About Me — Nick Alva
Adversity pushed me without end. Despite everything, I had success in business, but it only came when I acquired a father figure.
Hi everyone!
My name is Nick Alva. I was born in the ’90s in Spain to a pretty international family. My father was often moving to other countries for work, and before my 18th birthday, I had already lived in several countries. In fact, I still have family in Florida, Uruguay, France and Germany 🌍.
Because of this, I always had issues to fit in at school. I did some years in Spain, but then in Germany, then in anooother part of Germany, then Switzerland, and so on ✈️.
Due to this, I do not truly have one native language. I mean, in my most natural way, when I speak without thinking about the words, I speak like this:
“Pues si quieres, hoy hacemos el Antrag auf Gewerbeanmeldung y podemos empezar a generar profit right away”
This is how I would speak to my brother. And as you can notice, yes, Spanish is rather the language I use for syntax due to early exposure as a child, when my prefrontal cortex was not so active, and German and English for semantics, having acquired lots of non-Spanish vocabulary due to schooling and study, when the PFC was starting to work hard 💪🧠.
So, anyways, that is the context. Apart from being a weird child who was always a foreigner, what did I do with my life? 🤪
I was going to graduate high school and become an adult. I was tired of traveling around and following my parents everywhere they went. But I didn’t have studies or money. My parents didn’t have contacts (trucker and housewife), but I wanted to find my own place before having to move again. I felt stressed 😰.
Watching YouTube I discovered that you can learn how to code and get a job without having to go through college (I know, nowadays it’s not so “easy” anymore). I did that, and videos like these helped me stay motivated. I admired and followed Chris the Freelancer, the nerdy pizza guy turned coder Dylan C. Israel, Chris Sean and his self-taught journey and also the almost-all-knowing Derek Banas. Oh, the memories… 🎥
But what did I do to get a job? Well… I did not only get good at coding, I showed it often and talked about it with others at high school. Many people underestimate the power of real, human networking instead of sending out applications en masse. I might be wrong, but I think the rise of AI will make human networking even more valuable, not less 🤝.
And that is how I got a job just after high school! One of the parents at school who had a company noticed I had a skill he wanted and needed to grow his business (coding) and offered me two interviews and one unpaid work day as a test, which I passed.
I was able to negotiate a full-time position as a tech consultant (he wanted to offer me part-time). He also offered me to go to a college for professionals, with all the costs covered by the company, which I accepted 📄.
With my new job contract, I went to the property manager of the apartment of my parents, knowing that she was managing several rental units, and made an appointment in person where I explained my situation and what I was looking for. She checked the work contract and saw that I was wearing a suit and looking more serious than people my age. Weeks later I had the keys of an apartment in my hands 🔑.
I moved out of my parents’ house. What came later was a story of love, steady growth in my career, marriage. I first went from software developer to consultant and then lead consultant, then moving on to a larger firm. I was earning enough so my wife could quit her job. My wife and I had expensive holidays, went to nice restaurants, bought a big house… But I felt so empty ⚫️.
My absent father had caused in me a crisis of meaning. I was doing a lot, and earning a lot, but I missed all reason for being. I was missing the true values of manhood. And they were nowhere to be found within Western society, which was starting to remove the good values that reflect our human nature of man and woman, and are necessary for us to find meaning in life. Skipping this step of becoming would prove to be detrimental and self-destructive 🌪️.
OMG; What happened?!
My wife went to have a check-up at the gynaecologist while I was working. But what they found at the checkup was definitely not what we expected:
“Mr. Alva, your wife had to be delivered to the nearby hospital. I am sorry to tell you. She has a large tumor inside her. It doesn’t look good.”
I told my boss about what was happening. He gave me permission to go, so I packed up my things and rushed to the hospital. And there she was, on a hospital bed, expecting more checkups and tests. Thankfully she was released on the same day before midnight 🌝.
I had not eaten and barely drunk any water that day because of the anxiety. I remember slightly hitting a column while parking the car. It was my first and only car accident in my life. For me, this was a big indicator of a loss of control, as someone who had always been so used to having control in life.
Days later, the news came that we needed to act quickly and do a surgery before it’s too late. They gave us some months. The health insurance denied the request to cover the costs of the surgery. They gave some obscure reason but I know it was the price 💲.
My professional life was collapsing as a result of all the chaos. I should have provided my wife with emotional support but, instead, it was her that was supporting me and teaching me lessons of bravery, faith and resilience. None of the future success and the previous achievements would have been possible without her. And had I had a less supportive wife, I would not be writing this.
People just look at the hard facts: “Yea… But who is making da’ money?” and forget that at all times I had someone giving a hug and saying “it’s okay, honey” when work didn’t work.
There was someone sacrificing her time and business ideas to cook good meals that kept us healthy and made my brain work properly to provide for both, while saving tons of money.
Also someone who never once complained or objected when cutting expenses had to be done to save the household economy. She is the embodiment of candid strength, and my story is void without her 👫.
