care as deeply as you, the owner. I thought about the school day in, day out. It was consistently on my mind. I cannot expect everyone to be as obsessed as I was. It just doesn’t work like that.
Don’t become stagnant. This is something I really took from Adrian. I think I have a natural tendency to become somewhat complacent when things are going well. If we already had two yoga trainings doing well, why bother starting something else? Don’t change what’s not broken, right? Adrian was always thinking ahead, about the next phase. What can we do beyond yoga trainings to remain relevant and different? Let’s stay one or two steps ahead. While I think there’s a middle ground between focusing on the present and the future, I really admire his ability to continually challenge what you’re doing and always seek ways to improve or do things differently and push boundaries.
Be ready to do the work. Let’s be real. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint-hearted. When you want to build something from the ground up, it takes A LOT OF WORK. And I’m not just talking about the number of hours you work each day. It’s about how much mental space it consumes. It’s in your head 24/7; it never stops. “What if I do this?” “What if we try that?” It’s NON-STOP. It’s a grind. If you want to make a living from it, it will require tons of effort, energy, time, knowledge, and a bit of luck. And the best part? Even with all this, you might not succeed. It could still fail! I warned you 😉
Be realistic about expectations when collaborating with others. This is not a critique of all the wonderful people I’ve worked with, but when we started working designing the model of the school, we had a strategy, and expectations. A big part of our growth strategy was collaboration. We built an economic model to reward our faculty members based on the success of the school (we shared revenue + offered generous commissions). The idea was simple: if we win, we all win. We worked with 30+ people. Our assumption was, “If each faculty member enrolls one student for each cohort we run, the school will be incredibly profitable while also compensating faculty members really well.” It just didn’t work. I don’t know why, but out of 200 students, only a tiny fraction came from faculty recommendations. Too much of our strategy relied on them to get new students. In hindsight, we should have taken matters more into our own hands, earlier on.
Learn when you should or shouldn’t intervene. Something I noticed is that sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut, even if you really want to speak up. It’s not easy for someone like me, who loves to speak up and be right 😂, but I saw the value of this in two main ways: First, when managing people, you need to find the right balance between telling them what to do and giving them enough space to experiment and grow independently, without suffocating them. On the flip side, you also need to develop the intuition to know when it’s time to intervene because things aren’t going well and something must change. It’s a very fine line and a delicate balance to find. Second, there’s sharing opinions on things outside your expertise. While I strongly believe there’s value in bringing diverse perspectives to the table, sometimes you just need to “stay in your lane,” trust people to do their jobs, and focus your energy on what you’re truly great at.
Be kind. Be human. I genuinely believe this is one of the most important lessons. In a very ego-driven world, where we often hear that to succeed in business you need to be ruthless or act like a shark, I believe kindness will always win over ruthlessness. It might mean less financial success or it might take more time, but I’m okay with that. Because ultimately, what I’m most grateful for in this experience are all the connections I made. It wasn’t always easy. Yes, I had disagreements with people. But overall, it’s a huge net positive on a human level. I grew as a person. I built lasting relationships. I saw the reward of being kind, honest, and genuine through how people supported and helped us.
One Chapter Ends Another Begins
The Warrior Flow School is the longest project I’ve ever worked on. It’s been the most rewarding, challenging, and impactful venture of my life so far.
The School financially supported me for two and a half years and allowed me to travel and work from over 15 countries! 🌎
I wish we could’ve carried on, as we were genuinely bringing value to many people and the world. However, certain factors and circumstances meant it had to end this way. I’ve learned to focus on what I can control, accept the rest, and always do my best with the information I have.
The lessons, experiences, skills, and connections I acquired over these three years are invaluable. I’ll carry them with me into this next chapter.
After four years collaborating on various ventures, I’ve decided to use everything I’ve learned to go solo. I’m now focusing on helping people- especially solopreneurs & creatives- get unstuck, either in the personal or professional through coaching and consulting.
I feel very aligned, ready excited with my new mission.
Acknowledgments
I want to say thank you to Adrian, Andrea, Sunny, Anita, Molisa, Claudia, and Rosie—it took a team to do it all. And of course, thank you to all the faculty members and students who trusted us!
If you’re reading this and have been involved in the life of the School in any way, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. ❤️
👉 This is part of my Entrepreneur Chronicles—real stories, real lessons. Dive into the full series here.
You absolutely made a positive difference in many people’s lives, including mine. It was cool to be a small part of it. Thank you.
Sending big hugs!!!