I never planned to become an expert in three completely different industries. When I started the Hatch Chile Store, I was building a Shopify brand. When I opened Bionic Barbell, I became a gym operator. When I started working with Popsie Fish Company on digital marketing, I was thinking like a seafood e-commerce business. But over the past few years, running these businesses simultaneously has taught me something unexpected: there are lessons that transfer between industries, and then there are lessons that absolutely don't. And knowing the difference might be the most valuable thing I've learned.
The transferable lessons are the ones that live at the core of what it means to be an entrepreneur. First and foremost is customer obsession. Whether you're selling chile, gym memberships, or premium seafood, the businesses that win are the ones where the founder is genuinely obsessed with solving a real problem for real people. At the Hatch Chile Store, I became obsessed with the problem that authentic Hatch chile was nearly impossible for most Americans to buy — you either had to live in New Mexico or fly there yourself. At Bionic Barbell, I became obsessed with the fact that Las Cruces had zero recovery technology despite being a market with serious athletes and aging populations that desperately needed it. And at Popsie Fish Company, the obsession centers on the fact that wild-caught, sustainable seafood is still treated as a luxury product when it should be accessible. That obsession is what keeps you moving when growth flattens, when competitors emerge, or when the work gets genuinely difficult.
Systems thinking is another lesson that transfers across every single business I run. When you're operating in agriculture, you learn very quickly that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A bottleneck at harvest season can wipe out a year of work. A supplier issue with roasting equipment can kill your entire product timeline. You learn to think in systems, to map every single process, to identify where problems originate, and to build redundancy into critical paths. That exact same thinking applies in a gym. One broken cryotherapy machine means lost revenue and disappointed members. A poor onboarding system means high churn. And in digital marketing, a broken attribution system means you're making marketing decisions in the dark. The specific systems are different, but the discipline of thinking systematically about how things work — and how they break — is something I've been able to move between all three businesses.
Understanding your numbers is the third lesson, and honestly, I think it's the one that separates entrepreneurs who survive from entrepreneurs who guess their way into bankruptcy. Most people don't want to admit this, but the real work of entrepreneurship is understanding the unit economics of your business. What's your customer acquisition cost? What's your lifetime value? What's your gross margin? What's your cash burn? These questions look different depending on the industry, but the discipline of asking them — and updating them monthly, not quarterly — is what I've been able to consistently apply. In agriculture, understanding the cost per pound of chile from farm gate to roasted product taught me how pricing works. In fitness, understanding the average lifetime revenue per member taught me how to think about acquisition spending and retention. And in e-commerce, understanding the relationship between COGS, CAC, and LTV showed me how margins actually work. The spreadsheet skills transfer. The mentality transfers. The specific numbers obviously don't.
The fourth transferable lesson is that marketing fundamentals are marketing fundamentals. I've been able to apply the same core principles across all three businesses: know who your customer is, tell them something they haven't heard before, and make it easy for them to buy. The channels change. The messaging nuances change. The visual style changes. But the fundamental structure of "attract, convince, convert" stays the same whether you're selling roasted chile online, gym memberships in person, or premium fish through Shopify. I've been able to use email marketing, content marketing, and paid acquisition in all three contexts. The skills compound. The understanding deepens. And that's been one of the most valuable realizations — that foundational marketing knowledge is like a universal translator that works across industries.
But here's where it gets interesting. And this is where the lessons start to break down.
The supply chain for perishable goods is absolutely nothing like running a gym, which is nothing like the supply chain for a digital marketing operation. When you're working with fresh Hatch chile, you're dealing with seasonality, shelf life, refrigeration, shipping speed, and perishability. Every single day that passes between harvest and delivery matters. Your entire business model has to account for the fact that your product degrades. That leads to a specific set of constraints and opportunities that simply don't exist in the other two businesses. A gym membership doesn't spoil. Fish can be frozen, but there's still complex logistics around keeping it cold and shipping it fast. The business dynamics of something that lasts forever versus something that lasts days are so fundamentally different that the lessons from one barely apply to the other.
Similarly, seasonal business versus recurring revenue are two completely different economic models. The Hatch Chile Store lives and dies by the autumn harvest season. It's brutal and concentrated and then quiet. You either prepare and execute perfectly during those two months, or you don't. Bionic Barbell, by contrast, runs on recurring revenue. Gym memberships are predictable. They're monthly. They're sticky (once people show up and get results, they stay). The business model is almost the inverse — you want smooth, predictable, compounding membership growth. You don't care about seasonal spikes because you don't get them. This is a fundamental difference in how you build the business, how you staff it, how you fund it, and how you measure success. The lessons from one don't transfer because the underlying economic structure is different.
And then there's the difference between physical, B2C products and digital services. The Hatch Chile Store and Bionic Barbell are both physical products delivered to local or national customers. But one requires a building, employees, equipment, and local market penetration. The other is global and digital. When I work on Popsie Fish Company, I'm thinking about conversion rate optimization, SEO, email automation, and paid ad performance. These are skills I've had to develop separately because they're genuinely different from managing gym operations or agricultural supply chains. The digital marketing skills do transfer between Hatch Chile Store and Popsie, and that's been useful. But neither of those prepare you for the specific challenges of running a brick-and-mortar operation like a gym.
The deeper lesson here is that I've learned to be careful about which lessons I borrow. When someone tells me "here's how successful gyms scale," I listen carefully, but I'm skeptical about applying it to the chile store without thinking. When I read about e-commerce best practices, I don't automatically assume they work for a local gym. I've learned to ask: does the underlying economic model apply here? Does the customer relationship look the same? Do we have the same constraints? Are we dealing with the same time scales?
Running businesses across three different industries has made me a more humble operator. I know that expertise in one space doesn't guarantee success in another. But it's also made me a more effective operator, because I've learned where to trust my instincts and where to stay curious. The customer obsession, systems thinking, financial rigor, and marketing fundamentals that I've built in agriculture and fitness apply just as much in digital marketing. But the specific playbooks, the operational details, and the constraints are different enough that I have to stay flexible.
I think that balance — knowing which lessons transfer and which don't — is what separates entrepreneurs who can run one successful business from entrepreneurs who can run several. And based in Las Cruces, operating across agriculture, fitness, and digital marketing, that's the skill I keep trying to sharpen. The goal isn't to become an expert in every industry. It's to become expert at knowing which expertise actually transfers, and having the discipline to learn the new things when you move into unfamiliar territory.