"I Wish I Could Just Rent Yours": This Customer's Joke Created 40% of Our Revenue

And 4 Other Hard-Earned Startup Lessons

In 2012, I quit my comfortable facilities management job to build software for an industry I knew intimately. I had six figures in startup money, a somewhat-working prototype, and the naïve confidence that success would come quickly.

I was wrong about almost everything.

My first "office" was my dining room table. My first sale took four months longer than expected. My savings drained twice as fast as I'd projected. And within 18 months, I was seriously questioning whether I'd made the biggest mistake of my professional life.

Fast forward to today: FM Dashboard now serves facilities managers across thousands of locations in North America. But that growth didn't come from following conventional startup wisdom—it came from painful lessons that contradicted much of what I thought I knew about entrepreneurship.

I'm not sharing these lessons because they're universally applicable. I'm sharing them because they're rarely discussed in entrepreneurial circles obsessed with hustle culture and growth hacking. These are the unglamorous truths that shaped our path and still guide me today:

1. Organizational Support is Underrated—And So Is Prioritization

Before FM Dashboard, I was the hotshot Director of Customer Relations for a growing contractor who thought I was single-handedly growing one of the biggest self-performing companies in the maintenance industry. My ego came crashing down three weeks into entrepreneurship.

That "revolutionary" process I'd created? It only worked because the operations team executed it, the field management team adapted it, HR found talent to support it, and customer support smoothed over the rough edges I never saw. Suddenly, I was the support system—no established processes, no ready-made teams, just me answering support calls at 2 AM while simultaneously trying to figure things out one step at a time.

It forced me to understand something crucial: you can't do everything at once. I created a brutal prioritization system: "Will this task directly lead to a sale today?" Everything else waited. We missed product deadlines, delayed feature launches, and ignored marketing opportunities—and it was exactly the right thing to do.

One month in, we were two weeks from insolvency. Six months in, we were profitable. The difference? Ruthless prioritization. Learning this saved me from burnout and became a cornerstone of our early success.

2. Customers Should Drive Your Product

FM Dashboard exists today because of how spectacularly I failed at first. I spent six months building what I was certain would revolutionize facilities management - a simple, user-focused tool that was quick to learn and inexpensive. It kind of worked, but we built a lot of features that weren't used and didn't have a lot of features that were sorely needed.

I also thought that if we just built something that was simple, people would just sign up and start using it. And I couldn't have been more wrong. The real problem that our customers were experiencing in the industry was not software, it was the support that those software companies provided.

It wasn't fancy features or slick marketing that won our customers; it was our willingness to adapt based on their feedback. listening to customers also created another service line that is growing fast, bootstrapped and profitable. When customers talked, we listened.

That's how we ended up creating our Virtual Maintenance Coordinator (VMC) program. During a routine check-in call, a frustrated client mentioned they'd been trying to hire a maintenance coordinator for eight months. "I wish I could just rent yours," she joked. Our customer service rep brought this to our weekly meeting, and within 30 days, we had three clients paying us $3,600 a month for a service we'd never planned to offer.

Today, that "accidental" service line generates 40% of our revenue with margins that subsidize our software development. It was a solution born directly from customer conversations, turning customer service from a nice-to-have into our biggest competitive advantage.

3. Never Stray from Your Core Mission

In 2019, with a solid business and growing momentum, I made what I now call my “irrationally optimistic mistake.” A restaurant chain VP, who was a very good customer of ours, suggested we build a specialized software for their operations team. “You guys are software developers, and this application is really simple + a lot of people need it.“ The market was huge, and the connection was strong.

We invested tens of thousands of dollars into development and quickly grew to $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue from restaurant clients. On paper, it looked like a win. But beneath the surface, cracks were forming. Our developers were splitting time between two completely different applications, and our core facilities maintenance platform—the one paying most of our bills—started suffering. Features were delayed. Bugs lingered. Our most loyal customers were getting restless.

Then March 2020 happened. Overnight, restaurants shut down nationwide, and every single one of our new restaurant clients either closed or froze all technology spending. The country shut down, our customers stopped paying, and the software died. This was a huge distraction away from a strategy that was working and one that would have kept us out of a lot of financial hardship and loss during the pandemic had we simply stayed the course.

The lesson cost us nearly $200,000 and a year of momentum. From then on, we implemented what we call our "Mission Filter"—a mandatory cooling-off period for any new opportunity, followed by a team review that asks one simple question: "Does this directly serve facilities managers?" This discipline has been the difference between distracted failure and focused growth. By recommitting to our core mission, we navigated the pandemic better than competitors who tried to diversify, and by 2022, we'd not only recovered but doubled our pre-pandemic revenue.

