Welcome to the first edition of the Real Conversations Newsletter!

My name is Jacob O’Connor and I’ve interviewed 300+ high performers for my podcast, Real Conversations. Every Tuesday I’ll send out 3-5 of my biggest takeaways from that weeks podcast episode. Short, concise, and never spam.

With this being my first email newsletter, I’m sending this to folks that I think might be interested in receiving weekly emails. If you aren’t interested, you can opt out at the bottom of this email.

My newsletter on this week’s episode will go out Thursday morning and then we will be back on the Tuesday morning schedule. Below is an example post from last weeks Real Conversation’s episode with Lan Sansone, Co Founder of The Normal Brand. Know someone who you think might be interested in this newsletter? Forward this email to them (we’d appreciate it 😉).

Lan Sansone, Co Founder of The Normal Brand

Starting a clothing company is hard. Starting it in the Midwest is incredibly difficult. Building the company with your brothers— even crazier. But that’s exactly what Jimmy, Conrad, & Lan Sansone are doing. And it’s working. The Normal Brand started in 2015 and has scaled to 10 retail locations across the US with a large ecommerce presence. Here are 3 takeaways from my episode last week with Lan:

1. Don’t Overcomplicate the Problem

The Normal Brand (TNB) started when Jimmy Sansone (Lan’s older brother) was working on Wall Street and couldn’t find a “normal” shirt to wear in his free time. That was it. There was nothing in the market that he liked so he decided to make a shirt for himself and thought that there must be others like him that felt the same way. Simple.

2. Family is Everything

Lan has nine siblings (yes, you read that correctly). He works directly with two of his brothers and has another brother that helps them with finding real estate for each of their retail locations. When The Normal Brand launched, the whole family helped out at trade shows, attended events, and supported in every possible way.

Building a business is incredibly difficult. It can isolate you from friends and family and take up all of your focus. By involving their family (in both small and big ways) they’ve all remained close and have a support system unlike anything I’ve seen before.

3. Be Ok with Not Knowing

I would amend this to: Be ok with not knowing, but work like hell to figure it out. When TNB started, none of the brothers knew what they were doing, they just knew they wanted to make high quality “normal” clothes.

Lan talks about this in the episode, “When you don’t know anything, you’ll do everything". When you’re a beginner in a new business, the cards are stacked against you and you’re at a disadvantage. But, you have curiosity, fresh-eyes, and a hunger to succeed. You don’t need to know what you’re doing when you start— you just better be willing to work like a dog to figure things out and be successful.

You can watch / listen to the episode here. 

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-Do Hard Things & Live a Meaningful Life-