We are back this week with our favorite series: financial lessons from pop culture. After covering 5 insurance lessons from Breaking Bad and 10 personal finance lessons from Breaking Bad, we wrap up our Heisenberg series with 15 entrepreneurship lessons learned from our favorite crew down in ABQ.
As always, huge warning: SPOILERS AHEAD. Though seriously, if you haven’t seen this classic by the great Vince Gilligan yet, do not stop at Go, do not collect $200. Head straight to Netflix and get your binge on. We’ll even approve the addition to your streaming subscriptions for a month or two. It’s an emergency! Not really, but you should check the DVDs out from the library, borrow the digital copies from a friend, do something to watch one of the greatest shows of all time. You’re welcome in advance.
1. You’re never too late in life to change careers
Walt went from working at Gray Matter thinking he’d one day win a noble prize to an underpaid and underappreciated high school chemistry teacher. We’re sure he never saw that career shift coming, but he took it (mostly) in stride.
In the pilot episode of the series, Walk gets what he thinks is a very expensive death sentence. He decides perhaps it’s time to shift to a more lucrative career in order to cover medical bills and to provide for his family in the worst-case scenario. In his 50s, Walt pivots to a completely new industry by leveraging his mad chemistry skills to make that crystal clear blue meth that becomes his legacy.
Since he knows nothing about distribution or how the local supply chain of illegal drugs works, he also leverages his network and cashes in a favor with his DEA brother-in-law for a ride along. Walt learns the key players in the industry and assesses the easiest entry point into the business: partnering up with his former student, Jesse Pinkman.
By trusting his talents and using his connections, Walter makes a midlife career shift that reaps great monetary rewards, propelling him to financial independence. Sure, he ends up a mass murderer with the DEA, the chicken man, and the Mexican drug cartel out for his blood, so to say it was an overall net positive might be a bit of a stretch, but Walt proved beyond doubt that it’s never too late to chase your entrepreneurial goals.
2. Following your talent and passion leads to better long-term success
To say Walt enjoyed working for Bogdan Wolynetz would be like saying he enjoyed his cancer treatments. While he probably appreciated the extra income from his side hustle, his ego did not like taking orders from someone he felt was beneath him.
While I wouldn’t point to Walt’s ego as a great character trait, especially when it came to him trying to manage his income problem and financial woes, his journey at the A1A Car Wash teaches us a great lesson about entrepreneurship.
If you are someone who isn’t afraid to work and hustle, and you strive for great financial success, following your talent and passion can lead to better long-term success when you can afford to make the leap.
Walt sure looked smug when he told Bogdan he was buying the car wash out from under Bogdan. And he found more success as the great Heisenberg than he ever did as a chemistry teacher. This is not to say we think you should go make meth or consider money laundering. But aligning your career with your goals is part of our FIRE ladder, so it’s worth considering, whenever possible.
3. Partnerships can get complicated and can be hard to restructure/get properly compensated for if you later decide it isn’t a good fit. Or when a partner dies and inheritance becomes an issue
You can pretty much point to any partnership in Breaking Bad to make this point—except for Hank and Gomie. To prattle off a few examples:
- Walter and Tuco
- Salamancas and Gus
- Walter and Jesse
- Walter and Skylar
- Gus and Mike
Anyone who works with Gus or Walt throughout the show can tell you: partnerships are complicated. If you’ve seen Better Call Saul, the theme is splashed all over that show as well. Saul’s brother has difficulty with his place in the law firm with his illness. Nacho and Mike have their own complicated relationships with Gus.
Partnerships can be a great way to spread risk and expenses, but they can also bring a storm of dysfunction if you aren’t super vigilant in the beginning with how you structure it. On the other side of partnerships gone wrong, most entrepreneurs will tell you the stress, headaches, and financial fallout weren’t worth the upsides of the partnership. This especially holds true if your seemingly brilliant chemist partner turns out to be a serial killer with an axe to grind.
4. The road to success is full of speed bumps
The first episode of Breaking Bad is one of the best pilots ever. Nothing is more startling than Malcolm’s dad running out into the street in the middle of the desert with a gun, clad only in his tighty-whities.
This scene in the opener serves to show that entrepreneurs have to be resilient. When starting a new brand or business, things won’t go as well as you planned or hoped. No one will show up for your open house that took twice as long to put together than expected. Your first year’s gross profit will be half your projected income, and with more expenses than predicted, you’ll make even less.
While the road to success is full of speed bumps and drug dealers, a skill that will help make you a success entrepreneur is the ability to pivot and to keep trying.
If Walt had given up on his meth enterprise dream on that first fateful trip in the Fleetwood Bounder, he never would have gotten the nickname or the hat.
