Get, ship, done! Do you know that brick and mortar still thrives even during the pandemic? Chris D. Roberts introduces Brandon Beauchesne, the owner of The Mail Room. Brandon talks about how mail is fun because who doesn’t love getting packages? Join in the conversation and discover how Chris runs his eBay business. You can make good money on eBay, depending on how hard you want to run at it. The key is to show up, have a positive attitude, and win people over. If you’re interested in running brick and mortar, this episode’s for you. Tune in and crush it!

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Get Ship Done! With Brandon Beauchesne

Who Says Brick And Mortar Is Dead!?

We are here with Brandon Beauchesne, entrepreneur, extraordinaire, artist, and mailbox. This guy has done a little bit of everything. He’s going to share some tips and tricks along the way that he has learned throughout his journey of being an entrepreneur and owning and operating several businesses. Let’s get into it. Brandon, we want to know what you attribute your success to. What I mean by that is your version of success. Everybody measures it in different ways. What’s the one thing that you attribute to your success and all the things that you have done?

 

Success for me is constantly changing. Setting little goals and trying to succeed at those gives me a running feeling of success. I’m constantly trying to grow and get to the next level. With the business I’m in, what’s contributing and driving my success is showing up and being confident with a good attitude no matter what gets thrown in my direction.

We talked to a lot of people and everybody defines success in different ways. It’s like, “I’m success-driven by achieving little goals one at a time. They become big things and those things drive me forward.” Can you give us one example of something in your world? We are going to dive in deeper here. Give us an example of what you said, “It’s these small wins. It’s these little things.” In your business, give me an example of something where you looked at it and you are like, “I want to do this better, achieve this, and be better at this.” Give us an example of something that you have done.

The one thing that stuck out in my mind was the fact that I was showing up. When I was an employee, my track record and attendance were awful. I was always the last guy to show up and the first one to leave. When I jumped into The Mail Room, it was just me. There was nobody else running the ship with me, so I had to show up on time every single day, six days a week. I never missed it. It doesn’t matter if some family emergency happened. It was like, “I had to be here.” By being here, that led to other opportunities and successes down the line for me. Showing up and doing it is what drives me.

That is completely underrated. People don’t understand that. I have talked a little bit about this before. It’s like, “How do you achieve success or a goal? How do you do anything?” You have to show up. What does it mean when you show up? You have to put in the work even if you don’t understand it, you are not good at it, or you don’t have the pedigree. Let’s say it’s a degree in something or a lot of experience in it.

I guarantee if you show up, work hard, do the best you can, swing the hammer as fast as you can, work the longer hours, and leave last, you will find a way to be successful in your own way. When you say that, it sounds simple to some people like, “I show up.” When you show up, do you have your head held high? Are you smiling, greeting customers with passionate enthusiasm, going the extra mile, and doing these little things after you show up?

It was the biggest one for me because I had no idea. When I jumped into this, I was like, “I could figure this out.” Having a positive attitude, and winning people over. I knew if I could do that and win the existing customer base over, then the rest would fall into place. It’s being here, smiling, and faking it until you make it. I was pretending I knew what I was doing. That got me and led me to the bigger thing.

Show up, have a positive attitude, and win people over.

Let’s step back a bit for the readers and talk about what brought you to where you are now, your progression, those life experiences, and some business and personal experiences that drove you. For the Charging Forward crew, why don’t you share with us your journey, where you are, and what you do? We always tease with a question and don’t dive in at first. Why don’t you go ahead share your journey and tell us a little about what you have done and what you do now?

As a kid, I was very music-centric and I 100% thought that was what I was going to be doing with my life. Everything that I had in me and anything that I was focusing on future-wise was that I was going to be a rock star and make it big. I only needed to learn how to count to four so I didn’t do good in Math class. I hate to say it and I talk to my kids about this but I didn’t apply myself because I knew that I was going to be a rock star. I didn’t have to worry about economics, algebra, and all that stuff. I played in a lot of bands growing up and through my twenties.

