€4M ARR to Surfpreneur in Costa Rica | Ilias Contreas, S3E9

Our guest today is Ilias Contras. He's an Italian entrepreneur and the co-founder of Mixology Academy, a business he bootstrapped from a garage in Rome into the leading bartending training school in Italy. He scaled it to two locations, 10,000 students, half the Italian market, and more than four million euros in annual revenue. No VC and every euro from cash flow.

After his first burnout, Ilias took a month in Costa Rica and never really left. Four years later, with his wife, he moved there permanently. He moved a few days before the pandemic, shutting everything down. And even with the physical schools closed, the company kept growing.

Then one morning, he couldn't log into the company's systems. He opened his email and found a letter. After 18 years, he had lost control of the company he had founded. In this episode, we get into what was driving him through those hundred-hour work weeks in the beginning of his founder journey.

What it feels like to wake up as the version of yourself used to dream about and what happened the morning everything changed. If you've ever built a dream and wonder what comes after, because if something was missing, this one's for you. Welcome to another episode of Profit Led. I'm your host, Melissa Kwan, co-founder of eWebinar.

This season we're exploring the intersection of passion, profit, and purpose, and how those things change as founders evolve and come into financial success. Let's get started. Ilias, you grew up in Rome. Your father was a doctor, but you didn't follow that path.

So what was the idea of success that you had back then, I guess growing up? For all my life, I thought I would have become a doctor just like my father. But when I grew up a little bit, I realized that I wanted to become a writer, actually. So instead of studying literature and stuff like that, I thought that in the end books talk about people.

So what I would have studied and what I was interested in studying was understanding people. So I ended up uh going into psychology and I actually graduated in psychology in Rome. So that was the beginning of my career. And still today my idea of success is being able to write books and be free to stay on my computer whenever I want and then enjoy the rest of the day without having the pressure to do stuff, do tasks all days, every day.

And that that's still a project that I have. And actually after changing my life, as I guess we will see later during our conversation, I'm trying to change my plan and project it in order to make the dream become true. I mean, I found you on Substack, so you're a great writer. Thank you.

I mean it's a good it's a good outlet. I mean, for people like you and me, I I love to write as well. You wrote that you went to London around university age. Yeah.

And what was that specifically to bartend? Yeah, I was 20. So I in Italy you begin university normally at 19, something like that. So I was completing my first year, and I was pretty much a good student, so I had a few months in advance for my exams.

So I said, okay, let's take the summer to do something interesting. And one of the things I was doing during university when I was not studying, of course, was to invite some friends and make cocktail parties at home, but in a very amateur way. So I had a little book with recipes. I was trying to replicate them just because kids like alcohol and stuff like that.

In Italy, you can start drinking when you are 18 years old. You don't have to wait 21. So it was kind of a hobby, weekend hobby. I was not an alcoholic or something like that, but I just enjoyed that.

So a friend of mine came to me saying, you know, uh this summer I was thinking about going to London to Bartend. And I said, Wow, this looks cool. I mean, I love making cocktails, so I'm coming with you. But of course, I had no professional experience or nothing.

I was just to any end kind of stupid, probably. So I took the chance and ended up actually going alone to London because this friend of mine messed it up and didn't come. So I was just going from a bar to another asking for a job. I made up very false CV to make people believe that I could do the job because I pretended that Bartendi was super simple as a thing.

And only too late I understood that it was not especially in London. And I could say quality was that as the average Italians don't speak very good English, I spoke a little bit better than them. And in London, especially at the time, it was full of Italian bartenders and in general in the food and beverage industry. So it was kind of normal to have our nationality of people working there.

So I found a bar actually, a very nice bar in the center of London that gave me some sort of faith. And the moment they gave me the job watching the other bartenders in the same bar, I realized that I did a very big mistake because I had no idea what they were doing behind that bar. So in the following days, I had to study as much as possible. They gave me the chance to follow an internal training in order to practice.

So I was spending so many hours when the bar was closed to try the techniques and to study the recipes and all the rest. And in the end, that thing, that game became true. So they kicked me in the bar on a Friday evening exactly at 6 p.m.

