Running a business often has three components: the good, the bad and the ugly. The good happens when your company is thriving. The bad tends to occur behind the scenes, like budgeting for a high cost of advertising or spending long nights going over payroll. The ugly can range from 100-plus-hour workweeks to betting your life savings on your startup — and struggling to get it off the ground. CNBC Make It spoke with a group of highly successful entrepreneurs about how they recovered from major career setbacks. Here are some of their top tips for weathering unexpected hardships: ‘Be comfortable’ trusting your gut…
Author: Laura Bennett
This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Six-Figure Side Hustle series, where people with lucrative side hustles break down the routines and habits they’ve used to make money on top of their full-time jobs. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at AskMakeIt@cnbc.com. Before Krista LeRay launched her side hustle, she spent six hours painting a single 4-inch by 4-inch cotton canvas with a fine-tipped paintbrush at her kitchen table. “I would wake up and paint the entire day until 2 a.m.,” says LeRay, 33. “My pinky went numb from holding a fist [around the brush] all day long.”…
STOCKHOLM — Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk once turned down half a million dollars in future royalties from the popular video game Pro Skater — and he says it was the “best financial decision” of his life. Hawk was offered $500,000 in a one-time buyout deal for use of his name and likeness for Activision’s Pro Skater title, which was released in 1999. Speaking at the Techarena technology conference in Stockholm on Thursday, Hawk said that when he received the proposal, it “didn’t seem like a real number to me.” He ultimately decided to turn it down, citing success in both his personal…
Shortly after graduating from the University of Illinois, Charlotte Trecartin hired a TikTok coach for $400 per month, she says. She wasn’t trying to grow her personal brand: Under the coach’s guidance, Trecartin started posting three times per day about her water bottle accessory company CharCharms. Her account grew to 80,000 followers, grabbing the attention of retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Target, where CharCharms’ products sit today. Trecartin, now 25, brought those products — which include straws, straw toppers, and charms and pouches that attach to water bottles — to ABC’s “Shark Tank,” in an episode that aired on Friday. They quickly drew skepticism from…
Entrepreneurs who don’t have limitless investor funding, or personal wealth, often have to go to extremes to keep a new venture afloat: Depleting their savings, forgoing a salary, even selling off assets. So it’s no surprise that Katlin Smith had to make sacrifices to come up with seed money when she started a natural foods brand Simple Mills out of her Atlanta kitchen in 2012. “I definitely had to do some very creative things on my own side to fund the business, [like] selling my car and maxing out credit cards and crazy things like that,” Smith recently said on an…
When Jake Kassan sold his company for $100 million at the age of 27, he thought the money would make him happy. Though it did temporarily, it eventually took away his sense of purpose and threw him into cycles of anxiety and depression, he said. In 2018, Kassan sold his Los Angeles-based accessory brand MVMT Watches — pronounced “movement” — to the Movado Group in a deal that left him walking away a multi-millionaire. The company, which he had started as a 21-year-old college dropout, granted him the financial freedom he sought. “The North Star when I was younger, was always financial freedom,”…
For more than 15 years, Jennifer Hyman has been the CEO and co-founder of Rent the Runway. For the last eight years, she’s also been a parent. Doing both requires effort, says Hyman, but not the kind that involves waking up at 4 a.m., working late every night, missing kids’ sporting events or other commitments that some CEOs make. She wakes up at 7:15 a.m., eats breakfast with her three kids — and then works “like a maniac” at Rent the Runway’s office in Brooklyn, New York, so she can get home for family dinner, she says. If Hyman has to miss family dinner — recently, she…
When Carlos Gil opened The Hype Section alongside his brother-in-law in 2022, he was ready for entrepreneurship’s promise of financial freedom. Gil, a social media marketer, got a taste of the high-paid, flexible-schedule life in 2019, when he published a book called “The End of Marketing” and the ensuing book tour earned him six figures, he says. After dabbling in selling face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic, The Hype Section — a store dedicated to the hype culture around shoes, clothes and collectibles in Jacksonville, Florida — was his next step. He and his brother-in-law spent $30,000 in savings to launch…
Canada’s top tech talent has long moved to the US for better opportunities, but Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats are raising questions about how to build a stronger ecosystem at home.Last week, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney declared that the “old relationship” his country had with the United States was “over,” and it’s “clear the US is no longer a reliable partner.” Carney’s comments came after the US announced sweeping new tariffs on Canada and President Donald Trump spent months making inflammatory comments that have alarmed Canada’s leaders, including suggestions that the country would be “better off” if it was annexed by…
Paul Graham’s viral essay explains why Brian Chesky and Steve Jobs ruled and professional managers stink. But if a manager is smart and the founder is meh, who’s better?