I met my wife and we had kids. It was like, “I’ve got to start having a steady stream of income.” I DJed for a while, bartended, and held pretty much every job I could. I finally settled down at slinging cable internet and phone that people didn’t need. That was it for me where I was like, “The music thing didn’t work out too great. At least I have healthcare from slinging cables.” While I was at that company, I’ve got picked to be on this new sales team to launch this big cellphone and cable company I was working for. They were getting ready to team up and this was going to be the most explosive deal. They needed to put together a special sales crew to launch this thing.

I was like, “I would love to be a part of it.” That was where I was cutting my sales teeth and getting all that sorted out. I was excited to be a part of that launch and when it happened, we went from taking 100 phone calls a day to 1. My checks suffered from it. We had a ton of time because we were sitting there waiting for the phone to ring.

I’m still not 100% sure what happened because it was two big companies. It should have been an awesome thing but the marketing wasn’t there and the calls weren’t coming through. You had 30-some-odd agents that were picked to be a part of this team that was supposed to rock these sales. There was nothing there for us.

We’ve got bored pretty quickly. I was about 3 or 4 months into that. We had finished the internet and Netflix, watched everything, and visited every webpage. There was on demand. My first kid was on his way. We’ve got pregnant and the money was super tight because I wasn’t getting the commissions that I was used to. At the time, I was trying to quit smoking cigarettes and turned to vape. We were bored there at the office one day and I figured out how to make eLiquid from watching guys do it all.

I was like, “I could do this. It can’t be that difficult. It’s like three ingredients and candy flavoring.” While I wasn’t good at Math, I was smart enough to know that getting $20 for your product when it cost you $2 to make, I was like, “This is what I should do. I should start a business with this.” I had a couple of buddies that were also on that sales team. They were excited about it and I was like, “If you want to help me out with doing this.” One guy had the idea, another guy had the cashflow, and another guy knew some people. We formed our company Banzai Vapors.

We built our website on that cable company’s computers while we were on the clock because we had nothing else to do. In turn, over the span of five years, we all eventually broke free from the corporate thing and ran that business for five years. It was hugely successful and none of us had any idea what we were doing. It was millions in revenue and we had no business running that company but we did it. We tried and it worked out great. I had a lot of good experiences doing it. Many mistakes were made but at the end of the day, we all learned so much from it. It got me to the next step, which is where I’m at now with The Mail Room.

To go back, Banzai was successful. It blew up. We’ve got in right at the right time to be able to capitalize on when that trend was blowing up. It got wild but just as fast, it fell straight down. I saw the writing on the wall. I knew that regulation was coming in and that our pockets weren’t deep enough to sustain what we had going on. I sold my position in the company to the two remaining partners.

It was like, “This is how much I need to figure out my next move. Can you float me for whatever?” I’ve got six months’ worth of living expenses until I could figure out my next move. They wanted to keep going. I was not down. I was like, “It’s a house of cards. It’s falling. I’ve got to get out while there’s still money in the business.” I managed to get out and I didn’t know what I was going to do next.

For anybody that’s on this entrepreneurial journey and you are in a position where you are like, “What did I get myself into?” It’s keeping you up at night and you are drinking a lot or something because of it, I would say, “Even if you don’t have the means, figure out a way to get out. Don’t stay with something because you worked so hard to get there.” That’s such a big mistake that people make with business. They stay with something that is obviously failing and they are digging that hole deeper. Once you are there, it’s tough to get up. That’s my little piece of advice in all of this.

 

I want to dive into The Mail Room here but I want to digress a bit because you have had a pretty dynamic background with being a musician early on, and then going to vape, which is random. A bunch of guys who were bored and tried to think, “How do we go out and do it?” The reason I want to digress a bit is I want to ask you a couple of questions. As a fellow entrepreneur, I know it takes a tremendous amount of heart, passion, enthusiasm, and getting your teeth kicked in over and over in self-doubt, challenge, and strife. It takes a lot of courage to go in and do something against the grain.