When it's like the at least it was at the time, the happy hour moment. So in the city of London, you see this flow of people in jackets going from the offices into the bars. And so when they told me, okay, you start at 6 p.m.

, I was like, okay, I will have all the time to warm up and get used to that. And it was not because it was even worse than at midnight in a normal cocktail bar that you can imagine in New York or anywhere else. So I I reminded I had these four lines of people with uh with the hands and the arms moving to me like zombies, asking me for cocktails and stuff, and it was terrible, really terrible. I I still remind of the feelings that I had at that time, and it's creepy.

And and I remind that I was feeling like, okay, I'm doing it, I'm surviving. I believe that my shift is is about to end up. And I watched the the clock, and just 18 minutes had passed. So but that actually turned into your first business was a cocktail bar in Rome.

And and you said the first 18 months, you didn't take a single euro. You're doing almost every role by yourself, working 80 to 100 hours a week. And you've said that you don't wish that period on your worst enemy. So take me into what that was like and and what was driving your ambition to open this bar at the time.

Yeah, that bar after those initial 18 minutes actually became fun because I started to relax and to enjoy what it means to have people on the other side. So talk to them, understand what they want, make jokes with them. And I mean, it was cool. Everybody likes the bartender and in general being in bars.

It's uh it's a social venue. But uh things that surprised me a lot among cocktails and stuff like that was all the organization that was behind that bar. So we were maybe 40 people working all into that venue. That company had 11 clubs at the moment in London and 31 throughout all England.

And then they happened to become a multinational company with hundreds of bars, and they were acquired by another big group. So everything inside that place was super well organized. And actually, when I started, I was given a manual of maybe 200 pages, something like that. I mean, not even in your at university, I had to study so much.

And there I understood that uh no matter what you what your product or service is, a company is a company. So you have procedures, you have products, you have services, you have people doing things, managers uh coordinating them. And this really fascinated me. And through bartending, I understood that I could become an entrepreneur.

That for me already at the time meant the possibility to become more free, free to choose when to work, what to do, so how to use my time, and things like that. So when I came back to Italy after this experience in London, I studied more to become a professional bartender. And after a couple of years, I had the chance to manage a first bar. It was just for a summer season, so something very, very small and but fun and nice.

So the experience was positive. And then I I remember 20,000 euros from my father as a land because no bank, especially in Italy, was giving me a penny for anything. I mean, I could put a house that I didn't have as a you know, as a guarantee, but of course that didn't work out. So that was my only chance to get something, and I put that money together with other partners.

So we we opened this first club, but we were just bartenders. We were not business owners, we were not real founders, we had no competence over marketing or sales or nothing. We were just doing what we thought was right for us. So the first 18 months that I talked about in my blog were actually understanding how to manage a business while you are paying every single month all the bills and without knowing absolutely what was the right thing to do.

So the terrible feeling that I was talking about was that I was working really 14, 18, sometimes even 24 hours a day. So I was doing three days consecutively without sleeping to make more. But that doing more without the right direction wasn't leading me to solving my problems. So when you give so much effort without knowing if that effort will save you and give you the chance to have another month to make things better was really tough, was really stressing me.

So what kept you going when things were so difficult? Of course, we were young. I mean, I began this adventure that I was 23, so I knew that it was not my last chance in life to do something cool or noticeable or whatever it is. But at a certain point, of course, I felt that I couldn't just go and go and go and go, but I needed to find that direction.

So in the moment, in the worst moment of the of the activity when I thought we were about to collapse, I thought, okay, we we cannot just go on like this for another six months or a year. So let's do something extreme. So we put together our ideas with my partners and we we told ourselves, okay, what should be the things that would really change completely our venue, our bar. So we started to think about changing the entrance because people were seeing from the outside immediately a wall instead of seeing other people.

So even when the club was full of people, it didn't look from the outside. And that was a point. The bar was not so well organized, so we should have put it down and built it again. And there was very structural things that we could have improved, but to do that, of course, we needed money.