While there’s wisdom in knowing when to quit on an idea that won’t fly, don’t give up on your overall goals, even if the path is different than you originally planned. Most great successes are built on the foundation of failure.
5. Make sure you understand the supply chain and distribution
If you don’t understand the supply chain for your product, you can easily end up on the wrong side of the supply and demand curve with prepaid costs of goods and no market of willing buyers. You could also find yourself with rising costs that cut into your profit margin.
This happens to Walt several times during Breaking Bad. He makes pounds of his blue meth only to realize he doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to distribute it. Then he realizes his target market for distribution is too small to consume his product as quickly as he wants to produce it.
After the great Gus fallout, Walt realizes he didn’t understand the cost of distribution. In order to keep Mike’s guys quiet, Walt has to absorb the cost of buying their silence. He did not account for this in his profit calculations. Since lowering his expenditures is one of the drivers for him killing Gus, this comes as a shocking blow to Walt and is an expensive lesson in not understanding the driving market factors.
6. “Corner the market, then raise the price. Simple economics.”
Walt says this in episode seven of season two, and it’s as close to a get rich quick scheme as he could have come up with.
If you had to take a macroeconomics class as a general education course in college, you may vaguely remember the supply/demand curve. The more demand you have and the less supply, the more you can charge (like trying to get a first gen PS5 back in the days of the great chip shortage). The more supply of an item and the less demand, the cheaper it has to be priced to beat out the competition.
Walter decided to cheat the local supply and demand curve by cutting out (AKA killing) his competition and corning the market for meth in Albuquerque, which would allow him to price gouge his customers. This is why large monopolies are often broken up, to prevent price gauging.
While we don’t recommend whacking your competitors, it is important to carve out a niche in the market for your product or service. The less direct competition you have, the more flexibility you have in pricing your services so that you’re fairly compensated for your skills and time.
7. Never be too proud to return to a job or career you thought you were done with
When Walt gets his cancer diagnosis, money gets tight in the White house. He’s working two jobs as a chemistry teacher and manning a car wash. Skyler even goes back to work while pregnant. Bills gotta get paid and debt isn’t the answer. Walt knows this and doesn’t want to leave that legacy for his family after his death.
His Gray Matter cofounder, Elliott, comes to Walt and offers him a job with a good salary and great health benefits. Walt, realizing Skyler told Elliott about the cancer, gets defensive. He doesn’t want their pity or their money. (And, let’s be honest, he’s still a little hurt Gretchen ended up with Elliott instead of him.)
Walt doesn’t take the job. We can’t say for sure how his life would have turned out if he had, but we can imagine there would have been a lot less blood and murder and new identities. In the end, Walt has to crawl back to Elliott and Gretchen to have them funnel his money to his son, since Walt Jr. doesn’t want anything from Walt once he untangles Walt’s lies.
If Walt had gone back to work at Gray Matter, he could have used his cancer remission to finally get the Nobel Prize. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
8. Use your existing network and connections to market your product and start the word of mouth train moving from the station
Using Walt’s advice about simple economics, Walt and Jesse break away from their business working with Tuco and start their own distribution. Walt is still new to the “industry”, so Jesse calls in his connections, enlisting Badger, Combo, and Skinny Pete to help.
A lot of authors have street teams made of fans who help them publicize and market their books during pre-launch and launch events. Jesse’s team is a literal street team, taking to the curbs of Albuquerque to sling the blue stuff.
They use word of mouth to generate buzz about the pure, well-cut product Walt and Jesse produce, then let the product speak for itself once they generate enough interest.
9. Find a mentor to teach you the industry you wish to pursue, which will also open up networking opportunities
While Gus and Walt are working together, Gus puts another chemistry expert, Gale, under Walt’s apprenticeship. Walt is one of those people who fears he’s going to be replaced. Or, more accurately, his partner Jesse is being replaced.
Really, Walt just doesn’t like not having control of situations.
While Gale has already been experimenting with making meth, his method doesn’t provide the clarity that Walt has perfected.
There’s no better way to learn than from an expert. Jesse is a prime example. When we first met him, he was crawling out of second-story windows to evade the cops. He was very much a “get high on your own supply” kinda guy. But after working with Walt, Jesse learns the tricks of the trade and can make Walt’s recipe just as well as he does. He’s so good, in fact, that it saves his life later in the show, when the student becomes the master. (It kinda gets him imprisoned too, so it’s not all rainbows and sunshine.)
Gus is a mentor to Walt, showing him how the big boys do international meth distribution. Without Gus and his connections, Walt never would have been the Heisenberg he becomes notorious for. He’d corner the market in ABQ, sure, but he wouldn’t have made the connections that built his empire.
10. You need trustworthy employees who understand your company’s visions and believe in its mission
Whether you’re purchasing a car wash to launder your drug money through or running a small business for profit, one of the more critical decisions you make as an entrepreneur is who you bring on to be a part of a team.