It’s one thing to work in the cubicle for $10 an hour because you know, “As long as I do my job that I’m supposed to do in this cubicle, I get my $10 an hour, go home, make my 40 hours a week, and so on.” To try something on your own takes a lot of courage. It’s very scary. Even if you have guts, you are like, “I don’t know what I don’t know.” The reason I wanted to digress is I want to go back to your musician days because I saw you perform way back in the day.

When you were young, I remember thinking, “Here’s this guy up there rocking. That must take so much courage to go up there regardless of your talent, whether you are good or not.” It still takes a lot of courage because you hear performers all the time go into depression, have all these challenges, that pressure, and all this but they are good.

You are like, “If they are good and they are going through that, somebody who’s trying to break into this business must be going through that like comics and so on.” I want to get into your mind when 1) You were booking gigs, and 2) You were selling your CDs. What were you thinking back then? What was it that pushed you to do that? How did you have the courage to do that? That is not easy.

It’s sheer stupidity. I thought that’s what we were supposed to do. To go back to that, I did a lot of that wrong. We are going to get real on this. I bought 1,000 copies of our first record that we have put out. We produced 1,000. I could have started with 100 but I was like, “Let’s do 1,000. We will sell more that way.” We spent all the money we had saved to make the record. We had nothing left to mail it out or promote it. There was no marketing budget. I didn’t even have that thought back then. My mentality then was like, “If you build it, they will come.” Doing this now, I’m like, “Those are words to die by.”

If I’ve got a little bit of money to invest somewhere, I’m like, “If we build it, they will come.” That might be one of my risky plays. At that time, that’s what it was like. When we would play shows and do all that stuff, it was like, “What’s going to be fun? What’s going to get people to like us? What’s cool?” That’s younger-me talk. I never thought of it. Maybe I was selfish but I liked being in the face of a crowd, music in general, and doing all that.

I was doing it and having fun. I didn’t go to college. My entrepreneurial journey has been a lot of stumbling, figuring stuff out, and doing stuff because we thought it was cool like Banzai. That was the only deciding factor of any financial things that came up, “Will this make us look cooler? Will this make people want to buy more of it because we’ve got Martin Kove to come out and do signings?” A lot of that still happens with what we do now. We are still stumbling through it. We are not always 100%. We are a little bit wiser about what could happen and we always try to have a little bit more of a game plan. We still do a lot of it because we want to.

Let your guard down and get the other person to hear you.

There is no right or wrong answer to it. The reason we have the show and encourage the Charging Forward crew to pursue those dreams and ambitions is that there is no right or wrong, whether it’s youth, inexperience, and the almost silly courage that you don’t even know yet what you do, or don’t have or it’s, “I have a business plan and a mentor.” You have to continue moving forward. For example, where I was going with your CDs, it’s like, “We bought 1,000 CDs. We thought we would blow through those,” but then it was like, “We still love music.” At some point in your life, you realize music isn’t going to put food on the table.

“I love it but I need to do something else.” That’s when that epiphany hit you with the sales crew, “We are going to fill a need. I’m trying to quit smoking, this stuff is easy to make, and it’s not even mainstream. Let’s dive into this.” You went and grew this business, and there were lots of lessons learned there. You had partners and whatnot but what would be your takeaway from what you learned in the vaping business that you took to your next business? What was the lesson learned there out of all the things that you did?

There’s a laundry list there but the ones that are jumping out is Banzai. In that whole first experience and having partners, the biggest takeaway for me was communication and being able to have honest and very difficult conversations with people. That’s a huge strength, in my opinion. That’s something where I’m like, “I know I can do it. I’m down to have no holds barred straight-up conversations.” You can get so much further and progress relationships if you are transparent and straight up with people.

I am that way now with my customers and I’m not rude about it. Being able to explain things to people that aren’t necessarily easy conversations to have, let your guard down, and get that person to hear you is invaluable to me. That makes me feel invincible in a lot of ways. We are down to have those hard conversations. That was the big one. The other one was when I made the decision, I told my partners I was done. On my last day at the office, I remember getting my car, driving, and kept saying out loud to myself, “Never again.” What I was talking about was, “I’m never going to make that money again and let it slip through my fingers.”

