How A Big Setback Helped Sunshine Suites Become Profitable – with Cheni Yerushalmi

Cheni Yerushalmi, Sunshine Suites, Bootstrapping, Failure, Mental Game, Non-Tech, Scaling

The online gaming network he launched was losing money. “I made a lot of mistakes,” Cheni Yerushalmi said in this interview. If you listen to it (or watch it, or read it), you’ll hear what they were and what he learned from them.

But in the setback, he and his partner found an opportunity. They had a big office with lots of extra space, so they started renting parts of it to other entrepreneurs who needed inexpensive space without the burden of a long lease.

How did that business do? “We were pretty much profitable from the beginning,” Cheni said. That was 2001. While he won’t say how profitable the business is, he did say that 2005 revenues were $966,347 and 2008’s revenues were $4 million. In this interview, you’ll see how he this success story rose from the ashes of a previous company.

Cheni Yerushalmi

Sunshine Suites

Cheni Yerushalmi is the co-founder of Sunshine Suites, which offers affordable, on-demand office space in New York City.

 

Andrew: This interview is sponsored by Grasshopper, the virtual phone system that entrepreneurs love because you can use your own phones, and manage it on the web. Check out Grasshopper.com. It’s also sponsored by WuFoo, where you can go right now to get embeddable forms and surveys that you can add to your website for free. Go to WuFoo.com. And it’s sponsored by Shopify. When you go to Shopify.com, you can create a store within minutes, and have all the support and features that you need to make that store grow. Check out Shopify.com. Here’s the program.Hey, everyone. It’s Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, Home of the Ambitious Upstart. And today I’ve got with me, and I’ve got the pronounciation down dead-on right. He told me so. Cheni Yerushamli. Tell me if I’ve got it wrong now. How’d I do?

Interviewee: Unbelievable, unbelievable.

Andrew: I’m hit or miss sometimes with the names. Unless it’s Bob,...

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