So we said, okay, if we want to make this work, probably we have to do something extreme like this. And somehow we we took some money from left to the right. I mean, we looked for a budget to invest. It was a ridiculous budget in the end.

Nothing special. Like maybe we invested 15,000 euros, but it was money that we didn't have at the moment. So it was tough for us to know that we had debts and we had to make even more debts in order to go on. And so we invested them in a building company to remake the bar the way we thought it would have to become in order to work better.

And actually, uh the first night that we reopened, because our was a cocktail bar, so it was working pretty much during the night, we made the the double of our record that we had previously. So from there, things changed. I mean, we hit something right. We had still a lot of things to perfect, but we knew that we had almost 80% of our income concentrated between Friday night and Saturday night.

So we needed a way to be more productive and to make more people to get in those times. Because we had no real marketing, no effective campaigns, no, no nothing. So we we had to take the best of what we already have. And after changing the structure of the bar, we were just getting more money, and this money could be invested in more people because during the first year and a half, it was just me and my three partners working every day, doing everything we needed inside the business.

And then we passed to having 10 people working with us, and we could really concentrate and focus about management, marketing, and all the stuff that was outside of the venue. And in 2006, you co-founded Mixology Academy, right, with your business partner. You started out of an 85 square meter garage. What was the original vision for that company?

What were you hoping to build? Having the bar and developing the bar, we started to need people, okay? And being a cocktail bar, of course, our key figures were bartenders. So if we wanted to become entrepreneurs, we couldn't keep on bartending in our own business.

Okay. We understood at the time that time is limited, so you can't be the producer at the same time and the entrepreneur, because you are going to have mediocre results on one and the other thing. So when we started to hire people to get in the bar in place of us, we noticed that, at least in Rome, in our dimension, in our market, the people we were finding were not as good as we pretended. Because one of the things that made our bar work was the system that we developed to make it more productive without losing quality.

So actually, we developed something that we thought, or actually, I thought, okay, maybe we can teach these things to somebody else, because nobody was doing that stuff. The only bartending schools were teaching flares, so how to launch bottles and juggle with them and things that are cool maybe but are not productive on the bar business side. So we started to make the academy inside of the club during the closing hours. And from there, when we saw that there was a big interest from the market, even in a small dimension at the time, we said, okay, this thing could work.

So education is a cool thing, nobody's doing this, nobody's doing it the way that we are seeing it. And especially nobody was focusing on bar business. Everything was just thinking about the new recipe and the taste of the drink and not taking care of how to make the company really make money. So that's how Mixology Academy was born.

So we passed from making courses inside the bar to get in this first venue, that was the garage you mentioned. And in a few years, we passed from the same garage to the first 600 square meters venue because things were enrolling and were going good, and we we were getting kind of big. So our market enlarged from Rome to Letium, that is like the New York State, to give you a dimensional idea. And then we enlarged to the whole Italy and we opened a second venue in Milan as well.

And you scaled to, yeah, so the two locations, 10,000 students. I guess at its peak it was 4 million euros in annual revenue. And you said you had 50% of the Italian market, all bootstrap, no VCs. In a country where entrepreneurs aren't seen as heroes.

Can you tell me more about what you mean by that? Like why are they not seen as heroes? In Italy, we have this culture that looks like going really much against entrepreneurs. So if you try to do something different from other people, the other people see you like the bad guy who is breaking the rules and should go back to Earth.

And this thing is not only popular, but you see it the way you have to deal with bureaucratic stuff, with taxes. In Italy, we uh if you have your own company, you end up paying up to 60 and more percent of taxes. So everything you do is just for the partner that you didn't choose, and it does nothing for you, actually. So you have always this feeling of working for free, and is also one of the reasons that for tens of years, entrepreneurs in Italy were trying to survive making black money.

Okay, so of course, this is not a way to grow. At the beginning, we had to do things like that as well. It was not all clear, but in the moment that we grew, of course, everything had to change because to become scalable and to become financial and to have a real company, we needed to be 100% clear. But the condition, the market, the culture that we grew up in was really trying to survive to a state that was trying to hit you in every single way possible.

