Happy Wednesday!

If you’re new to reading this, hello it’s great to meet you and I’m honored that you’re here. My name’s Chris Meade and I’ve been on an entrepreneurship roller coaster for the past decade of my life and feel like all the lessons are finally compounding and working. As I type that, I’m sure I jinxed myself and something bad will happen shortly but thats just life as a founder and something I’ll have to deal with.

From film school graduate with a quarter million dollars of debt, to working a minimum wage job trying to pay it back, to a dead end job that I thought I’d never get out of, to inventing a backyard game that would scale to $50M while starting it on unemployment, to now building the fastest growing entrepreneurial founder community on planet earth while playing emotional support husband as my wife builds an eight figure pilates empire, I’ve seen alot and am here to share it unfiltered.

So lets get into it.

I just got back from Sarasota on Sunday as we’re opening a brand new BODY Hot Pilates at the most beautiful complex in the UTC complex in Sarasota (think of it as like the nicest shopping center ever if you’re unaware). Although the doors dont open until middle of September, the real excuse was going up to see my family in Tampa and visiting my 11 month nephew McCoy and my family.

He’s just starting to take his first steps and I got three straight days with him which were priceless. Watching him wobble around, fall on his butt, laugh, and try again. Somewhere on the ride home it really hit me how strange life actually turns out to be. If you’re around my age or older and have siblings, maybe you have felt the same way?

When you're a kid, you assume adulthood looks a certain way. Family stays close, you watch your niece or nephew grow up in real time, you're there for all the memories and the small stuff because you're just down the street. What ends up happening is just life. People spread out, everyone moves at a different speed, builds a different life, in a different city, for their own good reasons, and that the people you love most end up living most of your relationship with them through a phone screen. It sucks. Its nobodys fault. Its just reality.

I see McCoy and my family just a handful of times a year now. The rest is FaceTime and videos my brother sends me. I love that boy more than anything, and I hope he’ll grow up to realize that. The days I get to be with him in person are, without question, the most valuable days of my year. I found myself wishing, genuinely, that I could just slow time down while I was there.

I don't have some clean lesson to wrap that in. I just know it's real, and I have a feeling a lot of you know exactly what I'm talking about. In times like that, its more important than ever to find the balance between work and the memories and to be 100% present, because the stress of your “day job” will always be there and if you’re like me you’ll never be done with work, they’ll just be more of it.

Anyway. While I've been chasing McCoy around Tampa and watching my wife conquer the world with her pilates empire, a lot has happened that I am over the moon about.

Big one first: The Founders Club just crossed 1,700 members. We're on pace to hit 2,000 by the end of this quarter depending on the candidates. And even better we are on track to DECLINE 36,000 applicants this year. That is my favorite metric. Quality over quantity. Thats the only way this community continues to be a badge of honor.

Every month, we now host something called a Curated Connections Dinner in our core markets. Last night we hosted a beautiful evening at Ossobuco, one of Miami’s nicest steakhouses, for 50 members that got sold out in a matter of hours when we hosted it on The Founders Club app.

It was a special evening for a lot of reasons, one I got to meet an internet friend of almost seven years for the first time in real life, but more importantly, I couldn't stop thinking back to four years ago, when Aaron and I hosted our first event in Miami and came home defeated. Only four people showed up and we packed up our things thinking this idea might actually not work. In that exact moment is where most entrepreneurs and first time founders give in.

We'd sit there wondering if we were wasting our time, wondering if anyone actually wanted what we were building, wondering if we should just stop. And last night, we couldn't find enough space or a restaurant in Miami big enough to hold everyone who wanted in.

I keep coming back to this because it's the most important lesson I can share right now:

Everybody wants the immediate gratification of their business working overnight. Everyone thinks it should be easier than it is. Everyone is being fooled by the internet and “overnight success”. This is not how the real world works. The winners are the ones who wake up every single day. Grind. Make the business just a bit better and stay alive to see another day. Five, ten years, maybe twenty years later you’ll be thankful you stuck through it while everyone else is working for the man and begging to take a summer Friday.

Last night was proof of that. If you're in the "five people showed up" phase of whatever you're building, don't give up too early. You have no idea how close you might be.

For years I thought all these stories, all these memories, all these failures would lead to a really good book of lessons. I’ve always struggled with the concept of where do entrepreneurs go to learn besides making terrible mistakes? Podcasts are great, but normally you’re listening to a guy years ahead of you. Webinars are cool I guess if you can sit through it for an hour and ask your one question.