You can teach someone to do almost anything (wax on, wax off, Miyagi), but you can’t teach them to care.
While you’re unlikely to find someone who will care about your business as much as you do, you want someone who will work hard to support your dream and vision. A warm body in a chair there to collect a paycheck won’t help your company blossom. They might even give your company a bad reputation from the (lack of) service they provide.
When you want to successfully launder your money without getting caught for tax evasion, you hire your wife to handle the books at your car wash.
When you want to grow your business to the next step, hire someone reliable who believes in what you’re trying to accomplish and wants to help you succeed.
And, in case it needs to be said, make sure you pay and treat them well. Employees are investments, and each new one you have to interview, bring in, and train up takes resources you could be spending on your vision and mission instead.
11. Never discount the off-the-wall ideas because they don’t conform
The businesses with the highest chance for success are the ones that successfully find a niche in the existing market. They offer something new and exciting versus the competition. In order to do that, you have to have new and exciting ideas. Those don’t come from rehashing the same boring, bland ideas over and over.
That’s not to say every outlandish idea is a good business plan. I thought to myself, hey I’m going to write sports women’s fiction and get traditionally published. So novel, so grand. It turns out that’s not a solid marketing plan for a debut author. But sometimes, the off-the-wall ideas are the ones that can succeed with astounding results. Like making the topic of budgeting and personal finance fun by using pop culture and general humor (hopefully).
12. Don’t let people force constraints onto your decisions or actions
This is similar to our point directly above ^, but it’s worth pointing out directly and is also sponsored by our favorite Jesse Pinkman. When you’re working within an economic market, there are natural constraints if you want to be successful. For example, you have to turn a profit versus just bringing in revenue.
That said, don’t let other people’s lack of creativity or what they want to do limit your business decisions. This is one of the benefits of striking out on your own. You are no longer beholden to the whims of The Man. Don’t forget that. If someone tries to instill an artificial constraint (let’s say, for example, smoking within XX feet of a building), find ways to work around their system.
Always look for an alternative option when possible to give you flexibility and the ability to optimize your situation.
13. When entering into a negotiation, know your deal breakers
And, even more importantly, stick to them. My job dissatisfaction over the years has inevitably come from not sticking with my deal breakers and burning out in a blaze of overworked stress. To counteract this rage quitting, I’ve learned to reverse engineer the situation I want by asking for it up front. It’s also your job to stick to those self-imposed boundaries around your deal breakers though. If you decide you want to be off on nights and weekends, you can’t pull up your work email after dinner or at the little league game on Sunday morning.
When you’re starting a new business, especially if you’re used to the structure of working for others, this can be incredibly hard, but stick with it!
One of the most powerful negotiation strategies you can have is the ability to walk away. Keep this in mind as you plan out your entrepreneurial goals. You may want to wait a little longer before starting your business until you’re able to build up that power to walk away. (This is why financial stability is so important.) Jesse found this out when cutting ties with Walt.
14. Make sure you have the right tools to do the job
One of my favorite guiding principles of life and entrepreneurship is to work smart, not hard. Often, you have to do both, but I’m always looking for ways to minimize the amount of elbow grease and brute forcing required. Having the right tools for the job can help. Just ask Skyler, who uses the wrong tool for the job as an excuse to help her (and Ted) stay out of trouble with the IRS.
This isn’t permission to go out and buy the most expensive and top-of-the-line tool for the job. Depending on your budget, you might need to start with the Harbor Freight version and work your way up as your revenues and profits grow. Don’t be afraid to get creative and shop secondhand to save money. And ignore the tools that are flashy and cool, but really don’t make your life that much easier. Your investment still needs to ROI.
15. Never forget your vision and goal for your business
A final piece of advice from the final season of Breaking Bad: never forget your end goal.
Determining your goal is the first rung of our FIRE ladder for good reason, and it’s something Walt quickly loses sight of, thanks to his ego. When he starts out his side hustle, his goal is to reduce the financial burden of his cancer treatment and related medical bills. He also wanted to make sure his family was taken care of in case the treatment plan ultimately didn’t work. By the end of the show, he has more money than they’ll ever be able to launder through the car wash, but the family he wanted to protect is in shambles. Money didn’t buy Walt happiness, and his successful empire in the end didn’t fulfill him after he neglected all other aspects of life. Money isn’t the end goal; it’s simply the tool to help you get there.
The final word
We love entrepreneurs and want you to succeed! We hope Walt and gang have provided you with some useful advice and cautions on what to avoid so you can learn from their mistakes without having to make them yourself. If you have a specific business question you’d like help with, feel free to reach out to us in the comments below or ask the hive mind in our budgeting and personal finance group.