Happy Monday friends,

I'm writing this from seat 1B, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, flying home to Miami after five days in Mexico City with Lyndsey.

This place was unreal. Half the trip was filled with nonstop exploration, 15,000 steps daily, and enough shopping to burn a whole right through my wallet.

The second half was filled with a ton of love.

We weren't there to escape. We were there for a wedding. One of my closest friends, Gaston, got married, and here's the part that still kind of blows my mind: I met him almost two years ago as a member of The Founders Club.

Let me say that again, because I'm still processing it.

A guy who joined our community a couple years ago in Miami is now someone I'd call one of my closest friends. The kind of friend you fly to another country for. The kind of friend whose wedding you wouldn't miss if you had to crawl there.

To be honest, this trip hit me in a way I wasn't expecting.

The fact that I’ve grown so close to Gaston is living proof that The Founders Club actually works. Not just for our thousands of members, but myself too. Real living proof that The Founders Club gave me one of my best friends. And without it I would not have met him.

That's not marketing copy. That's real life.

And here's the wild part. While I was galavanting around Mexico, the rest of our team was pulling off something we've never done before.

Let me explain.

The same week I flew to CDMX, The Founders Club hosted 7 events in 48 hours across 7 different cities.

Miami. New York. Austin. LA. San Francisco. Chicago. St. Louis.

Some of these are our core markets where we've been running events for years. Some of them, like San Francisco, Chicago, and St. Louis, were our first ever events in those cities. And to be honest, watching it all unfold from my phone while I was getting ready for the wedding was one of the most surreal experiences I've had as a founder.

Photos pouring in from seven different time zones of energy. Text messages from members I've never met thanking us. New friendships forming in cities I've barely spent time in. All happening at the same time. All on brand. All rooted in good energy.

And it hit me after laying in bed after our Miami meet up earlier this week.

It's not the brand. It's not the marketing. It's not the events themselves.

It's relentless focus why this is all working.

Nobody cares more about our members than we do. Nobody cares more about putting on a better event than we do. Nobody is more obsessed with making sure that when you walk into a TFC room, you walk out with at least one connection that genuinely makes your world better.

That's the whole thing. That's the moat. You can copy everything we do. But you can never copy my fucking passion and energy for what we’re building. Its contagious.

If you missed it last week, I announced that I’m writing a book. I think I'm going to call it “I Wish I Knew.”

To be honest, I'm scared as hell about this entire process. I've been thinking about writing this for years. Pushing it down. Telling myself I'd get to it later. But if I'm going to put my name on something that lives in my house forever, that sits on the shelf next to me when I'm 70, it has to be damn good. No half assing it. There's a real pressure to get this right that I haven't felt since the earliest days of CROSSNET.

Here's why I'm doing it anyway.

There are thousands of entrepreneurs out there right now going through the hardest moments of their lives. Bleeding money. Making the same mistakes I made. Sitting alone at 11pm wondering if any of it is going to work. I've been that person. I know what it feels like. Desperate for advice, but nowhere to find it. Podcasts aren’t tactical enough and books from people light years ahead just don’t cut it. Real advice from real people is what I’m going for.

If I can write the book I wish someone had handed me at 24, the book that might stop one founder from blowing up their marriage, their health, or their business making a mistake that was avoidable, then it's worth it. Even if it helps one person, it's worth it.

To pressure test it this week I surveyed 1,500+ members in our Slack by asking them: What's the biggest mistake you made running your business?

The responses made me 100% certain I’m on the right track with this book.

Here are the five that hit me hardest:

1. Trusting the wrong person with the money. One member hired a CFO from the corporate world early on and stopped looking at her financials. Within 12 months, the once profitable business was buried in $1M, financing things they couldn't afford, pretending to be a VC backed company. It took her three years to crawl out. Lesson: never outsource your awareness of your own numbers. Hire help, but stay in the seat.

