We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Palmer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Chris, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start on the operational side – do you spend more of your time/focus/energy on growing revenue or cutting costs?
I believe in business in order to get to a viable business growing top lines sales is always the best approach. A lot of times in order to do this you are firing on marketing, processes, and capex into your business to make that happen. I know the natural instinct is to want to save every dollar you bring into a business but without investment into acquiring new customers, capitalizing on what you can sell in your industry to be more relevant or have a broader reach. You are simply putting the cart before the horse and playing defense before you get a game going. I also believe growing top line sales in an expansion mindset for a business while a cut costs mentality is a protect what you have mindset. As an entrepreneur who focuses on turn around opportunities I have always had more success understanding the growth mindset of a business than trying to take away process in order to save costs.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Chris, I grew up in Texas for most of my life. I found myself in a unique situation for college attending the United States Air Force Academy. While this was great for my discipline and what would later be a framework for servant leadership it was extremely tough for someone who wanted to make the world their oyster and pursue passions I had in businesses and learning how to run my own business. I have done many things, I have lost at some and been more successful at others. It took a long time for me to be ok with saying that. Somewhere 15 years in I understood iterating your passions through business was not always a sure thing. I have done a lot of things in business; built homes, built apartments, tanning salons. I currently own a dozen hair salons, run a successful luxury charter company in the Caribbean, and I am helping launch a sustainable luxury water brand out of South America. Each of my businesses are in very different industries and markets. Each fills my creative side bring out new problems but similar ones that are grounded in a fundamental business truths, I am not speculative in todays sense of the word and I am not cutting edge as much as I would love to be sometimes. I do believe if you bring value to your customer, treat your team fair with a teams win mentality and drive to grow your business you will find you have built something other people are interested in.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
When I started buying hair salons no one would would sell us one, We couldn’t build one due to the local economy and development happening and the only shop we could purchase was the worst store in the entire city of then 65 locations. We were simply to green or naive in our ability to know any different. We built that store and honed our marketing, advertising and operations know how of a new business because we had nothing to lose. We were already losing and behind the financial curve of a viable business. We grinded the nuance of that business and pushed for several years eventually growing into 12 locations. 1417 days in, my business partner and I paid ourselves our first $2000 one month. The next month Covid happened, during Covid we felt it was an opportunity to show our teams we were supportive and always took the option to keep them together as much as possible. Our company grew in 2021 by 100% and we doubled in size in an economy where most were simply trying to shore up negative cash flow. I don’t think we were more risk than others. I think we were simply used to being behind and knowing how to work ourselves out of a situation which we had to learn from our first day in that company.
Poseidon Charters was my luxury yacht charter business that also opened after 3 years of working through how to make it work in Jan of 2020. Feb of 2020 our entire boat broke down due to captain error and we were temporarily shut down while we sourced a new engine for the yacht. We reopened on March 10, 2020. I do not need to say how the timing of that worked out. A travel business abroad in a pandemic is not your first choice of good business plans. Again I buckled down and worked the issues as best as we could. Kept the teams focused on what we were building and helped as much as we could financially to show a new team we cared about them. Today we own 165 feet of yachts 3 luxury yachts and we are arguably one of the busiest yacht charter companies in the region. Averaging 60-90 charters a month.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When I failed at my first business in 2007, I had to go and find a “real job” I relied on my leadership experience in the military to move into retail store management. I tell myself I did it for money but really I didn’t know what to do that first time of failing at something on what to me was a large scale at the time. I alluded to this idea that being in business, being an entrepreneur you have to understand the risk you take and that it does not define you every single time. At that time I did not understand that, I gave up and hid. While that industry treated me very well and honestly gave me more experiences that would eventually help me in other businesses it was not by design made to make me a better business owner in the future when I went into it. I changed my entire life to hide from my failures and then used that experience to finally get back into my passion when I started growing my outside work businesses. I look back now on that first failure with appreciation on what i could have done different but also understanding on what I learned in that process. This lesson has constantly been a lesson I share when I work with or mentor other people in stepping into something new with excitement and also nervousness of failing. It does not define who you are and as long as you have not hurt other people I think it is a healthy part of growing in your own walk in pursuing a business idea.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.poseidontci.com www.gcchopit.com nubewater.com
- Instagram: @poseidonturks
Image Credits
Poseidon Charters LTD Turks and Caicos, BWI