12 Lessons I Learned in 2020 from Running Wall Street Mastermind

As 2020 comes to a close, I wanted to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned during what has been a crazy year for most people. I feel fortunate and grateful that despite everything that happened in the world, 2020 was the best year yet on both a personal and professional level. We celebrated Skylar’s first birthday and she’s quickly growing up into a happy little girl with an adorable personality. Wall Street Mastermind grew by ~120%, more than doubling year over year. Accomplishing this while being a first-time parent definitely wasn’t easy and took a lot of sacrifices as well as help from other people around me. This post is more for myself to look back on later and remember the lessons learned, but I’m posting it publicly so that it might help other people as well. (WARNING: THIS IS LOOOOONG.)

With that said, here are the 12 things I learned along the way (one for each month of the year):

#1.) Success is not a straight line. Sometimes you take 1 step back to take 2 steps forward.

Coming out of 2019, I was naively optimistic. November 2019 had been Wall Street Mastermind’s best month to date at that time, and I had finally hit a revenue goal that month that I’d always thought would make me feel like a REAL legitimate business owner. As I sat down to forecast out 2020, I built this financial model that was "up and to the right.” That was followed by three successive months of declining revenue in Q1’20, capped off in March as COVID-19 started spreading in the US and the stock market tanked. When everything was said and done, my March revenue had dropped 71% from its November 2019 high, down to a level that I hadn’t seen since the first half of 2019. I felt like my business had been set back 9 months. Fortunately, I fixed what I needed to fix and we bounced back in April, which became our second best month ever. And for the rest of 2020, we’ve been gradually growing month over month, almost every single month. We’re exiting 2020 with a lot of momentum, and the foundation of the business today is significantly stronger than what it was coming into the year. ??

#2.) Set big, audacious goals. Even if you miss, you’ll end up better off than if you had set small goals. Then normalize as you level up.

Speaking of that 2020 forecast I built which was up and to the right… I had forecasted that I would almost quadruple the business year over year (lol). Boy was I off. I guess all those years doing finance at tech startups only taught me how to create wildly unrealistic projections ?? But the upside to setting big audacious goals like this is that even when you miss your target by 40%, you’ve still more than doubled your business. Growing up, my dad always said to me “if you aim for the moon and miss, you’ll at least land amongst the stars.” Turns out my old man is a pretty wise man. Of course, as you’re growing quickly - it’s important to “normalize" everything so that what you just accomplished becomes your new steady state. If you are constantly in awe of the growth you just accomplished, you’re not going to achieve even more growth.  

#3.) Always be grateful, but never be satisfied. Compete against yourself, and be 1% better every day.

Each time I hit a goal, I immediately set a new, higher goal. In a sense, it’s always a moving goal post. I don’t know why I do this, but I think it’s just how a lot of successful people are wired. They don’t ever get complacent with what they’ve already accomplished, and they always want to see just how far they can push. While I’m super grateful for how quickly Wall Street Mastermind has grown in just 2.5 years, I’m never satisfied with where it’s at. In fact, I’ve already started thinking about a longer-term vision that will make this company much bigger and much more impactful in the next 4-5 years (stay tuned ??). Getting to that level will require me to grow by a tremendous amount as a person, so that I can become the type of person who can lead a company of that size. But I’m up for the challenge. I love competing. Initially, it was this unhealthy obsession with comparing myself against other people, and feeling this need to be the best. But I realized that’s just an ego thing, which is stupid. And there will always be someone who is doing “better” than you, or is "more successful” than you (at least based on the way society measures success), which makes this a pointless chase. My mentality now is to just compete against myself. If today’s version of me can be 1% better than yesterday’s version of me, then I’ve already won. If I can stack these 1% improvements consistently day after day - there is tremendous growth ahead to be had. Learn to love the process, and the results will be there. I’m grateful for the opportunity to play this game.

#4.) The importance of having a routine, and the importance of having help.

September was another rough month, because that’s when Sophie and I decided to take Skylar back to Taiwan so that she could live a normal, COVID-free life and not stunt her development. Our first two weeks back in Taiwan, we were in quarantine with zero childcare help for the first time since Skylar’s birth. This meant Sophie and I had to work and take care of Skylar simultaneously, which I’m sure many parents have struggled with this year while working from home. Being in a completely different time zone also took getting used to. My clients were mostly in the US, which meant I was anywhere from 12 to 15 hours ahead of them. I ended up having to work early mornings and late at night to make the time zones work. It’s no surprise that September ended up being the only “bad” month revenue-wise during the last three quarters of 2020. We eventually got childcare help after the quarantine ended (thank god for Sophie’s parents), and I quickly established a new working routine to account for the time difference. I now understand why a lot of professional athletes are religious about their game-day routines. Being an entrepreneur is really not that different. In order to compete at the highest level, you’ve gotta find a daily routine that is successful for you and stick to it. And there will be people behind the scenes who are critical to your success, and deserve your appreciation even if they’re often forgotten.