I went and read all the books and got my stuff together to a point where I figured out what enough was and what mattered to me. I went overboard with it because I had to figure out, “You are still allowed to have fun and spend money on some stuff.” As cliché as it sounds, it taught me the value of the dollar. When I saw how much I made and my take-home, I realized, “I don’t even own my house but I made this much money.” It was stupid. That’s my story. There are 50 to 60-year-old guys that still haven’t figured some of this stuff out. Everybody becomes enlightened at different arts but I feel very fortunate to have gone through all that.

Charging Forward crew, here’s what I want you to take away from that. It’s such an important piece that it is not talked about a lot. What Brandon was saying was that he learned to have difficult conversations with partners and people in his circle. When you are not an entrepreneur, you work 9:00 to 5:00 on your own, do what you are told, go home, and leave work at work. When you are an entrepreneur and you own a business, you are accountable to everyone and everything 24/7. That transparency is critical and sometimes the conversations are difficult.

What I want you to take away from this is that it feels and sounds good on paper to open up a business and be a business owner. It sounds great but that could result in 60-hour workweeks, difficult conversations going in the hole, and no paycheck sometimes until you pay your dues and work your way up. It’s important to understand that. You have to be mature enough. Stephen Covey said, and he may not have been the original creator of this phrase, “Knowledge is power but only if applied correctly.”

When Brandon got into this business, he was like, “I’ve got to understand the business and the numbers. I’ve got to understand that some things are not going to feel good to talk about but it’s my job to execute those conversations.” You are going to have to prepare yourself psychologically for that stuff because if you don’t, you will get bulled over in business by the shady people or get upset customers when you tell them what you think they want to hear.

The other thing you touched on, which I don’t want to overflow this thing and make sure we roll over this thing, is the value of the dollar. It’s understanding where your money is going and analyzing where you are spending money. Are you living below your means? Are you preparing yourself for when challenging times come in your business? Let’s say you are a podcaster and that’s your primary source of income, or you open up a brick-and-mortar store or a coffee shop. All of the principles are the same. It’s like, “I have $1 coming in and $0.75 going out. That leaves me $0.25 for the profit and marketing. Am I maximizing that $0.25? Am I spending $1.25 when I only have $1?”

You can start doing that by measuring everything you are spending. That can put you in a position to be successful with measuring your dollars and making sure that you don’t put yourself in a hole. I want to make sure we highlight those quickly. Brandon, I appreciate you sharing some of your past experiences. Would you tell us a little bit about what you do and your business? It’s a great business.

 

The deal I’m in is Mr. Teller’s Mail Room LLC. Long live Mr. Teller who passed away. He was my road dog and my ride or die. He lives on and we are making his legacy with The Mail Room. What we do is we are a retail packing ship store. Think of UPS, Goin’ Postal or whatever you have in your area. We are those guys. We are independent. UPS stores are corporate. We are not a franchise. We are our own entity. In addition to the shipping and mailing, we do private mailboxes like PO boxes. We have a full-range gift shop and we are having a lot of fun with it. We went into it not knowing what the hell we were doing and what we were getting ourselves into. I should talk about how we’ve got here.

When I left Banzai, I was like, “Never again.” I didn’t tell my wife that I was quitting. I was like, “I’m out.” I came home and talked about a difficult conversation. It’s like, “I’m done.” I knew that I was going to have a little bit of money to get us by but we were going to have to do something else. She was able to go pick up her old job working as a chiropractor. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to get into.” I had some experience with eBay. I used to work as a pawnbroker for a short time doing eBay sales for this pawn shop and I liked it.

I was like, “I had a bunch of this stuff that I bought with all this vape juice money. I’m going to start offloading some of this stuff.” I did that and started selling on eBay and getting rid of personal collections, music gear, collectible toys, and all sorts of stuff. I’ve got into it because you can make good money depending on how hard you want to run at it.

For me, it was a fun job and business. I went nuts with it. I’ve got in my garage and I was going to all the thrift stores, swap meets, and antique stores and selling everything under the sun. With our phones, you could look and see what an item was. Even if you didn’t know what it was, you can look it up and figure out what it was worth right there on the spot.