That is why this experience made our bond even stronger. We moved into a cheaper apartment, which was only half-done and had bugs. I asked to work from home as often as I was allowed to, and avoid commuting costs. I started eating only once per day. We made huge sacrifices, but we were able to pay for the surgery, and it left us with $2K in the bank account. Phew.
The surgery went well, and the recovery time would be long. I took the vacation days I had accumulated over time and even though I was taking care of my wife, at the same time, I felt a fire inside of me. I said to myself:
“No more poverty. Never again a situation like this. Not when it concerns health. I don’t need to save more, I should earn more. I don’t want to catch up at work, trade my time for money and then look bad when disease or tragedy strikes. I want more control over our lives, I want us to be less vulnerable. I want us to work if we want, not because we have to. It’s now or never 💪.”
I had watched many videos and read many books about “How to overcome procrastination”, “How to be more disciplined”, “How to achieve more”. But after three days I always gave up.
Having experienced great pain and emotional suffering, and wanting to avoid the same in the future is what really provided me automatically and without any paid training all the discipline, procrastination-beating, dopamine detox that I tried to achieve consciously and build into my habits for years with no success.
The truth is: Environment beats conscious decisions — always ✅. Find a way to push you into a state of creative, entrepreneurial flow and keep you there, and you can ignore 90% of all the personal development books.
Ok… I see I’m drifting off again 👀. I’ll leave these specific life lessons for other blog posts.
So I did some side hustles while I was taking care of my wife, having free time from work. I sold crossword puzzles on Amazon. It helped a bit, but was not very scalable. I took the money I earned from selling and invested it into selling courses.
They made more money, but took a lot of time, effort, and many people just wanted to shortly check out the course and then requested a refund. Or they opened support tickets all the time for really banal things. It felt like many customers asked for the moon in exchange for paying peanuts.
I took one of the courses and upgraded it by starting to offer one hour of coaching combined with the course as a premium package, for more money. It worked so well I was able to quit my 9–5 job! 👨💼
Then I got tired of courses and offered high-ticket offers, with more coaching and less of a lesson-based structure, with offers fully tailored to the customers. I also slowed down a bit and took it easier than in the past. Money was not an issue anymore so I could afford stepping back a little. When I needed it least, the revenue exploded.
This taught me a lesson. Pricing is not a scale of pain. You won’t get more work and support tickets when you price your offer higher — you’ll actually get less! Disclaimer: Only if you make sure that your product is valuable enough! (More on this in future blog posts, including what it has to do with wine 🍷).
The rest is history. Scaling up the business, slightly adjusting the offer, adding more offers, trying out new business ideas, managing a small team while traveling around the world, being coached by other business mentors, reading a LOT, making 6 figures ARR (close to $300K per year, almost all of it profit) and finally, when I ran out of ideas and sold the business for $3M to a group of investors.
We kept traveling for a while, taking a kind of sabbatical, until we settled down in the country where I was born in and spaint part of my childhood (Spain. And it’s not a typo, it is fun to connect both words 🇪🇸). The money is in a savings account and we pay ourselves dividends. We can just live a humble life going once or twice per month to a restaurant without having to worry to get a job again.
However, seeing the state the world is in right now and there being sooooo much work to do in leadership, entrepreneurship and personal freedom I couldn’t lie on the beach any longer.
That is why, over the past months, I have been thinking about which field I want to go into and help people there.
- Leadership? Sure! But I focused on the offer and not the target audience.
- Entrepreneurship? I can talk a lot about that! But only that?
- Personal freedom/mindset/mental health? I love it! But it sounds so broad…
I even tested going back to my old offer: Soft skills for engineers. But it didn’t feel right. There was a reason why I sold the coaching business. It was based on experience but no passion. I needed an offer that combined both experience and passion.
And so, Alva Lead was born. Its aim is to transform the lives of other male entrepreneurs who have had an absent father and who know that real gentlemen are necessary in this world. It resonates with many, that like me, have had the following issue: “You are good at making money but it’s futile if you don’t know yourself.”
If life has proven me something, it’s that we are so vulnerable. But also, that you react very differently to vulnerability when you have spent most of your time training your mindset and acquiring resilience.
The health issue was a warning. It was our choice to respond to it and prevent further disaster or to react emotionally and complain about having an unfair life, letting the world crumble under our feet.
I can go on writing and talking an awful lot about these topics, but I shall stop here now that you already know about me and the purpose of the article has been fulfilled. So, instead of drifting off, to each topic their deserved article.
Finally, I want to share one quote that resonates with me. Quite honestly, I have no idea if I stole it from someone or if I came up with it. Never mind:
Artists create.
Salespeople sell.
And entrepreneurs?
They create and sell.
Thank you for reading! ️🙇♂️ And by the way, if you would love to follow and actively shape my journey (yes! for now I am able to respond to every email and request I get), just subscribe to my FREE newsletter called “Nick’s Notes”; it’s the grey box with the input field and the School of Athens: https://alvalead.com
