AC Hampton: Don’t Let Your Situation Stop You From Your Goals

If there’s one thing that life coaches, business mentors, concerned friends and family, and just about everyone agree on, it’s that setting goals are incredibly important. Of course, different professions approach goal setting from different angles and employ it to achieve different outcomes. Either way, the consensus seems to be that, in life and business, having a goal is much better than wandering without one.

There’s more to goals than that, of course. Having goals means having a dream. It means believing that one day if we work hard, we can improve things. However, it’s sad that people often miss out on all of that because there’s something keeping them from working on their goals.

As an entrepreneur in the e-commerce industry, AC Hampton knows a thing or two about setting goals and working towards meeting them. He’s been in the business of running a business since he was a teenager, so he’s had experience setting business goals as well as his personal goals. Quickly enough, the two converged into a single goal.

“The whole reason I started dropshipping was to create generational wealth,” he says. “My mom traveled two out of four weeks my entire life, so I grew up alone. I wasn’t about to raise my son the way I was raised. I wanted to spend more time with my family.”

AC Hampton became aware of the transformative power of entrepreneurship – earning money, really – early on in his life. He started his first business right when he became a teenager, offering to mow lawns and even going so far as to advertise his business around the neighborhood.

Still, it was his sneaker business, which he started when he was only 17 and ran through some of his college years, showing him how much his entrepreneurial effort paid off. “It felt good. I never had to ask my mom or dad for money for food, gas, or anything,” he explains. “I was paying my bills and taking care of myself in college.”

His next big lesson, about the power of perseverance and sticking to his course, came after AC Hampton graduated from college and decided to give dropshipping another go. At that point in his life, he’d already tried it once, with no success. So, facing a low point after losing his post-college job, he decided to give it a go.

Before he saw any success with it, however, AC Hampton had another major setback in his life. He was a victim of a robbery that left him so much in the red that he had to sell his clothes just to make ends meet. He stuck with dropshipping, though, finding a six-figure product within a month.

“I couldn’t replicate that kind of success for months afterward, however, so I was soon back to square one, with nothing to my name,” he says. “But then a crane collapsed and fell through my building, killing my neighbor. I found myself sleeping in the local church with nothing but my laptop.”

At that point, having lost almost everything that he could lose, AC Hampton found that he had nowhere to go but through, without stopping until reaching the other side. His search for a winning product eventually bore fruit, and within six months, he was working towards generating his second million in sales.

At this point in life, AC Hampton has been working with dropshipping long enough to teach others how to do it. Through Supreme Ecom, his dropshipping agency, he’s helping people around the world do the same thing he did – keep an eye on the prize, no matter what else is going on around.

“I believe the fear of failure is one of the big reasons people never actually start a business. The fear paralyzes them,” he says. “I’ve learned with dropshipping that failure can be good, that it’s a point people can use to grow.”

For AC Hampton, the fear of failure prevented him from going all in with dropshipping much earlier in life. It took a sharp turn for the worse to get him to devote his attention to it finally, and the more challenging things became, the more he stuck to his guns. He kept refining the foundation for his business, and when it started paying off, it never stopped.

“And now, with a kid and a fiancé, I can work from home and spend all the time I want with them,” he says. “That’s everything to me.” And all it took to get him there was staying on track and working towards his goal, even when disaster struck.

McClatchy newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.