So, for example, when we had to restructure the venue in Milan, we needed a single paper that was in an office in Milan, and we had to send people in Milan every week or two in order to make the the officers work on that single paper. They just had to sign this paper to make us go on with the workings, and we ended up waiting for almost three months only for that single paper, and we couldn't open our venue, we couldn't make money because of this very small bureaucratic detail.

So it's it's all very, very, very, very, very difficult. So you hit your first burnout when you opened your Rome venue. Like how many years into your founder journey was that? It was 2014.

I had begun in 2006 with a cocktail bar that uh ended up becoming a mixology academy. So we we were about eight years from the very beginning of my entrepreneurial adventure. And that was when you went to Costa Rica. Exactly.

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I was of course in a very delicate moment because we passed from the garage to a 600 square meter venue. So that meant more responsibility, more risk, more people that we had to hire, an ambition that grew. Because when you do a step like that, you must match the conditions of the market. So it was a very tough moment.

And when we survived that moment, because of course no bank helped us even in that moment. So it was all with our own cash. And if we didn't sell, we wouldn't have made money. And in our specific business, when you train bartenders to begin their career, yes, you can sell advanced courses and stuff like that, but most of them are buying your courses, your service just once.

Okay, so we we couldn't just say, okay, we have 100 clients and we are good with that. Every month we had to begin from zero. Okay, so this was very stressful, also because I was the director of marketing. So I felt the heaviness of this responsibility mostly on me.

So in that condition, I really needed a place to recover, to relax, to think about myself. And I had always dreamed about myself writing on a wooden table near the beach, watching the ocean in front of me. And when I saw these pictures of Costa Rica from a friend of mine, I said, okay, maybe that's the place where I should go to relax a little bit. And when I came here to Costa Rica, I didn't expect what I found.

I mean, I knew I would have seen a lot of palms and uh sand beaches and waves in the ocean and stuff like that, but I had no idea of how the lifestyle could change in a tropical venue like this. So I was fighting with the electricity going and coming, water not being there maybe for a few hours, me deciding what to do during the day based on the rain coming or going away, changing my schedule based on the temperature during the day. So doing certain things in the early morning or in the afternoon and not in the mid part of the day.

And when you have this relationship with nature and what happens around you, you start to feel life differently because, of course, living in a big city like Rome or Milan or even New York, you start to feel like everything is there for you whenever you need it. Okay, but in Costa Rica it was not at all like that. And somehow that made me appreciate more the little things. Okay.

And then I went to the strip alone, so I had a lot of time to think, to stay by myself. I started to surf, and even in the ocean, I had this condition that I would say it's kind of close to meditation. Because when you are there waiting for a wave, of course, you cannot play Tetris or whatever, you're just there. So you are in silence and you can think.

And this was a way to, I think, know myself better. And when I leave Costa Rica to go back to a civil country, I felt I was missing the feelings that I had when I was in the jungle. And that was the first thing that made me think that maybe I would have come back to Costa Rica and that maybe I had to go there more often and be there as as long as possible. And you did do that, right?

Because for a few years you were kind of trial moving, I guess trial testing going for a few months. And you moved, I guess, right before COVID, right? January 2020. Your wife was pregnant, but your business was a physical training school in Italy.

And you guys were told that you can operate. Take me back to that time. Like what was going through your head? Because you're you moved to this new place, it's it's beautiful, you you want to settle down, it's a physical school, now you can't operate.

Like, what was going through your mind? I wanted to kill everybody in that moment because I had this dream of moving to Costa Rica for four years, and I did everything in the right way to be sure that was the right thing to do. And so organizing the business, hiring people, training them. You know, I wasn't just saying, okay, guys, I'm staying here, good luck.

I tried to make things in the proper way, not only for myself, but especially for my company. So when it was finally the moment to move, and even my wife was pregnant, eight days after we moved, I started to see the first news about COVID. And the the dream became sort of a nightmare, like what's going to happen, how long is it going to be this thing? And of course, our schools were closed as soon as the pandemic became something, let's call it serious.