2. Spending on marketing before the fundamentals were ready. Multiple members said the same thing in different ways. Blowing money on ads before the messaging, the brand, or even the fulfillment arm was strong enough to handle it. One member lost a national Target contract 48 hours after winning it because operations couldn't keep up. Marketing amplifies what's already there. If what's already there is broken, marketing just makes the bleeding faster.

3. Chasing revenue over profit. Said over and over in different ways: growth without profit is just expensive noise. One member hit multiple 7-figure mistakes all tracing back to the same root cause. Profit isn't something you wait for. It's something you build into the business from day one.

4. Handshake deals and bad contracts. One member hired a friend of a friend during COVID on a handshake. Two years and a Department of Labor lawsuit later, she had her contracts locked down forever. The pattern repeated across responses. People you trust still need paperwork. Especially people you trust.

5. Not firing bad hires fast enough. Almost every single response touched this in some way. Holding on too long. Hoping it gets better. Confusing loyalty with strategy. The hardest lesson in business is that being good to your team sometimes means letting the wrong person go before they take the whole thing down with them.

If you're sitting on a "mistake" story you've never told anyone, hit reply I’d love to hear from you.

Last week I had my mom come down for Mother’s Day.

Nothing fancy. Just hanging at the house, thousands of steps around Miami, binge watching a new show called Man on Fire, and spoiling her anyway I can. Lately I’ve been really into this thing where we stack each other’s phones at dinner and go deep into conversation. What I realized as we sat at our favorite hole in the wall Italian spot was that I was asking her questions I'd never actually asked her before.

What was her grandma like? What do you remember most about being a kid? Was life more stressful then or now? Do you have regrets?

I'm 33 years old. This woman raised me through good times and bad times from small apartments in New York to several homes in Connecticut. Worked her ass off so I could have a shot at a better life, and I genuinely didn’t even know the answers to half of these questions. I knew the highlight reel of her life. I didn’t know the texture of it.

We sat there for probably two hours. She told me about her grandmother. She told me stories I'd never heard. I learned that my grandpa who died pretty much before I have any real memories of him used to work at the NY Public Library and was responsible for printing the newspaper. He was the guy lining up massive metal cartridges, filling them with ink, and they had the entire newspaper imprinted into it. The stories she told me about being a kid in a way that made me realize my mom was a whole person before she was my mom, which sounds stupid to type out but I think a lot of us forget that.

That night was special and then I did some math that wrecked me.

I see my mom maybe 4 or 5 times a year. If I'm lucky, that's 150 to 200 more times I get to see her in my entire life.

200 more times.

That's it. Not 200 weekends. Not 200 dinners. 200 total times. Thats fucking crazy and really sad.

I’ve carried that with me the entire week. Sitting at the wedding watching Gaston dance with his mom. Walking through Roma Norte at sunset talking to Lyndsey about starting our own family. Knowing our children will be in the same situation one day.

Its really hitting me that we get so caught up in building businesses, hitting numbers, chasing the next thing, that we forget that none of that shit really matters. The people who got us here are on a clock we can't pause. And the worst part is, you can't hire your way out of this one. You can't outsource it. You can't delegate "making more memories with your loved ones."

So I've made a promise to myself. Every time I see her from here on out, I'm going deeper. I'm asking the questions. I'm recording stories. I'm treating those visits like the limited resource they actually are.

If you're reading this and your parents are still around, do me a favor. Call them today. Tell them you love them. Because one day you won’t be able to.

A wedding for a friend I met through something I built. A book I'm writing for a younger version of myself. A mom I'm trying to know better while there's still time.

We spend so much energy trying to optimize and grind and squeeze and hustle. And the whole time the most valuable thing we have is just slipping past us in the background.

Making memories with the best people in your life is the whole point of living. Because when its all set and done, that’s the only thing that matters.

And one number to leave you with.

200 more times.

That's the one I carried with me through Mexico City this week. Not a revenue goal. Not an event count. Not a metric. Just a number that reminds me what actually matters and what doesn't.

Wheels touch down in Miami in about an hour. Back to it tomorrow.

Have an amazing week,

Chris

PS. Reply directly to this email if you have questions or thoughts. I read every one.