#5.) Keep testing and optimizing, but don’t try to change too many things at once.

I’m always looking for ways to improve the different parts of the business - whether it’s on the sales, marketing, to client fulfillment side of things. When you’re trying to find these improvements, it’s important to not tweak too many things at once. I used to violate this rule constantly because I would have a bunch of ideas in my head that I wanted to execute on. Problem is, when you make a bunch of changes all at once and it doesn’t work, you have no idea how to isolate the variable that caused it to not work. Sounds simple, I know. But testing one change at a time requires methodical patience that is seemingly counter to the type of growth we like to see as entrepreneurs. One of my mentors, Cole, had to remind me of this multiple times before I learned my lesson. In this case, slowing down actually allows you to go faster.

#6.) Rigid rules might be better for beginners, but flexibility always wins in the long run.

One of the first mentors/business coaches I hired to help me with my business had a bunch of very rigid rules that their clients had to follow. For example, we had to run our Facebook ads a certain way. We also had to do our sales calls using a very specific script, sometimes saying the sentences verbatim. Even the packages we sold had to be the same package every time, never to be negotiated or customized. And anytime anyone didn’t get results or wondered whether there might be a better way of doing things, they were told that it was an issue with their mindset and they needed to trust the process. That never felt right to me; to be told to never ask questions and just follow instructions. I think while having such rigid “rules” could be beneficial for newbies who are just starting out and don’t know what they’re doing, eventually you outgrow these rules if you want to take your business to the next level. While I’m forever grateful that they helped me get my business off the ground, my growth also stagnated for ~11 months because I failed to adapt, and for awhile it felt like there was this invisible ceiling that I would never break through. I eventually left and found a new mentor who was a lot more flexible in their approach, which helped me take my business to where it is today (~5x bigger). Once you’re no longer a beginner, you have to learn to think critically for yourself because nobody else knows your business as well as you do, or cares about it as much as you do.

Most of the time in business and in life, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It’s the same reason why we’ve structured Wall Street Mastermind’s business model the way we have - where we coach each client individually based on their specific recruiting situation and strengths and weaknesses, while all of my competitors are just selling PDF interview guides and pre-recorded financial modeling courses with no customization whatsoever. Is it a lot more work for us to do it this way? Hell yea. Do our clients get way better results because of it though? Hell freaking yea. If you ever find a mentor who tries to give you a one-size-fits-all solution and discourages you from asking questions, run the other way. They're doing what's easiest for them, but not what's best for you.

#7.) Cheap mentors are better than no mentors. But the best mentors are better than cheap mentors. Always get the best.

Since starting Wall Street Mastermind, I’ve gone from being cheap and trying to do everything on my own, to working with three different mentors along the way (increasing in price each time):

• First 6 months in business: No mentor, relied on reading business books and watching youtube videos to teach myself everything. Generated $0 in revenue.
• Months 7-8: Hired my first mentor for $700. He jumped on weekly 1-on-1 coaching calls with me, and helped me get my first client.
• Months 9-21: Worked with my second mentor, invested ~$20,000. Got my business off the ground where I was averaging ~5 new clients per month after just 2 months of working together, but stagnated there.
• Last 18 months: Worked with my third mentor, invested ~$50,000. Helped me 3x my business within the first 6 months, and 5x my business within 1.5 years

What’s the lesson here? Invest in the best mentor you can find, it will more than pay for itself. Don’t cheap out, because money is something you can always make more of, whereas time is something you’ll never get back. Trying to save some money upfront by figuring it out on my own and hiring cheap mentors actually ended up costing me a lot more in foregone revenue and slower growth. No amount of self studying could have outperformed the experience of someone who’s already “been there and done that.” This is one of the biggest differences in the mentality that I see from the wealthy versus the poor. Wealthy people value time above all, and will gladly pay money to buy time. Poor people value money and would rather save money by spending more time. We all know how that works out in the end. Model your decision making after the people you aspire to become. 

