Adrian Ghila realized that he needed to change his business, add a team, and implement systems after he reached the $1 million in revenue plateau of Los Angeles Luxe RV Inc. Having built and sold a significant real estate developing company in Romania, Adrian Ghila has continued with his successful business interests in the U.S., as CEO of Los Angeles based Luxe RV, and founder of Earth Car Wash & Loop VAN, and Proiect 3 Holdings (an investment company). Adrian’s entrepreneurial spirit, ethical business background, and corporate expertise continue to drive Luxe RV, as well as his other businesses, successfully forward.
I believe what makes a company truly great is profitability. In my opinion, many companies these days are focusing too much on having a friendly culture, appealing to sponsors and essentially the „politics” behind the business and venture capitalism. Many companies have lost sight of the ultimate goal of being profitable, first and foremost, and that means hitting those large sales numbers. This is the key differentiating factor that my businesses bring to the market.
Many potentially good companies are focused on culture, customer service, fancy marketing ads and so on and are misallocating their overhead to resources that deter from their bottom line. I believe that is why these companies never reach their full potential and end up simply average or bankrupt. The bottom line should always be the most important factor in company management. After this is satisfied, then you can budget or delegate capital toward office designs, culture and other conveniences.
A company can have the most innovative and great product around, but if it isn’t able to make the business profitable to distribute this product, the company will die. This means all of the employees will end up without jobs, regardless of how positive and fruitful their company culture was or how cutting-edge their product was.
One example of such a case would be Myspace, the revolutionary social media platform that took over the early to mid-2000s. The company had created a culture of its own, from being an outlet for many students all over the world to connect to being a harbor for many bands to showcase their music. Almost anyone who’s been alive since then knows what happened next. A company by the name of Facebook came along around the same time, run by now-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg took the idea and made it profitable. He took it from being just a „space” for friends to chat and created a universe in which advertisements can endlessly target almost every single person who has a connection to the internet. The end result was billions of dollars generated on an endless loop for advertisers and Facebook, while also popularizing an incredibly useful product that just about everyone uses now. Instagram took the same approach even further with making an existing product even more profitable and had tremendous success.
The bottom line: You must stay profitable to stay in business. If you want to become a great company, you have to make sure you stay alive first. I can’t stretch enough how important to plan ahead. Any decision I make I think of how that will be impacted in the next 5 years. And based on that I make business decisions or personal decisions. Try to be as precise as you can about what you want to accomplish in life. That type of planning will get your foot in the door.
Think about what they tell you on an airplane before you begin takeoff: „In case of emergency, put your own oxygen mask on first, and then assist children or anyone else who might need your assistance.” At first thought, this mentality can seem extremely cruel and brash, but it isn’t at all. It’s simply logical. In this scenario, as an adult, you have to make sure that you survive first so that you can adequately take care of another, or even many others. Otherwise, everything becomes obsolete because the child would not be able to survive on their own, anyway.
There is a utilitarian aspect to this that I believe all businesses should have. I am not saying that you should sacrifice all of your employees if it would help you hit your bottom line. You should never put yourself into a position where you would need to sacrifice your employees, your culture or anything else to be profitable. Because you should always be giving your business the oxygen, or the capital, first. Make sure your company has plenty of oxygen and wealth to survive and prosper, and then give it to your employees, your customers, your offices and so on.
Adrian Ghila, CEO at Luxe RV, Inc. for Forbes