We recently connected with Irsan Tisnabudi and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Irsan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share a story that illustrates an important or relevant lesson you learned in school

School was very counter-intuitive for me, when it comes to entrepreneurship path I have taken today. I studied engineering, and it was quite formal, structured, and provided a false sense of security. I was trained to be an employee and followed the rules well. Entrepreneurship is more about smart risk taking, not breaking the rules but bending them. It is about being innovative and creative. There were two impactful things I learned in college, and they are:

1. The ability to deal with different authority figures and their personalities, for the purpose of obtaining good grades. They are applicable to different clients I have to deal with today to win business from.
2. Goals worth achieving are usually long-term goals, not an instant gratification. I was able to focus on a 4-year destination that required work on things in the present that sometimes I didn’t like / was challenged with.

I also took an entrepreneurial program called Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business program, and the most impactful of that program was to think about selling the business as early as possible. It changed the way I think about building my business.

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

My neighbor invited me to work at his firm he founded as I got out of college. That’s how I got introduced to the world of Wireless Telecom Infrastructure. Nowadays, I tell everyday folks that we do engineering on cellphone towers. After 12 years with my neighbor’s company, it got bought out and I had to relocate to another state at the time, 4 months before my wedding day. We decided that I would quit, so to not complicate the wedding preparations. Bless my wife’s heart, for she had to marry me while I was unemployed.

The follow up job offer I got was terrible. Although I wasn’t entrepreneurial, while in fear I asked my wife then to give me a one-year chance to see if I could recreate my previous company and run it as my own. Timing was perfect, and within 9 months, one of my previous clients gave me a chance.

Aria Services, Inc. was born 13 years ago. Other than making it to Inc. 5000 list twice, our biggest accomplishment was to survive covid-19 down years without laying-off anyone.

We provide site development and engineering services in 45+ contiguous US states. It includes macro sites, small cells, fiber and DAS.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Aria Services never started as a side hustle; it was a one-year risk that I took, being focused on it. The drawback for Aria is lack of assets such as equipment, building, and so on since it is a service company with people and cash. A side hustle did come out of Aria in 2012 when after paying tax and setting aside 2013 budget: commercial real estate investment.

Under a separate new entity, Courage Investment, LLC, we purchased a 10,000 sq ft. store front at 60% occupancy. The store was built in 2005 and it was a foreclosure. With low interest rate at the time, we were able to break even at 50% occupancy. Since then, we built it up to be 100% occupancy but lost tenants due to Covid. We bought it at the right “price and mortgage,” so we made profit still through the pandemic. We’re still working on putting it back to 100% occupancy today.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

This seems pretty straight forward, and it is always around soft skills: 1. Honest communication.
2. Reliability.
3. Sustainability.
4. Good will, good faith approach.
5. Talk the talk, walk the walk, and they match.
6. Synergy, and capable of working as a team.
7. Leadership.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.aria-corp.com/
• Instagram: @bootjie8
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ariaservicesinc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irsan-tisnabudi-915840/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/dbooch8
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKWLd3U_6TIQrr0a04PIjHw