When I was doing it, it was easier than it had ever been to make money. I’ve got into it and it was so fun. Britt got into it with me. She likes sourcing and the kids were into it. I was going nuts and selling everything I could under the sun. I’ve got focused on selling high-end music equipment, mainly keyboards, synthesizers, and stuff like that. At the time, I was able to find them for dirt cheap because kids went off to college and mom found her son’s vintage synth in the attic. She doesn’t know what it is so she’s offloading it for $50, and I can flip that into $600 in a day. I don’t get margins like that anymore. I was enjoying it.

There are still a lot of guys doing that and killing it. I gave tons of praise to them but that market has dried up. You go to Value Village and they are selling stuff based on what the price is on eBay. It’s a lot harder to source those high-margin items than it once was. I’ve got in at the tail end but it still wasn’t coming close to where I was with Banzai as far as what I was bringing to the table. I knew I’ve still got to figure something out. What I was doing is I would take my eBay order all over town. I would have UPS one that needed to go to FedEx and one that needed to go to the post office.

I found out about this place called The Mail Room and it was in the exact spot where it was when I found it here in University Place. It was this little rinky-dink dusty joint that you wouldn’t even have known it was here if you didn’t stumble in on accident. I came in and they were like, “We take everybody, UPS, FedEx, Post Office, and DHL. You can always drop all your stuff here.” I was like, “This is amazing.”

You need people who will help you, and many people will need your help.

I was having a beer with a buddy. He was asking me about eBay and how’s it going. He’s like, “Where are you taking all your stuff?” I was like, “I found this little mom-and-pop mail place called The Mail Room.” He was like, “My aunt owns that place. Get out of here. She wants to sell it because she’s getting older and it’s turning into a liability for her.” I was like, “You should talk to her for me and see if she’s willing to let it go for.” He did that and I came in and introduced myself, “I’m Adam’s friend. I’m interested in what you do here and what you’ve got going on.” That conversation eventually led to us taking over and purchasing it.

My vision at the time was like, “This little existing business, we can spruce it up a little bit. We’ve got a warehouse in the back so I will still be able to do eBay. It’s right next to a thrift store. This will be perfect. How did I get so lucky?” We spent that first year updating things because things were still pen and paper and old school. The person that sold it to me was pushing 70. She wasn’t trying to learn and keep up with technology and what all this industry was evolving into.

That first year was us cutting our teeth, figuring out what’s what, and bringing things up to the modern age. It was a one-man show at that time. Britt was still working at the chiropractic office and I was here with Lucy, my daughter. Mr. Teller was here and Joel was at school. Those were the good old days. Our goal when we took over was like, “It’s The Mail Room. There are a million of these types of businesses all over the place.” There’s a multimillion-dollar FedEx Kinko’s across the street. It’s this business center and there’s a post office a block away from us.

“What are we going to do? How are we going to get customers?” Britt and I talked back and forth for a while, “What if it was this wacky mail place that made mail fun? Mail is fun.” When was the last time you’ve got a handwritten letter in the mail? You don’t get them but if someone sent you one, you would be like, “What?” If it was nice, you would be pumped about it. Who doesn’t love getting a package? We wanted to run with that because if you go to the Post Office, it’s not always a pleasant experience. I’m not trying to hate or anything but any of the UPS stores or barbered stores is like going to the DMV. There’s not a whole lot of personality going on in those parts.

We were like, “Let’s be rock stars of the mail and shipping industry, and do things differently.” We brought in fun gifts, changed the music, and looked at our demographic. It was mostly the Baby Boomer generation and women. We started playing their music and played a lot of funk and Motown. People take to that like catnip. That’s one thing that I brought with me from DJing. I do know how to work for a crowd. We built a ridiculous playlist with all these hits and people relate to that in such a strong way that their guard comes down.