And I could do just nothing in that very same moment, but accept the situation and trying to think about solution. So I had three plans that I thought about. That was one, like what we could do immediately, what we could do mid-term, and what we could do long term. So, based on what would have happened, we could move to us from a strategy to another, but immediately what we did was to transform our business and make it survivable even without having our open locations.

So we found a company in Poland that were selling these bar stations that were close enough to become like luggage. So like portable. Exactly, exactly. So in a single minute, you could have a proper, big, cool bar station, and it was easy to send.

So we decided to send this station to the people who were enrolling our courses, and we transformed our professional education into video courses that were live. So it was not, it was not just a video course, but we were actual lessons with people who could see each other through the webcam. So the students were taught to have the webcam pointing them so that the trainer could see them actually. And this way, even having our venues closed for most of the year in 2020, we made like plus 6% of the revenue of the year before.

So I could say we survived very well. Uh it was also the beginning of another brand that we developed that was focused not only on professional bartenders but on the entrepreneurs having venues or running businesses in the food and beverage market. So in the end, it was a good thing talking about business because it gave us the chance to find the solution to a very big problem and solve it. And feeling successful in that moment made us feel kind of powerful, you know.

Even if there in the end we we didn't move so much from the revenue of the previous year, and we were kind of making every year plus 30, plus 40, plus 60, plus 100. So it was kind of delusional. But of course, the situation was kind of extreme. So it was a very good thing, and it gives us the prompt to begin this new brand as well.

And it was a good thing in the end, definitely. I mean, let's talk about money a little bit. So when the revenue scale past 4 million, you had real income coming in, right? It's a it's a recognizable business, you've got half the market.

How did having that kind of revenue make you feel about yourself and the business? And did having that money change your ambition in any way? I've always considered money as number one, a way to be more free. So free to decide how to use my time.

But mostly talking about business has a consequence of what I was doing in the community. So we have this definition in Italy for companies that is ragione sociale. That means social reason. And at least at the beginning, maybe not anymore nowadays, but at those times when they introduced this definition, it meant that your company had to do something for the community.

So when you had to choose a name, it was what's the reason why for your company to exist? What's the purpose for the community? So I always had this feeling that what I was doing had to help people. And I don't believe this is the reason why I created Mixology Academy as a sort of path of what I did as a person myself.

So from the kid who started to bartend, to make some money and then open a bar to become an entrepreneur and invest in other businesses. So what we were selling was not become a bartender making great cocktails. That was just a detail. The real part of our business and our positioning was to sell the skills that you needed to make the life you really wanted without having to become a doctor, an architect, or a lawyer, or any standard job that in Italy is like the only thing that you can choose to do for your future.

So most kids have this idea, or at least at my time, that if you want to become something, you have to follow that kind of path. So we were talking to all those people who didn't have that idea, who didn't feel like becoming a doctor like their father, just like me. And we were selling them, if we don't take Sal as a bad word, the capacity to build a life that could be ambitious in an even bigger way. So I was a kind of demonstration that it could work, and we ended up having so many students hoping in their bar or investing in other businesses, just starting from a bartending job.

So that was the cool part. So when I was interviewing my students and listening to their stories, I was feeling happy because I was not just making money, I was changing people's lives. And I was feeling that these kids were just like me when I was training, that I had no idea what to do when I would have grown. So that was my ragione sociale.

Okay, so doing that in the best way possible was making me feel right because I knew that if I could reach as many people as possible with that kind of business, I could make more people happy. So the money was just a consequence of doing that kind of work and bringing on that philosophy. And in the months before everything changed with your business, on paper, your life was perfect. But you also wrote that you were missing like a certain stimuli, right?

Like the feeling of being able to conquer the world. Tell me about that. Were you at that point bored of running the business that you were building? Not bored, but when a business became big enough to be very standardized, so there are a lot of procedures and a lot of people, and when you want to make a decision, this decision has all a kind of long path to follow.

It's very different from when you're smaller, maybe you are three or four people who make take decisions and you talk to each other, make a meeting, and the day after this decision is becoming something practical. Even if we were not doing 20 or 50 or 100 million per year, we were that big enough to become slower. And there were many more people who were a kind of weight into taking decisions, and I could see that we lost our uh sparkle, let's call it like this. So that was boring me a little bit because I actually wanted to uh expand to the United States.

