From Felonies to Entrepreneurship

The Difference Between a Loss and a Lesson (Part 1)

How you handle adverse situations is what builds the person you are. If you’re like most of the world there will be times when you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Like no matter what you do, it seems like you can’t get delt that winning hand. We have all been there. When the mud gets thick it’s time to lift your pants and keep on going. This is my story of felonies to entrepreneurship, and what I feel every time I put on Skyline clothing.

Let me take you back to 2004/2005, two young men who paths crossed and knew they were meant for greatness, but still had a long way to grow. It started with Mr. Skyline and me going to house parties and him bringing his turn tables and rocking the party. You know we had that screwed and chopped on the ones and twos. Day in day out we were inseparable. Once the parties got out of hand, you know how house parties can get, we started venturing out to the club. Our group of friends were rebels without a cause. We had the Northwest on fire. Whatever you needed we had. As we got deeper in the club scene Clay, our brother still to this day, called our clique Southern Green. Southern Green ruled Friday and Saturday nights at Club Krammers. Mr. Skyline saw the potential in the promotion business from a young age and said him and I should promote a party there. Halloween was a few months away, so it was our time to shine. We created flyers and shirts at our own expense to promote our Halloween Bash. We spent countless hours out in the streets passing out flyers and getting the word out. I know some of y’all are thinking why not just post it on the Gram or Facebook, well shorty the only spot to post was on MYSPACE and to be real I didn’t know shit about that. This was before social media, people had to actually talk to each other in person. During one of our times out we ran into another club owner who was interested in us promoting an open mic night for local rappers. We gladly agreed and just like that we had one night a week at one club and of course the epic Halloween Bash. As the time gets closer for the Bash, we start promoting harder and harder, not to mention that our night at the other club was getting better and better. We were making our dream come true. The night of the party was finally here, it was go time. We get to club early and excited about the turn out we were going to bring. As the night went on people started to trickle in, we knew we owned the night. Once midnight hit, we started to get worried no one was coming in. The momentum had stopped, and it was looking like it was going to be a failure. It turned out that only 25-30 people showed up. We didn’t even get our money back for the flyers. Not only that we ran out of local talent for the other club, and just that quick we were dead in the water.

At that time, we saw both these actions as a loss. In my mind the days of promoting were over. We lost and that's what it was. Shit I make more money in the streets than in promoting so it was back to the streets for us. Of course, this is just the beginning, what we didn’t see at that time it wasn’t a loss it was a lesson and don’t take experience for granted. On to the next chapter!!!