Darius Foroux is a blogger and consultant with a background in marketing. He studied marketing at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. After he did his master’s degree in 2010, he started a business with his father. They sold laundry machines to hotels, restaurants and to the professional market. After doing that for 2-3 years, he also wanted to get some experience at the corporation, so he did a job in London in a technology advisory company. He did that on the side as well while still running the business. That’s when he really started getting into productivity because he had a lot of stuff on his plate. He started researching on how he could be more productive. He wanted to get more stuff done in less time and that’s how he became what he is now which is to teach and write about productivity.
In a candid chat with ScaleUp magazine editorial team, he talked about his life journey.
Success, Failures and life as an entrepreneur
Laundry business started by Darius still exists today, that’s the only business that can be called successful. After about 2 years of operation, he thought that he was pretty experienced in marketing so he started an agency with a friend from college which failed very early. It failed as they did not know what they were doing.
They said to themselves that we should do this and that’s how they started without a plan. They just did some networking, tried to get some clients and did their websites and did some marketing for them but they did not have any strategy, they did not have any systems in place.
His friend lost interest in the business after 6 months and decided to take a job as he was not really enjoying it. They did not connect at a personal level and discussed the way they were doing business. So the whole business failed.
From this experience, he learned that if you want to start a business and especially with someone else, you need to have a strategy in place because it is a large part of your life and you need to try to think ahead. If you don’t have a strategy, you are just working on tactics and that’s what they did.
So these days Darius is more focused on strategies instead of tactics.
Tips to scaling business
In the beginning, the biggest challenge was to scale the business. As per him when you start a business you are often very enthusiastic and especially if you are passionate about what you are doing. As an entrepreneur, you want to grow the business but you can not really grow a business unless you have a system in place.
Darius shares a personal experience of growing his online venture.
Read the full interview in ScaleUp Magazine Issue 8