Actually, New York was going to be in my head the the first American venue, and then I had the idea to have these mixology academies all around the world, even if on the other side the AI and uh robot market was coming up, so it was a strange moment. A few things were kind of collapsing together, and for short, the relationship with my partner and the people I was working with was not the same anymore. And living on the other side of the world, I was working a lot. I mean, I was not the guy staying all day at the beach with a cocktail with a little umbrella and checking the bank account or things like that.

I mean, uh I was the crazy guy who was still working a lot because I felt that I was privileged to be able to live my life here in Costa Rica with a business that was being run physically on the other side of the world. But not being able to be there and go there so often uh sometimes made me almost forget who I was, professionally speaking, and know me more as a person. So I was seeing that my identity and my ideals were going farther and farther from what I was doing. So I felt like that was not enough anymore for me.

So what did you realize had shifted between like the passion and purpose that drove you to start the academy versus I guess where you were at this point, maybe 10 plus years later? Of course, I changed a lot as a person. I still have the same feeling of wanting to learn something new every day and wanting to grow and make things interesting. All my businesses have been not a thing like I can say I didn't really want to do only that in my life.

So my purpose was not necessarily to train people to become bartenders, not necessarily to make cocktails, not necessarily to sell bar equipment, because that was one of the other companies that we opened, was not necessarily to make consultings, but my lower purpose or better, my higher purpose was to help people. So as long as I was helping people, I was feeling good, I was feeling happy, and as long as I was doing that thing better, in a bigger way, reaching more people, I felt that uh I was on the right path for myself.

So that thing never changed. Just what changed was the detail. So the way that I was doing and that I was following that purpose. So one morning you and your wife, who was working for the business too at the time, realized that you couldn't log into the company systems, and that's when you realized that you were removed from the operations of that company.

Tell me what that day was like for you and and how were you feeling? Of course, a big surprise at the beginning, because I was not expecting something like that. I was also the brand ambassador of the company, so my face was just everywhere. As I was saying before, all the company, all the brand was on my story, what I did, what I developed, and I was the face of everything, and not only the one who conceived the brand and the positioning of the company, but the one who even operationally developed it with uh with all the marketing department that at the beginning, of course, was just me, myself, and I, before we became more people.

So after almost 18 years, it was a big surprise. But on the other side, I felt kind of relief because as I was mentioning before, I had this thoughts in my mind about uh doing something more, doing something different, and not just getting the profits of the company every month or every year. I I wanted to fill again that purpose that I had before. And so I thought that maybe that was a kind of signal from the universe.

I don't know, maybe just a coincidence, but it was my chance to do what I had in my mind because I felt that responsibility. So developing my own projects while being here was making me feel kind of guilty. So that was the reason why I never started to write any blog or anything, never never did any consulting out of what was my main company. So I said, okay, now I can begin, I guess.

Of course, there was all the legal situation to understand what was happening and what was going on with my shares and to try to monetize them or stay in the company and get the profits at the end of the year. I mean, there are all a sort of situations that I had to handle that were kind of delicated because from a day to another, such change is very sensible to manage. So, but apart from that, I was relieved because I had again the chance to do what I think I can do better, that is solving problems.

So this was a nice problem to solve, and probably I somehow I was looking for it. Were you surprised that you were relieved in the end? Um not me maybe, but the people around me. They were saying, How can you be so relaxed in this situation?

Of course, there were moments that I was not that relaxed. I was kind of angry because in the end I felt betrayed. I mean, it's it's the company that I founded. So when you wake up with an email saying that you don't control anymore your own company for a bureaucratic detail, that of course was my my own fault to not to take care of at the at the time that I should have done it.

I had moments of rage, I would say, but not immediately. I mean, it was more when I uh handled the situation for okay, what I'm gonna do from now on. After I fixed that, I had the time and the chance to get a little bit angry and to manage those things. But yeah, in the very first days, I was kind of peaceful and I can understand thinking about my wife, my friends, that I could look strange, no?

