Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Cash Lawless. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Cash, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
What helps me build confidence is evidence of gained competence and committing to actions that produce desired results.
On competence, the more competent I become, the more confident I become as I see the real world out comes of decisions made from that competence. This strengthens your trust in yourself to navigate more encounters with hard things in life, which translates to confidence. You can tell yourself in the mirror you are capable as many times as you want, but these affirmations don’t serve any purpose unless real world evidence backs them up.
In some lines of work a sense of false confidence may be helpful. Telling yourself you can do something like lift a little more weight than you have in the gym, trying to set a record can be helpful. As an entrepreneur, you may need to be confidence in your ability to achieve something you’ve never achieved before, so while the confidence can be unfounded, it can sometimes be enough to get you going.
In investing however, thinking you are better than you have proven to be, can be very dangerous. You wouldn’t want to get on a plane with a pilot who has never flown, but is very confident he can handle it. There are people out there like that.
I say all of that to communicate that confidence is a critical ingredient in success soup. A successful person has to have a certain degree of trust in their ability to make decisions, but they should also know when confidence is a tool, and when it is a threat.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I’m an entrepreneur and investor. My first jobs were picking berries, and bucking hay to guitar player, to Justin Bieber’s hairstylist. Those were very formative moments and seasons in life that I didn’t realize at the time were developing much of who I am now.
Today, I am the CEO of Hanover Sloan. Hanover Sloan is like a family office that operates like a venture capital and private equity firm. Our portfolio of businesses is comprised of startups in the Real Estate, Automotive Manufacturing and Beauty Products industries.
I made the transition into investing while I was a working hairstylist in New York And Los Angeles. When I met my wife I knew I wanted a life that didn’t require me to fly over 100 times a year and work obscene hours on a moments notice. Little did I know, starting and running businesses would be much more work than that. I wanted to be with her more often, so we put together a plan.
She lived in Texas and I in New York and we were both too poor and busy to see each other but a few times a year. So we agreed to get married long distance and work on building companies and investing until those things grew to the point where we could be together in Texas. We were long distance for 7 years seeing each other only a handful of times each year until we made it happen. So you could say, I had a big reason to pursue success. Now, my wife and I work together everyday and the freedom to do that has been the greatest reward for me.
I have sat in every seat of my businesses from manufacturing, marketing, sales, accounting etc. What I focus my energy on now, is driving the growth of the companies in our portfolio.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Clarity: I believe this is the first step in accomplishing anything; knowing what I want. I operate much better when I am clear on what I want. I can’t stand being unclear so I spend a lot of time and effort on generating clarity and vision for myself personally and for my businesses. This is not easy and takes a lot of practice. Vision comes easier for some than others but everyone can do it. If you can see a commercial or an ad and immediately see yourself having that, then you can generate clarity. But be careful how much of what you want is clarity that has been generated by other people. I fell prey to thinking I really wanted to do some things when I was younger only to find that was someone else’s vision for me, not mine.
2. A burning desire to achieve what you clearly want; an obsession. This carried me for years through the hardest moments. Without this attribute, I would have quite. I don’t understand where it comes from, but I have always had some idea of what I wanted, and when I wanted something, I had to have it, or accomplish it.
3. A strong curiosity to understand things and myself accompanied by a voracious desire for learning those things over long periods of time. People say don’t sweat the small stuff, but the big stuff, is just a bunch of small stuff put together. The sails on a boat are very big. And if you focus all of your attention on the sails ignoring the little rudder, you’ll struggle to make way in any direction. To understand how the big stuff works, you must understand the small stuff and that comes from having a strong desire to learn about all of the facets of your company. A small thing is only a small thing, when compared to something bigger. But in the universe it hard to tell what is big and what is small, so I prefer and enjoy being curious about it all.
4. Being disagreeable. I am told by others this is a contributing factor to the degree of success in my goals, I have achieved thus far. In many cases, I know what I want, and don’t often let people’s opinions or words change that without good reason. Standing firm in my convictions has allowed me to listen to my gut, see the outcome and learn to listen to it even more.
What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
The most challenging thing I am facing in this stage of my career is navigating the infinite external forces that impact my businesses like economic shifts, policy changes, geo political changes etc. Policy is probably one of the most powerful external forces that can effect a business that is very difficult to navigate, and often you can do nothing about it. Sometimes, a single policy change signed by another person, can put an entire industry out of business and they can do virtually nothing about it.
A business needs to have a plan forward, but a plan can only be made for how one understands the world today, so a plan has to not only include offense and how to progress, but also, defense. There has to be a plan for the likely ‘what if’ scenarios.
For example, you can buy lots of real estate on floating rate debt and do great for many years. But if you don’t plan for the day those rates start to spike up through simple policy changes, you can find yourself in a pretty bad spot eventually.
Or, you can manufacture an incredible product, that a competitor copies and begins to out brand or out market you taking more marketshare. So you have to plan defensively to protect your assets.
The big challenge on my plate at the moment is to know what to do, how and when it should be done, who should do it, and keep a close eye on environmental changes, and do that for several companies in serval industries. I am not sure anyone gets this perfect so I am just looking to continually improve in my ability to make good decisions in difficult and rapidly changing environments.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hanoversloan.com
- Instagram: @cashlawlesshair
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cash-lawless/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrcashlawless
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