When we are stelling to them, all those little details make closing and all of that a lot easier. I’m sure you already know a lot about that. We took this as mail is not so much like mail but mailboxes. More people are buying online and more mail theft is happening. We need to make this a place where people want to have their mailboxes and ship stuff. This is a cool place.

What I love about that is you took a business that would otherwise be pretty boring and blasé. Nobody thinks about it. You want to get in and out of there. You transitioned it into a place that people want to hang out and chat. It’s interesting because I can speak from experience going in there. Hearing the way that you and your customers interact right back and forth is a completely different vibe than when you walk into other mailbox places to ship a package. Some of those other places won’t even take packages from other companies.

You made a point of highlighting, which I want the Charging Forward crew to pay attention to is, “I found this great place where I can mail all my stuff.” You found a value proposition in a business that you would have never thought you would ever own. When the opportunity presented itself, you knew there was immediate value there, especially when it was for sale. You said, “How do we exponentially grow this business model? Let’s take this value proposition that she built on for years and make it a fun and exciting place. Let’s relate to our customers and create a nurturing environment where they are excited to come in here.”

Most people may not think about this but when I have been in there, I have seen your customers that come in. Let’s say they are a little bit older demographic. A lot of those folks don’t have people to talk to regularly. They don’t have a social circle necessarily. I have seen the way you engage with them and it’s like you are all friends. That is not an environment that you generally see in a mailbox place. You’ve got the knickknacks, colorful stuff, retro stuff for sale on the walls, music, and the dog. The environment is conducive to the excitement, fun, energy, and a genuine inviting vibe.

The point I’m making is you had a good idea, as simple as that may have been, “Let’s make it a fun place.” That worked well for you. You took it a step further and started diving into the numbers and figuring out, “How do we maximize more of these mailboxes? How do we create more revenue? How do we utilize our existing customers to drive more people to use us and tell them about this great little secret?” You have done a spectacular job there. I encourage anybody if you are in the area to go check them out. Of all the things you do, what do you attribute the one thing that you are doing? You mentioned being customer-centric.

 

I don’t know if you will be able to sum it up well. Helpful human. That’s our mission anytime we are making a decision on any change that we are going to push or initiate. In any decision we make, the top question is, “How is this helping our customers or employees?” Having that be our deciding factor on what we do and how we run all of our systems, you cut away a lot of the stuff that’s unnecessary. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the business of like, “We need to do this and that.” If you pick one thing and use that as your deciding factor for any of the decision-making, it becomes a lot clearer to you on what you should be doing with your business.

For us, it was being helpful and that is our brand. We are here to help. We get phone calls constantly on stuff we don’t even do or a Google search away. Going back to what you were saying about how we are the social interaction for a lot of the demographic that comes in here, we make it a point to even help those people who aren’t even our customers because hopefully, they will remember us, “That guy down there at The Mail Room is super nice. He helped me find the DOL. I’m going to use those guys for my mailing needs. I will my friends about it.”

You put good out into the universe and it comes back. It’s good stuff. We stumble through life, make mistakes and learn from them, and hopefully push forward and don’t give up. Along the way, you meet people. There are influencers and books. Is there a book, a mentor, an individual, a family member or whatever it is in your life? Is there somebody that was a mentor to you or something that influences you in a positive way? If so, how?

Give us an example because there are some people in our readers that don’t have a good circle of influence. They are looking for something or some way to keep themselves inspired and motivated to push forward, take that chance, go for that dream or whatever it may be. Can you give us one person, book or inspiring figure, and why?

We have a mentor and his name is John. He took me to the next level to summarize. He has done a lot on the business side of things. He’s very much not the man I hope to become because that’s all he does. I’m like, “I’m not looking for all of it.” I know what enough is for me. He taught me a whole heck of a lot about myself. He got me to realize that a lot of things that I and we as entrepreneurs worry about don’t matter. A lot of that is imposter syndrome where it’s just noise and stuff.

I will come to John with something that’s weighing me down, “I feel like it’s a hurdle I’m not going to be able to climb over.” He’s like, “I have done that a million times.” He makes me understand that if you are not getting bumps and bruises along the way, you are not doing it right. That for me has been huge because I’m very tense. I stress out a lot on things that don’t matter but having him talk me through this to keep me grounded is super helpful.