But you ultimately sold your shares back to your partner, you had a good outcome. And then within six months, you were building again, right? Brand new and you were matching your previous income through consulting. How are you approaching your business today differently after going through what you went through?

Of course, I don't have any more 40 or 50 plus people working for me at the moment. Maybe in a few years it will be again like that. But after what happened to me, I wanted to enjoy a situation where I could just handle things myself. So right now I am in this phase.

The business that I'm working on right now has the idea to become something big, but with the right time. So I thought that I was good at doing could be done even for their companies. But if I had to open another company and then another company and then another company, I would have spent maybe 10 years to reach certain kinds of results. So I said, okay, maybe I could become a sort of fractional partner to other companies and collaborate with existing companies and do my job, do the things that I'm good at.

So I passed a couple of years building my first case studies, and I'm super happy of what I've done together with my partners, clients so far. And after these two years, I started to get on Substack, so go in public, sharing what I've done in these two years, and so I'm moving to the next step of my business that uh will have also books, video courses, group coachings, and all. Are you staying in the hospitality industry? Like what are you consulting on today?

Actually, I've been working with every single type of market because what I've learned in my career, I I've always studied studied other businesses, and one of my habits was to take things from other markets and put it into what I was doing. So I didn't feel like having to copy my competitors in my same market, but I had to look in in different situations and try to think the way other entrepreneurs have thought to solve their problems. And that was a big school for me. And I believe today very strongly that if you look at the numbers of a business, you can work in every kind of market without problems.

So I wanted to demonstrate it practically to myself in this period, this situation. And I've worked really with any kind of market from retail to B2B to health services and events, and even in the food and beverage market. But it's just part of the game. So you said that happiness is the distance between your ideal self, right, and the way you see yourself in the present.

And by the time you settle into Costa Rica, you had closed that distance to almost zero. What is that ideal version of yourself that you've dreamt about? Right now, I was talking about it actually just this morning with my wife. We were walking on the beach, and I was saying that to be 100% happy, so 100% close to that ideal version of me, I would be just writing.

So I'm back to the dream that I had when I was 15, 16 years ago. And this is a big stimulation for me because I feel that I'm getting closer and closer to that goal. So it's not making so much more money or things like that, especially when you start living surrounded by monkeys and iguanas and things like that. You don't feel like needing fancy things or or nothing.

You you just enjoy what you have, the nature, going to the beach, swimming, surfing, walking, thing with your family, and enjoying your time with uh very simple things. And so I think that the only thing that I miss is to be able to survive only on writing. That would be my goal. And that's how you would define success?

Right now for myself, yes. Maybe in a couple of years it will be different. Of course, I can say that I miss that because I already have a beautiful family. We are about to have a second kid, and I love my wife, I love my kids, and the the place that where we live.

And I wouldn't move from here, not even with any other pandemic or war or whatever. I mean, this is the place where I want to be. So uh I feel that the painting that I would draw right now of my life, it's very, very similar to what I'm actually living. So I can say that I miss just uh this writing thing because I already have all the rest.

I mean, honestly, I I hear you so much because I I love to write as well. It's my creative outlet, but I write a lot for my work, like professional writing. And if I didn't have my company, I would be writing different things, write different stories or you know, other creative outlets. But it is what it is, right?

I am where I am. So, Elias, last question for you. Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently? I would have taken care of that bureaucratic detail that made me lose my company for sure.

Because even if it helped me to make this more this step forward, I would have liked to be in control of it. So I the the way it happened was terrible. Uh, I will probably write a book about it because it can be uh good counseling for other people having partners. And I was already planning to do that stuff, but not that way, of course.

So I think this is the only thing that I regret. But I also know that if I didn't take care of that thing is because there was there was trust with the people I was working with. So if I didn't have trust, I probably probably wouldn't have moved moved to Costa Rica. I wouldn't have felt good to be so far from my company.

So maybe it had to be just this way. I mean, that's just life, right? We have to believe we're exactly where we're supposed to be. Yeah, definitely.

All right, thank you so much for coming on to share your story. Uh really appreciate your time. Thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure.

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