We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alan Li a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Alan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

The idea for our company, Signs and Mirrors, started from our own problem. My wife and I run a photo studio, FotoLab, New York City and Houston’s first self-portrait studio. For our studios, we were looking for a beautiful sidewalk sign but couldn’t find one on the market. Specifically, we wanted a mirrored sidewalk sign so passersby could take a photo of themselves with our sign!

We ended up working with a few different manufacturers to build the stainless steel base of the sign and also cut a mirror to fit perfectly on the sidewalk sign itself. After a few weeks of tinkering, we made something that we thought was both beautiful and elegant that represented our photo studio well. Funny enough, we started seeing more pictures of our sidewalk sign than we did of our photo studio itself!

Given we had this problem of finding premium sidewalk signs in the market, we thought other businesses may also experience this problem. We created a website, took pictures of the signs we had created, and listed it online. Customers started to come in very slowly but each customer LOVED the design and look of our sign. We also treat every customer with the utmost respect and urgency which allows us to differentiate in the crowded sidewalk sign market.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started my career in finance working in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and private equity at Siris Capital. I really value my time working in finance because I learned the importance of work ethic, responsiveness, and attention to detail. However, I also realized finance wasn’t the path for me. I wanted to do something different and entrepreneurial. In between banking and private equity, I launched a podcast called, The Vampire Squid, which detailed my experience and my friends experience in finance. I created over 50 episodes and had over 1 million downloads. My podcast resonated most with college students interested in finance who wanted to learn more about the industry and how to break in.

After private equity, I went to business school at Harvard to meet awesome people that I could launch a business with. I worked on many different businesses at my time at Harvard including a music creation app, nasal inhaler, meditation app, and probably 20 other ideas. One of the toughest parts of transitioning from a structured corporate environment was the lack of structure and realizing there’s no one to tell you what to do. You are now the adult in the room! Coming up with a strategy, focusing on the most important tasks, and being disciplined to show up everyday without external motivation took me a while!

The other part of entrepreneurship is also the roller coaster of emotions and mental toll it can take. One day you may feel like you are on top of the world after winning a big contract where the next day you may wonder what you are doing with your life after a critical bug causes your product to go down for a week. Managing the ups and downs is a skill that gets easier with experience.

Signs and Mirrors is the culmination of a lot of my entrepreneurial experiences. I like having full agency over any issues that may arise in the business. I like how we work with and solve problems for amazing retailers and businesses. I like how there is a path to scale that doesn’t need venture capital. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of issues that arise with any business, but I am comfortable with fixing the problems that come with Signs and Mirrors.

Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.

Yes, I sold my last business called Moxa. Moxa is a health and wellness mobile app that teaches users self-acupressure for ailment relief like stress, headaches, and pain. Moxa was a venture backed business that required hypergrowth and scale that we unfortunately did not have. Thankfully, we did have a beautiful functional product that was used by tens of thousands of users each month. When we realized we weren’t going to be able to raise our next round of funding, we explored strategic alternatives including M&A. As a part of the M&A process, we reached out to all of our prior partners and friends in the industry to see if they were interested in acquiring Moxa. We also listed our app on M&A aggregator websites. Through these two processes, we found two interested buyers in acquiring Moxa. We signed a exclusivity with one buyer who was willing to pay all cash and move fast. The diligence process took about 3 months and the closing process took about 1 month.

For any acquisition, the diligence process is usually the most stressful part where you need to have materials and metrics detailing every part of your business. There are dozens of calls per week and you still have to run your business as well!

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

For Signs and Mirrors, we are customers of our own product. We run retail stores and can identify with the pain points that our customers needed ourselves. We also pride ourselves on our customer service and work hard to make sure every customer is satisfied and taken care of.

Unlike other prior businesses that I’ve built, I hope for Signs and Mirrors to be a business I never have to sell. We want to grow slowly and profitably so that we never have to rely on outside funding. Having agency over strategic and financial decisions in the business is extremely important to us because it will allow us to serve our customers best with the highest quality products.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.signsandmirrors.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/signsandmirrors
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/signsandmirrors

Image Credits

Signs and Mirrors Team