I want to touch on what you said, “You don’t have a mentor in your inner circle.” You are a product of your environment. I don’t mean to say it negatively necessarily. If you are not around good people that are helping with your progress on whatever journey you are on, you’ve got to find new people as much as that sucks.

You are like, “It’s sucks.” You don’t have to be rude and cut these people out of your lives. You need to make it a point to find somebody who is going to help because I’m not a self-made man. I would never claim that title. A lot of people helped me along the way and will continue to help, and I will continue to help other people.

I don’t think anybody is like, “I did this all by myself. Go, me.” You do need people who are going to help you, not just fluff you up with like, “We are going to sell 1,000 of these records. You are such a good singer.” That’s how that happened. That’s how you get stuck with 997 copies of your record. It’s because you’ve got too many people telling you it’s a good idea.

You’ve got to reach out. The way I found John was organic. He was one of my customers and we would have these dialogues. I knew he knew stuff because he was using some terms with me. He had some acumen in business. I found out what he did, where he was from, and all that. I was like, “You could help me not drive this thing into the ground. I don’t know how this works but would you mind being my mentor?” He was like, “We can sit down, talk, and do what happens. It sounds fun.” It was that simple. I was just asking and now we have been friends for years. He did help get me to where I’m at now and where we are going. I give him so much credit for that.

I want to highlight this because it’s important. It’s one thing to say, “Do you have a mentor? Go hire a mentor.” It’s another thing to earn a mentor’s time and respect. Oftentimes, you can volunteer your time, give yourself, and do all these things to draw a mentor into your world. You simply were being polite like you are and being customer-centric. This person saw some value in you and that you were working hard and trying to grow your business. He gave you that time. I cannot emphasize this enough.

These folks who have been there who are 60, 70 to 80 years old are incredible value propositions for anyone aspiring to do what they have done. They have paved the roads. A lot of them are dying to share information, help, and assist in any way they can. You’ve got to be willing to work, help them, want to be around them, and show that you are willing to put in the work.

Oftentimes, you will find that they will spend time on you. I was in a similar position at a younger age where somebody saw value in my attitude and my energy. They put the time into me to teach me, and that’s what propelled me onto owning, running, and operating several businesses down the road. That’s good advice and I appreciate that. Brandon, as we close here, why don’t you tell everybody how we can find you, your social links, anything about you or anything you want to talk about?

Listen to what your heart is telling you and follow it.

There’s The Mail Room in University Place, Washington. Our Instagram and Facebook are @TheMailRoomUP. We try to stay somewhat active. We are not crazy social media people. We don’t go nuts with it. No offense to anybody but our business is here. We do have a following on that but we put the time in on the face-to-face interactions straight up.

If I have to be in my phone on top of doing the face-to-face thing, that’s going to wipe me out. We focus on face-to-face things. We are in University Place. The biggest thing is that this is not a rehearsal. If you are on the fence about starting a business or the business you are in, make the tough decision. Your heart is telling you what to do. Follow it because you don’t want to live on what-ifs.

Thank you so much, Brandon Beauchesne. With Mr. Teller’s Mail Room in University Place, Washington, among many other wonderful successes you have had, I look at them as all successes regardless of being in business or not because most entrepreneurs will fail along the way. A failure is defined by what? It doesn’t even mean anything. It’s a learning experience, in my opinion. Almost every successful person has had them. Brandon, it has been a pleasure having you. You have dropped a ton of knowledge. I hope everybody enjoyed the time we had. We will look forward to seeing you soon, Brandon. Everybody, have a good day. Thank you so much.

Important Links:

• The Mail Room
• Instagram – The Mail Room UP
• @TheMailRoomUP – Facebook

About Brandon Beauchesne

Born and raised in Tacoma WA. Brandon began his entrepreneurial journey in 2012 as a founding member of an E-liquid manufacturing company. He purchased The Mail Room in 2017 and is currently expanding through a partnership with DHL.