The idea is simple. I'm interviewing 100 of our seven, eight, and nine-figure members about their stories, lessons, and mistakes, the kind of stuff nobody tells you until you've already paid for the lesson the hard way. Every chapter should read like the advice you'd give your 20-year-old self to save a few years of pain.

I did my first week of interviews, and I already have about 10 more on the calendar for this week alone. Two stood out immediately.

The first was with Keith Cristobal, a nine-figure operator who runs one of the largest telecom service businesses in the country. The second was with my good friend Gaston Becherano, who owns Smorgasburg, the largest outdoor food market in the country. Both conversations were the kind where I shut my laptop after, ran to my wife, and was like this books actually going to be damn good!

I wanted to close this week’s newsletter with a few tidbits from each of them as I don’t want you to wait to have the hardcover in your hands this holiday season.

Keith started with $20,000 in savings and another $20,000 his co-founder pulled off credit card cash advances. No investors, no capital. Today he runs a portfolio of companies doing well north of $100,000,000 annually, with his average employing making over $145,000 a year (his proudest business accomplishment)

He dropped two lines back to back that felt like they belonged on a business card:

“It's not what you know, or even who you know, it's who knows you.”

“If you want to fly with the eagles, you don’t swim with the ducks.”

Both stuck with me instantly, as its so true. You have to show up and carry yourself with integrity every day, for years. One stupid mistake can blow everything up and it can take years for the right people to notice you and what you’re building.

Another two great points I’ll leave you with were:

1) His biggest regret was not prioritizing legal and compliance early enough. Skipping it cost him a $575,000 lawsuit years later with the state of California. His advice exactly was, “There’’s no avoiding this. As much as it is not fun, you’re going to have to get back to legal and compliance eventually, just don't make it way later."

2) On why he stopped being a people pleaser and moving on from childhood friends who no longer served him - "Shrinking to make people feel accepted might help in the short term, but in the long term it's never the right play. It just invites drama later and fosters entitlement." And the line that's been sitting with me all day: "When someone tells you who they are, you have to believe them."

If you’re unaware Smorgasburg is the country’s largest outdoor food market and its almost impossible to not know it if you live in NYC or Miami.

Back in 2016, almost a decade before I knew Gaston, I would go to their Williamsburg location every Sunday to keep myself occupied and trying to make a few friends. It was the loneliest part of my life, fresh off of a six year breakup, living with random strangers from Craigslist (crazy story for another time), and working a job I hated. Smorg was one of the only places that would make me smile and give me an escape from the hell that my life was during that time.

Crazy enough, Gaston wasn't Smorgasburg's founder. He started as a food vendor in 2017, opened and closed his own restaurant, convinced the original founder to launch a Smorgasburg branch in Miami in 2022, and bought the entire company two years ago. He said something I loved about that: "Every day I have to prove to myself that I'm the right person to run the company. It's not a yes-or-no thing you decide once, it's something you continuously earn, because things change and evolve all the time."

When we first met, we bonded over bad business partnerships and having to buy out co-owners of past businesses. During the interview he opened up about a business partnership that fell apart and that he would tell his younger self:

He also told me that scaling past the small team he saw in person every day in Miami to leading 40 people across four cities remotely was the hardest lesson of his career, not because there were more people, but because they weren't in front of him anymore, so he had to get deliberate about communication instead of relying on it just happening naturally.

And when I asked him if running a company without a partner ever gets lonely, he said something I didn't expect: "Before the Founders Club, I felt a little more lonely." I couldn't have set that line up better myself if I tried. That's exactly why this club exists.

So if you want to apply, you should do so here - foundersclubofficial.com

I've got 10 more of these conversations this week, and 90-plus to go after that. If there's a specific kind of story you want me to chase down, someone who's been through a brutal partnership breakup, someone who bootstrapped to an exit, someone who's failed publicly and rebuilt, just hit reply and let me know. I'm building this book for you as much as for the members telling their stories.

Whether this was your first newsletter or you’ve been reading for nearly five years, I just want to thank you for getting this far down in the newsletter. Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring. Thank you for sharing what we’re building. I don’t take it lightly that tens of thousands of you read this every week. It is one of my biggest honors and blessings in life.

If you have a minute, I’d love to hear back from you. What are you building? What are your challenges? What do you want to hear more of? Believe it or not, I’m an inbox zero guy and read EVERY SINGLE response. So shoot me a message back.

All the love in the world,

Chris