We recently connected with Benjamin Anderson and have shared our conversation below.

Benjamin, appreciate you joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

My sister and I were raised by a single father. Something that he did right was that he was always transparent with us about what was going on as far as his work goes. My father has been in real estate for 40+ years and in the early 2000s, he was at the top of his career as an independent developer. That all changed in 2008 when the market took a down turn. This hit our family and his portfolio hard, but he did not sugarcoat the realities of the situation to us as it was happening. He explained the situation at every opportunity as it was unfolding in language that we could understand and was never slow to highlight his own lapses in judgment that could have prevented or at least alleviated some of the negative effects that we were experiencing at the time.

I remember in great clarity one interaction in particular that sums up the root of what I am getting at here. He told my sister and I to pay attention to what was happening so that we never had to go through a similar situation again. The next time the environment changes in such a way that it could destabilize a lifetime’s worth of work and investment, our family would be ready, as opposed to caught off guard, because we will have already learned from the mistakes of this experience, even at a young age.

This mentality of my father’s expands beyond this specific time in our childhood. At every opportunity, my father would put his ego aside for us as his children to explain aa situation in such a way that we could learn from it, and avoid making the same mistakes ourselves. The Anderson’s are a family that does not make the same mistakes twice, and that’s because my dad instilled a pattern of radical transparency through tough times for us to learn from, and it is a pattern that I will keep for my own children and even with those I work with for the rest of my life.

Benjamin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am an independent researcher exploring intervention strategies in complex systems.

My personal focus is in biology, but something I’ve learned is that the same principles that I explore in this domain are relevant in business, social structures and beyond. It’s for this reason that on occasion I find opportunities to work with business owners that have a specific set of problems, and help them to develop creative and systemic solutions to those problems. It’s doing this type of consulting that has allowed me to pay the bills and focus on my research with the rest of my time.

The most consistent thing I’ve done over the past 3 years is serve as producer for a show called The Vance Crowe Podcast. On the VCP, we interview people who spot patterns in business, culture and science that others don’t, or at least haven’t yet. Listening to my partner and host, Vance interview such a diverse array of individuals is what gave me a strong sense for determining general principles from a wide array of different experiences. It’s this realization that’s helped me make a career of identifying these principles, and applying them in places where others are not to develop novel solutions to complex problems.

Before working on the podcast, I was a software entrepreneur. I started and sold a marketplace platform called WAND, which connected independent cleaning professionals to users on demand in a format similar to Uber.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When I was 18, I deferred my accepted to college and decided to move to Denver, CO with my best friend to see what the world outside of the small town I grew up in had to offer.

There I learned how to code, and did a number of other things that paid well enough to justify the time including digital marketing, property management, launching a product line on Amazon, brokering freight, flipping cars and many other miscellaneous things, none moving me closer to a career.

Despite all of this, after a year of living there, I was essentially out of money and struggling to keep up with my bills for my expensive apartment and the lifestyle I’d chosen for myself.

It got so bad that at one point, I was sleeping in my car in my apartment’s parking garage while violating my lease terms to airbnb out my apartment to guests. I calculated that for only 10 nights/month, if I could find another place to stay whether it be with friends or on occasion my car, I could rent my apartment out to travelers to cover the entire expense of my rent, and so that’s what I did. I had to stop after an eviction threat from my building after an interaction with one of my guests. At the time, I told them eviction would be great, so that I could get out of the lease and find a cheaper place to live. I ended up riding out the remaining few months and moving to Saint Louis at the end of my term, into a house that I’d bought there for ~$10,000 that had no heat, not water and no electricity, but it was mine and had a dramatically lower overhead than what I was accustomed to in Denver.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

On a few occasions I’ve had to pivot significantly to meet the challenges imposed by my environment. In life, this was relocating to Saint Louis for a more accommodating cost of living from Denver, as mentioned in my last answer.

The most dramatic pivot I ever had to make in business was with my software platform WAND. Before covid, around 80% of our platform’s revenue was driven by Airbnb turnovers, and so when March 2020 rolled around and travel came to a screeching halt, 80% of our revenue flew out the door, ironically at a time when the average person cared more about cleaning services than ever before!

It’s for this reason that we quickly pivoted out platform to support existing cleaning companies working to keep up with the new demand. We recognized that most people operating in this space were not taking advantage of modern technology like what we’d built to service the industry from automated bookings and invoicing, to customer communication and more. We created a new version of the software that was a monthly fee model using all of the same infrastructure as our brokerage model and offered it to janitorial companies to take advantage of. Relatively quickly we were back in the green, and it was shortly after this that I made the decision to sell the business when we received an offer from a private equity from from Connecticut.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thebenjam.in/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benjamin421/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-anderson-20707265/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/benanderson421
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@VanceCrowePodcast

Image Credits
Image of me speaking in white shirt with Glasses should be credited to ‘Foresight Institute’. Image of me with green storefront background should be credited to Tommie Leigh Hill. All other photos are my own(Benjamin Anderson)