This is also why every time a student says to me “my parents said that since other students have gotten into investment banking without using a service like Wall Street Mastermind, I should be able to as well”… I always shake my head because they’re missing the point. I’m not saying it’s impossible to get into investment banking without Wall Street Mastermind. Of course it is, anything is possible. But the acceptance rate at most top investment banks are 1-3%, whereas the success rate for our clients is over 90%. Instead of asking what is “possible” (which is really just the bare minimum), the better question would be “how do I maximize my upside and minimize my downside?” After all, where you start your career is one of the most consequential things that can permanently alter your career trajectory, and if you start off on the wrong foot you don’t get to go back in time and have a redo.

P.S. By the way, I'm not saying something is always better just because it's more expensive. But a lot of the time, that is generally the case because the market dictates that you get what you pay for. If a business overcharges relative to the value they're providing, they'll likely go out of business pretty fast. Of course, you've gotta do your research before you buy.

#8.) Know your unique selling proposition. Sometimes that means doing things your competitors aren’t willing to do.

In any competitive market, you must know your unique selling proposition. This is basic marketing 101 stuff, but most people still get this wrong. For Wall Street Mastermind, our unique selling proposition is that our clients get:

1. 1-on-1 personalized coaching on demand (not one-size-fits-all)
2. From actual investment bankers who know how the recruiting process works (as opposed so say, upperclassmen)
3. For as long as they need, from now until they get the job (no limit on the amount of help they can get)

Nobody else in the market is offering this level of service, because it’s a ton of work to do it this way. Most of our competitors just sell a one-size-fits-all PDF guide or video course to tens of thousands of students each year, because they don’t want to actually talk to the students individually. So for students who want that higher level of service when it comes to their career, we are it. Nowhere else can they find the combination of someone who is 1) actually knowledgeable about this stuff, and 2) is also willing to spend hours and hours helping them individually. Most investment bankers are working 80-100 hours a week already, and making a lot of money doing that. They’re just not going to spend hours and hours helping a college student they don’t know get into the industry. It’s not a good use of their time. Being willing to do the things that other people aren’t willing to do has allowed us to develop a USP and carve out our place in the market.

#9.) Tune out the haters, you’ll never make everyone happy. The people who belong in your tribe will find you.

Once your business actually gets big enough and more people start to discover you, you are going to encounter haters eventually. After all, nowadays anyone can sit behind a computer screen and say anything they want about anyone, without actually having to face the person they’re talking crap about. If you let the internet trolls get to you, then quite frankly you’re not fit to serve and impact the clients you were meant to help.

It used to bother me (a lot) when random people on the internet who have never worked with Wall Street Mastermind would write things like “Wall Street Mastermind is a scam because it charges money for things that you can easily find on Google!” or “People who work with him are idiots!” I also know that comments like that have cost me business as well, because a lot of people are easily swayed by other people’s opinions rather than thinking critically and forming their own. But despite periodic threads like this that pop up in online forums, I’m proud of the fact that none of these comments have ever come from an actual client. In fact, our clients are mostly grateful and appreciative of the work that we’re doing, as can be seen on our testimonials page and on 3rd party review websites like Trustpilot (where they actually verify if the reviewer is an actual client - a lot of my clients had to send in their actual contract before their reviews could get approved).

At the end of the day, I decided that I’m going to continue to care tremendously about what my clients think, and just tune out the rest of the noise. It's kind of like politics - people are going to choose to see whatever they want to believe. The people that understand the value we provide will find us and become a part of our amazing tribe. The ones who don’t see the value will continue to try and figure it out on their own, and that’s ok. I’m not meant to help every single person out there, nor am I going to try to convince them. Coming to terms with this fact has allowed me to stop wasting time on what people think of me, and get back to focusing on getting our clients the best results possible.

#10.) The more you give, the more you get. If you’re afraid to give, it’s because what you offer is probably just a commodity.

I used to have a mentality that I had to keep all of my best stuff behind a paywall. Because if I gave away everything for free, what reason would people have to pay for my services? But one change I made this year is I started putting out a lot more free content. I started building a Youtube channel and a podcast where I give recruiting advice for free, usually 3 times a week (if you’re trying to break into investment banking, you should subscribe!). It’s still in the early days so I would say the audience is still relatively small, but I’ve already had so many students tell me how much they enjoy and appreciate the content. There have been students who found out about Wall Street Mastermind through our free content, and ended up becoming paid clients because of it.

