I was rummaging through my office the other day and came across my old camera, the one I used for my very first business.

That little relic brought me all the way back to Memphis. At the time, I was young, living there, and trying to help my dad with his company, RGS Strategic Sourcing. His whole thing was helping businesses cut costs and he was really, really good at it. The kind of good where he could save companies serious money. Like millions of dollars. And yet… it didn’t work.

Why? Because the purchasing managers at those companies didn’t exactly love the idea of someone coming in and doing their job better than they did. Which, frankly, is fair. Imagine hiring my dad, he saves your company millions, and then your boss turns to you and says, “So… why didn’t you do this?”

Awkward.

Anyway, that was my early exposure to business: sometimes being right isn’t enough.

Around that time, I decided to strike out on my own. Now, I had exactly zero real experience, unless you count my 6th-grade hustle selling cinnamon toothpicks and photocopied mazes from my mom’s Xerox machine. So naturally, I thought: I’m ready for entrepreneurship.

I knew a guy in Dallas running a site called DFW exposed. His name was George and he’d go out to various nightlife hotspots in Dallas, take photos of people, post them online, and sell the pictures. I thought, “Perfect. I’ll do that in Memphis.” And just like that, memphisscene.com was born.

My business model? Go out, have fun, take photos of people, post them online, and wait for the money to roll in. And to be fair… the traffic rolled in. Tons of people visited the site. But the sales? Let’s just say I can count them on one finger. Yes. One.

On a side note, around the same time, I also tried to start a web development company called Zosta. Number of customers (excluding myself): Zero.

Anyway, at this point, my entrepreneurial resume looked like this:

• High effort
• Strong enthusiasm
• Approximately no customers

Not ideal.

But it was still a blast. I got into clubs for free, met tons of people, and for a brief, glorious moment, was a very minor Memphis nightlife “celebrity.” (Heavy emphasis on very minor. Let’s not get carried away.) More importantly, it was an education. Not the kind you pay tuition for, but arguably more useful.

Looking back, I realize I had fallen for a common misconception of thinking I needed a new, clever, original idea to succeed. Turns out, that’s one of the hardest paths you can take. Most new ideas fail. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re unproven. So what works better?

Boring businesses.

Things like… house cleaning.

Not flashy. Not exciting. But incredibly reliable because the demand already exists and the competition is mediocre. And you can see the demand by googling the service. See tons of businesses? Good. That means there are plenty of customers (and demand) in a sea of mediocre businesses. Oddly, many see all these businesses and are frightened, thinking the market is saturated.

For instance, a couple of years ago, an old college buddy and his wife reached out to me about starting a cleaning business in Houston. He was excited. She… not so much. Her concern was that the market was “saturated”, too many cleaning companies already. But that’s actually the wrong way to look at it.

When you see a lot of businesses in one space, that’s not saturation; it’s proof of market. It means customers exist. It means demand is there. It means money is already being spent.

The opportunity isn’t to be different. It’s to be better. Better service. Better reliability. Better experience. Compete on quality, not price and you’ll succeed.

Back to MemphisScene.com…

It was fun, but it wasn’t profitable. Eventually, I packed up and headed back to Dallas, partly for a fresh start, partly because I had the brilliant idea that I might win back an ex-girlfriend (long story; don’t ask). I arrived in Dallas with about $300 to my name and stayed with a friend for a month while I got back on my feet. I found a job, a girlfriend (not the ex), and a winning business idea.

Entrepreneurship had been stuck in my head, so I had been writing down ideas in a notebook, everything that floated to my conciousness. One of those ideas? Maid service!

One day, I was talking with my girlfriend at the time and her roommate. They were both kind of drifting, figuring things out, and I suggested, “Why don’t you start a cleaning service?” I wasn’t pulling it out of thin air, it was something I had already thought through and had a compelling feeling it would succeed.

They were interested… briefly. Then they lost interest. And I remember thinking, “This is a good idea. I’m not letting it go.” So I did it myself and started Dallas Maids. It was a huge success. So in 2012, I teamed up with my brother-in-law and started Memphis Maids and the rest is history.

Thank you for letting me share a little about those early failures that proved to be valuable learning opportunities. Those early failures were exactly what I needed. They taught me what doesn’t work. They gave me reps. They built confidence. They showed me that ideas don’t matter nearly as much as execution and that customers matter more than every