Entrepreneur Interview #1
Eric Rachal from MxToolBox.com sat down with ManhattanDigest for a brief interview.
What was your inspiration for starting MXToolBox?
The idea can be traced back to the mid 1990’s when I was working for an innovative startup in Austin Texas. I knew back then that ultimately I wanted to own my own thing. It was at this startup that focused on building residual revenue as a WAN management service that we pioneered a concept known today as Managed Services.
There is sense of stability built into any kind of business with residual revenue. That stability and challenge is what attracted me to building MXToolBox in the first place. MXToolBox started out as a reseller of spam and virus filtering solutions. The website’s tools were assembled out of necessity to help manage our customer email systems.
As the tools grew in popularity I registered a domain and put the tools online for all.
When did you know you wanted to be an Entrepreneur?
I don’t know exactly. It wasn’t in my teenage years. I think that I drew the inspiration from a conversation with a stranger that happened when I was around 20 years old. This stranger told me about his lifetime of work in the potato chip business. He explained the different facets of the business and as an older guy who had been around the block there were some great stories.
I walked away from that conversation with a greater sense of what I wanted to do with my life. I realized then that as an entrepreneur I would always be growing as a person. A lot of career tracks seem to end. A lot of trades don’t allow for personal growth past a certain point. Generally when someone chooses a career they choose to do the same same thing every day until they retire. There is really no end of personal growth opportunities for a small business owner.
What is the hardest thing you have ever had to do as an Entrepreneur?
The hardest thing is also one of the most important skills an entrepreneur needs to be successful. If you look at successful people and where they are now you’ll miss the most important part of the journey. Successful people aren’t afraid of failure; you will find a trail of wreckage from failed ideas in these peoples pasts that led them to succeed later. To me that is the hardest thing. Learning that something isn’t working and being strong enough to admit it’s failed and move away instead of pursuing failure.
It’s like the song “you need to know when to hold them and when to fold them”
If you had all the money in the world what would your days look like?
I don’t know. Good question. They probably wouldn’t look all that different. I’m a geek, I like building things, playing with things, and I’m able to do all that with MXToolbox. I think it would be more of that. I would continue to tinker but I would use the freedom of greater resources to work on projects for the fun of it; instead of considering the bottom line impact the time would have on the business. Even with all the money in the world my days wouldn’t look that different.
If you could have one super power what would it be?
I cannot even imagine… I know it would have to do with knowledge and wisdom.
What’s next for MX Toolbox?
We are actually at an exciting point! We are putting more resources into the toolset. We are hiring! We are bringing on developers, testers, web analysts, and marketing folks. We are really interested in expanding the toolset and expanding into different areas. We aren’t going to do anything radically different just more of the same and better.
What is MX Toolbox today?
MX Toolbox is an I.T. infrastructure diagnostic tool and monitoring company.