Today we’d like to introduce you to David Grubbs. David and his team shares their story with us below:
In 2004, David was wrapping up his freshman year at Baylor University and started his first business. His parents told him they would give him money towards his MBA or his first business, and he immediately took the seed funding and ran with it. By college graduation, however, the company was not yet large enough to support a full-time salary, so David moved in with his sister who was working on her Masters’s degree. He slept on a Coleman air mattress for 9 months on the living room floor and went on the road pitching investors to raise a round of funding.
The first 40 investors turned him down and he was down to just $300 in savings with the reality approaching he was going to have to go out and get a job. He firmly believed that God had a plan and he had to just keep going. After nearly 100 pitches, five investors came on board and provided the $250,000 in funding required to grow the business. The same day the round of funding was closed, his air mattress popped, and he was able to get his own apartment and buy a real bed.
Fast forward to today and David has started over twenty businesses (several of those with Boss Club co-founder Charlie Gasmire). In 2012 David and Charlie co-founded Vendevor, an ecommerce software business which successfully sold to Payscape in July of 2015.
David’s recent successes include First Centurion Group (FGC) and Pegasus Fulfillment. FCG sold a variety of consumer goods from its own line of skin care products and work-out supplements and generated nearly $40 million in online sales and grew to over 50 employees and was one of the fastest growing start-ups in 2013.
November 2019 David sold Pegasus Fulfillment, to Selery Fulfillment, a Mark Cuban backed company. Pegasus Fulfillment was a company he built with his father Mike Grubbs, which handled inventory warehousing and online order fulfillment for over a dozen different ecommerce businesses including his own.
With many startups under his belt David has learned there is a recipe to starting businesses which enables businesses to be launched faster and with less risk. Those hard-learned lessons from nearly two decades were disseminated into a unique Entrepreneurship course he taught at Baylor University with Dr. Kendall Artz and Dr. Les Palich where 12 hand selected students were given funding to start real businesses over the course of a semester. The program was a success but the biggest take-away was that entrepreneurship needed to be taught at a much younger age.
In 2018, modeling lessons learned teaching entrepreneurship at Baylor, as well as the business lessons learned through various successful ventures, David joined forces with long-time business partner Charlie Gasmire to launch Boss Club, a company focused on providing practical, hands-on entrepreneurial education for students across the country.
The company first started with self-guided business kits as a way to make it extremely easy for elementary age students to start their first business. Not long after Boss Club launched school curriculum that is now taught as an elective class in over 120 middle and high schools across the country.
In 2019, Charlie and David launched the Boss Club Foundation and piloted a summer entrepreneurship program was piloted in Waco, Texas with 125 students participating and launching their first business. Today the program has expanded to Fort Worth, Dallas, and Austin and has helped over 1,750 students launch businesses.
The entrepreneurial spirit and success that Boss Club has helped students experience has been wonderful, but the more lasting impact the company loves witnessing is the newfound confidence and creativity that students have after launching their first business. That is a mission worth pursuing every day. and the core of Boss Club’s curriculum is based on all the principles taught in that college level course.
In his free time David loves flying (as a private pilot), running, horseback riding, scuba diving, reading, learning Spanish, and participating in his church. David lives with his wife Daniella, who runs her own not-for-profit equine therapy center to help people with disabilities and their one-year-old son Sam.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Entrepreneurship is never a smooth road and if managed well that can be what keeps it interesting and fun. Boss Club is the culmination of over 20 years of start-up experience and as a team we have learned to enjoy the process with its ups and downs but this is the first business where it hasn’t been a constant battle to reach our targets and goals. It has been a weird feeling that the path seems well marked out before us and the right people, resources, and customers have joined forces with us to grow. I would never say it has been easy but our journey has been relatively smooth and straightforward for the first time in my career. We seem to be growing without resistance and it is a good feeling for once.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Boss Club?
Our mission at Boss Club is simple: Inspire confidence and ignite creativity in students through the pursuit of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is a cross-curricular learning vehicle to build up responsible leaders equipped with work ethic, people skills, and financial literacy and stewardship. Our school curriculum and business kits have provided thousands of students across the country with practical hands-on experience of launching their first business which also provides real-world context for everything else they are learning in school.
You can learn more about our school curriculum here: https://bossclub.com/pages/entrepreneurship-curriculum-for-schools
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
Advisors and mentors are critical for success in the early days of being an entrepreneur. There are a lot of “experts” out there but I highly recommend that you reach out to people who have already accomplished the things you seek to accomplish with your life and have the specific industry experience to help guide you along the way. Even if you do not have a relationship with them already, I encourage you to be bold and reach out to them through their business or social media. You never know who will reply and will be willing to help.
Contact Info:
- Email: support@bossclub.com
- Website: https://bossclub.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bossclubco
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrgkiOQBtLAwfmeTMOjwFfg
- Other: https://music.amazon.in/podcasts/2d670ac8-acf0-40e8-9e6f-230166be1c20/the-boss-club-podcast