It’s funny because in a way, those haters I mentioned previously aren’t wrong. In the age of Google and Youtube, if everything you have to offer can already be found for free on the internet, then your offer isn’t very valuable at all - it’s just a commodity. The value that our paid clients get from working with us is much more than just stuff they can already find online. Yes we do provide them with all the information they could possibly need in one place. And yes everything is laid out in the order that it should be executed in, removing the need for trial and error and making the process significantly more efficient. But more importantly, it’s:

• The 24/7 unlimited support that they get on demand, anytime they need it
• The opportunity to learn from the cumulative experience of our highly qualified coaches, who all worked in the top investment banks (GS, MS, JPM, etc.) as well as private equity
• The benefit of hindsight that comes from the hundreds of other students that have already gone through the recruiting process before them, and the luxury of being able to benefit from the arrows in other people’s backs to avoid making the same mistakes
• Our ability to find our clients relevant internships to build their resume, even if they’ve never had any finance experience before. We have 100% success rate in this area, and often times getting your foot in the door is the hardest part
• The large sample size of data we have on what type of networking strategies and interview answers work vs. doesn’t work, a sample size that cannot be replicated by just talking to a handful of upperclassmen
• Our ability to help students get in even when everyone else has told them it’s a pipe dream, because they go to a non-target school, or their GPA is not above a 3.7, etc. About half of our clients go to non-target schools, and the average GPA for our clients is probably around 3.4-3.5. And we still have an over 90% success rate regardless
• Belonging to a community of A-players (we call ourselves the Wolf Pack) who are collaborative and supportive of each other’s career goals, where everyone is winning together and will eventually grow into one of the strongest networks on Wall Street

None of these things I just listed above are things that you can easily find anywhere else. It's not commoditized. In fact, Wall Street Mastermind is about so much more than just getting our clients into investment banking. While we do believe that investment banking is one of the best places to start one’s career, that’s really just the first step. The long term vision is to help our clients sustain that success over time. To help them create wealth and freedom - whether that’s financial freedom, or the freedom of choice (where you can take a job or spend time on something because you want to, not because you have to). There is more we have in store in the future, which I won’t reveal for now.

#11.) Diversify your traffic source, which also has the benefit of omnipresence.

A common mistake I see a lot of online businesses make is putting all of their eggs in one basket. The best example is generating all of your leads through Facebook ads. I think in the beginning, of course it’s OK to pick one source of traffic and start with that. But over time, you’re going to want to diversify. Whether it’s Facebook/Instagram, Google/Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, podcasting, whatever it may be… you might not be able to do all of them (I know I definitely can’t keep up with whatever college kids are doing these days ??), but you want to figure out where your audience is at and be on at least 2-3 platforms. This way, you’re not going to be completely at their mercy anytime one of these big tech companies decides to change their algorithm, and all the sudden your ad account has gotten mistakenly banned. Plus, being on multiple platform also has the benefit of being omnipresent, which means your potential customers will become more familiar with you. It’s a win win.

#12.) It’s all about the TEAM.

This has probably been the biggest area of growth for me in 2020, which also came with a lot of bumps and bruises. Managing other people is a lot harder than managing yourself. I’m still nowhere close to having mastered this yet, but I’ve learned a lot and will continue to try to learn more going forward. But at this point of Wall Street Mastermind lifecycle, its growth can no longer be singularly driven by me. It takes a team, and we’re only going to go as far as the quality of our team allows us to.

There’s a lot that goes into hiring and retaining A-players, the biggest of which is that A-players are typically only looking for the best opportunities. And the best opportunity starts with the leader at the top and the culture that they’re able to build. It’s too bad they don’t really teach leadership in school today, because it truly is one of the most valuable life skills one can have. But another thing that I’ve learned (after having gone through both good and bad hires this year) is to hire first for attitude, then hire for skills. Of course if you can get both, that is always best. But otherwise, skills can be taught, whereas a bad attitude is hard to change. I would much rather hire someone who is hungry to learn and believes in the mission of our business, than to hire someone who is highly skilled but not ready to go all-in on what we’re doing. But no matter what, you will probably make some hires along the way that aren’t a good fit. When that happens, communicate, see if there is anything that can be done to make it a better fit, and if not, then be decisive in cutting your losses and parting ways. You’re not just doing yourself a favor, but you’re doing your team member a favor too by allowing them to go and find whatever their true calling is.

Let's crush 2021.

Annnnnd that’s it. I ended up writing way more than I intended to. But if you’ve read all the way to this point, thanks for caring enough to take this much time out of your day. Even though these are all things I already knew in the back of my mind, I find that writing it out still helps me crystallize the learnings much more clearly. Hopefully, you’ve found at least 1 or 2 of these things to be helpful as well. Let’s crush 2021 together ????