From selling candy in the garage to Profit Compass App

At 11 I started selling candy outside my house. My grandfather, a businessman his whole life, saw that I was interested in this and taught me the first lesson, the hardest one: learning not to spend the profit the moment I had it in my hand. Save before spending.

At 15, with my mom's permission, I started working at a neighborhood pizzeria. I went through every station: I swept, mopped, diced ham, learned to make the dough and the sauce, until I got the oven — the most dangerous one, where you could burn your forearms if you weren't paying attention. I ended up as production supervisor, on the register, even delivering on a motorcycle. Three years learning the business from the inside, not from a book.

At 18 I opened my own pizza business. Before opening, my grandfather wouldn't let me copy the recipe from my old job — he made me create my own. We threw “tasting parties”: we gave away pizza in exchange for an anonymous card where people wrote what they liked and what they didn't. That's how a 30 cm pizza was born that in the '90s, in Guadalajara, nobody else had.

But what really changed everything was what came next. My grandfather made me buy a gram scale. We weighed the cheese, the sauce, the dough, even how much each slice of ham cost. He emptied a bottle of ketchup into little bags just to know how much each one we gave away cost. We prorated the gas by minute of oven time. We divided rent, electricity and water across the real days I was going to open — 24, not 30, because you have to rest too. And to every expense we added an extra 25%, “because everything goes up”, so I wouldn't have to raise my prices every time something got more expensive.

With all that, I worked out my break-even point: how many pizzas I had to sell just to not lose money. And from day one, my own salary was already in there, as one more fixed expense — not as whatever was left over at the end.

Then came the method that marked me the most: the envelopes. Every day I opened, I set aside in cash the exact share that belonged to electricity, water, gas, rent and wages. That money wasn't touched until the due date. If something was short in a fixed envelope, the variables envelope — which always carried an extra cushion — covered it. I never lacked money to pay something on time. That habit, more than anything else, is what let me grow debt-free until I had eight businesses in nine years.

Along the way I learned to write process manuals so I could teach others without repeating myself every time. I learned to stop being the one running to put out every fire, and to hire managers who would take charge. I learned the hard way the difference between owning a business and owning self-employment disguised as a business.

Today I take all that experience — earned gram by gram, envelope by envelope, mistake by mistake — and turn it into Profit Compass App. It's not an app designed by someone who only studied finance in school. It's the same discipline I used to grow real businesses, turned into a tool, so you don't have to learn it the hard way, like I did.