The Origins of a Lifestyle Entrepreneur

We talked our way into getting a dorm room for around $200/mo and converted the basement into a recording studio. Then when Summer rolled the dorms turned into a youth hostel and we threw parties buying beer for 25 cents and selling them for tourists for $1.00…after they had a few we’d sell them CDs of our music for $10. It was a fun life and made just enough to travel all over Europe for a year.

But soon enough I was ready for a new challenge and moved to Nashville, TN to attend SAE, the School of Audio Engineering. That’s when things got really interesting. I started doing studio installation work and even helped build a 16:1 surround sound studio (the first of it’s kind) that you could control with a joystick. Can you spell awesome? But the best thing that came out of my time in Nashville was meeting my band mate and first business partner, Jake Harsh. We began writing songs and recording other artists in our living room-come-studio and soon enough we started playing out and building a name for ourselves as Harsh Krieger.

We had a good thing going and were getting better and better at songwriting and producing, but I saw a fork in the road. We could either go for a “record deal” and sign over our career to a record label…or take the road less travelled and start a record label of our own and chart our own course in one of the wildest industries in the world. After much debate we Jake agreed to co-found our own label, provided that he had final say on creative decisions and that I would run the business side of things. And so it was that my passion for music lead me down the road of entrepreneurship at age 21. So it was that I made the transition from musician to the core to budding entrepreneur. A whole new world opened up as I learned about business plans, raising money, hiring and managing staff and 1,000 other things it takes to start a record label, but I just took it one day at a time and ultimately raised $125,000 to finance the production of our album.

Then, after nearly 10 years of eating, sleeping and breathing music, something inside me shifted and I became supremely fascinated with entrepreneurship and business in general. I packed-up shop in Nashville, TN and made the journey home to San Francisco, CA where I launched Krieger Consulting Group and started working with other entrepreneurs and business owners to grow their companies. Starting with the connections I made in the music industry, I quickly branched out to clients in a variety of industries. One of the most notable was helping 4-time Superbowl champ, Bill Romanowski, launch a nutritional supplements business!

This was in 2006/7 and the world was a different place. Every day the stock market was reaching new highs and it seemed like there was opportunity around every corner. I was making deals, making money and felt like the world was my oyster. I did so well for the bank that one day the CEO had a new BMW M6 delivered to his office and I asked what he was going to do with his “old” 645ci…he said “you’ve been crushing it, who don’t you drive it till the lease runs out!” Whether it was foresight or luck, it’s hard to tell, but in the midst of making a lot money for the first time, my will to work fell off a cliff. I wanted to travel Europe and party with friends. I wanted to have more options with girls and start dating a lot more. I was ready to put my career on hold to go back out and explore the world

So, in Summer 2008 I applied to a program called Project Rockstar. At the time it was billed as a “one-time only 8-week life transformational program” for guys. Some of the top dating coaches, health and fitness coaches and entrepreneurs came together to create a life-changing program. I had to get in. I bought a round-trip ticket to Europe for the summer and hoped that my application would be accepted, then went to work at the Colosseum Pub Crawl in Rome for a few weeks with a bunch of my international friends. I didn’t even tell the CEO of the bank or my clients I was leaving and just answered my phone whenever someone called…waiting to see how long until someone noticed I was out of the country.

Ultimately I was accepted onto the program for Project Rockstar and my life took a turn for the awesome. Everyday was a new challenge; go approach that group of gorgeous girls and tell them they look amazing…lose 5lbs in two weeks of training 5x/week…learn from millionaire entrepreneurs on how they became successful, the program blasted my comfort zone out of the water and pushed me to grow in every way. Thus began my strange and charmed life as a dating coach. I went into Project Rockstar determined to succeed at business at any cost. I came out of it with the perspective that life is to be enjoyed and enjoyment is not to be deferred until retirement. My focus shifted from lining up investors to finance deals, to lining up itineraries to go teach “dating bootcamps” in far-flung corners of the world.

Around this time I really started to consciously think about how I would design my life to amplify my interests and passions. I try to follow my instincts and pursue opportunities for growth and learning, and use a business entreprise as the “glue” that leverages those interests and inspires a greater level of focus by having money on the line. But greater focus doesn’t have to mean not having fun in the process. While all this was going on, building a flash drive business, studying Chinese and bouncing around the globe teaching dating workshops, I had been taking some night classes at a community college. Even though life had no shortage of excitement or opportunity without a college degree, a part of me wanted to transfer to a university and get the whole college experience while still in my twenties. After a few years of building up my lower division credits at community college, I applied to transfer and got accepted to UC Berkeley.

Foolishly thinking that I could run USB Superstore, which had grown to a 8-person operation doing $50,000/mo in sales, and be a full-time student at a famously rigorous school, it wasn’t even two weeks into my college career that my two worlds collided. In between studying microeconomics and Chinese grammar 10 hours/day and trying to manage the business expanding into Brazil with a team of partners, employees and investors there just weren’t enough hours in the day. I had to make a choice. Ultimately I chose to go from running a company to being a full time student. A choice more than a few people thought strange, but which fit right inline with my shifting focus towards wanting to master Chinese language and understand the world in historical context. I had accumulated a lot of specific knowledge, and now I wanted a broad understanding of how the world works and has developed over time to arrive at the place we are at.

So I looked around and found a buyer for USB Superstore and negotiated a sale of the company. However, my business parters weren’t entirely pleased to learn of my new plan and we had a few months of emotions running hot during the sale and transition. Ultimately it all worked out and we sold the company and I bought myself a new lease on life for a couple years of just learning everything under the sun from some very bright professors, then traveling the world in between semesters to teach dating workshops in Asia and visit more new places.

In the last year of school I had been working on the outline for a book. Originally it was focused on how to launch an online business that manufactured goods in China and sold them to customers in USA. I wrote an eBook describing that process and self published it online. The next time I was over in Singapore, a friend of mine who had written a book on Facebook marketing offered to put me in touch with his publisher. I sent them a copy of my book and when they showed interest I decided to hop a flight to Malaysia and explore the opportunity.

The Kanyin team was very supportive as I wrote and re-wrote a manuscript for the book, then I flew back a few months later, showed them the progress and signed a publishing agreement on the spot. They proved to be a great partner and promoted the book extensively leading up to the release date in August 2012. When I arrived back for the book launch I got a chance to speak on the main stage at BookFest Malaysia in the heart of Kuala Lumpur to a few hundred book fans!

Not only was this a personal accomplishment, but by the very nature of getting Lifestyle Entrepreneur out to a larger audience meant that I was impacting people in profound ways…people I had never met and who write emails after having found and read the book and decided to start a business of their own. The feedback and encouraging words people share with me is a large part of my inspiration to work harder and bring my message out in an even bigger way.