4. Empower Your Entire Team with Your Mission

In 2017, I was the bottleneck destroying our company's potential. Every decision required my approval. Every feature needed my sign-off. Every customer complaint landed in my inbox. I was working 70-hour weeks while our growth stalled.

During a particularly exhausting week, I missed several critical calls and found myself responding to emails at 2:00 AM. When my wife found me working late one night, she asked a simple question that changed everything: “Isn't your company supposed to give people their time back?”

That hit home hard. Our mission statement—to "give facilities managers their time back"—had become just words on our website. I realized that if my team didn't truly own this mission, we'd never scale beyond my personal capacity.

So I did something radical. I gathered everyone together and announced that from now on, any decision that honored our mission didn't need my approval. I created a simple framework: "If it gives our customers back their time and we can deliver it reliably, just do it."

The transformation was messy at first. Mistakes were made. But within six months, something remarkable happened. Our support team created a self-service knowledge base that reduced tickets by 30%. Our developers built automated reporting that clients had been requesting for years. And as mentioned earlier, our VMC program—now our fastest-growing service—came from a support rep who was empowered to solve a customer problem without my involvement.

My workweek dropped from 80 hours to 50. But more importantly, our customer satisfaction scores rose from "acceptable" to "exceptional" in less than a year. I didn't just delegate tasks—I delegated purpose. Turns out that when everyone owns the mission, innovation comes from everywhere.

5. Play the Long Game—Success Takes Time

My darkest entrepreneurial moment came in 2021, nine years into building FM Dashboard. We had just gone through the pandemic. I was suffering the dual failures of a failed new product and lower sales from my loss of focus. In just twelve months, we'd lost 80% of our restaurant customers and watched 50% of our total revenue evaporate. I felt like a failure and I wanted to quit.

"Maybe we should just sell this thing and do something else," I said to my co-founder.

But thankfully, he didn't let me off the hook.

"If you knew everything you know now and had to start all over again, what would you do differently?" he asked, pushing a notebook across the table. "Write it down."

I filled three pages. As I wrote, something became clear: the 7 years of success we'd enjoyed and the 2 years of failure we'd endured had provided us with experience, perspective, and resilience that couldn't be acquired any other way. Our competitors who were just starting out would need a decade to learn what we now knew.

Instead of giving up, we decided to lean into our experience and play the long game. We created a 5-year vision. We stopped setting quarterly goals and started focusing on what we could accomplish in a year. We got back to the basics of ruthless prioritization: "If this task doesn't result in earning a new customer or keeping a current one, then it's not worth doing."

The results were stunning. Within a year, we doubled our sales and started expanding our team again. Within two years, we surpassed our pre-pandemic revenue by 35%.

I went from feeling like a failure to understanding a fundamental truth about entrepreneurship: the biggest advantage isn't having more capital or better technology—it's having the perspective that only comes from weathering both success and failure over time. True overnight success stories are actually "10-year overnight success stories" that the media simply discovered late in the journey.

Conclusion

Conclusion

These five lessons cost me over $500,000 in mistakes, countless sleepless nights, and nearly a decade to fully comprehend:

1. Build your support systems first — No entrepreneur succeeds alone, no matter what their ego tells them.

2. Let customers shape your path — Your best ideas will come from listening, not from your own brilliant insights.

3. Stay laser-focused on your core mission — Every time we've strayed, we've paid a painful price.

4. Empower your entire team with purpose — Delegating decisions is good; delegating mission is transformational.

5. Play the long game — The "10-year overnight success" isn't a cliché; it's a mathematical reality.

The journey from 2012 to now transformed not just FM Dashboard but me as well. I started as an ambitious facilities manager who thought I knew everything. Today, I lead a team of people serving over tens of thousands of locations across North America, and I'm humbled daily by how much I still have to learn.

Our mission—to give facilities managers their time back—remains our compass. But perhaps the most important lesson is this: entrepreneurship isn't ultimately about building a business; it's about building yourself into someone capable of overcoming whatever challenges tomorrow brings.

The world doesn't need more "hustle harder" advice. It needs entrepreneurs willing to prioritize ruthlessly, listen deeply, focus intensely, empower genuinely, and persist patiently. Do these five things consistently, and your success isn't just possible—given enough time, it's inevitable.