Rest In Peace Grant Thompson; Creating A Legacy.

By Isaiah O’Connor

On Tuesday, July 30th, I saw a notification pop up on one of my favorite YouTube channels. It was a short 1-minute video titled “Grant Thompson, in Memoriam.” The video was simply a picture of Grant Thompson, aka “The King Of Random” with no sound. Underneath in the description was the following text.

“It is with great sadness to inform everyone that Grant Thompson passed away last night. Grant had great love and appreciation for his fans. We invite you to share your thoughts for Grant and the channel in the comments. Please do a random act of love or kindness today in honor of The King of Random. Grant’s legacy will live on in the channel and the global community he created.”

This news hit me unexpectedly hard. Sure I liked his channel, and have watched it a lot with my two sons, but I did not know the guy, had no personal contact with him. So when I thought about it some more, I realized it was because of his age and his family. He was only 38 years old, had a wife and 4 young kids. I am just 2 years older than him, so I think it hit home pretty hard.

This made me start thinking about his legacy, but before I do that a bit of background.

Grant Thompson was a YouTube Creator who launched his channel in 2010. His focus was learning and teaching what he learned, Things like how to build a foundry to melt metal with, making gummy candy lego bricks, as well as, doing all sorts of experiments with things like liquid nitrogen.  His channel gained in popularity eventually having well over 11.6 million subscribers and over 2.4 Billion views at the time of his death.

This brings up his legacy. In late 2017 he brought on a co-host. He had decided to spend more time with his growing family, and stop appearing on camera as often, and so set up a company that was capable of running with or without his presence. He still worked behind the scenes on the day to day operations but no longer was the driving force of the channel.  He also at this time worked with Kris Krohn to create a training and coaching seminar to help up and comers develop out their own YouTube success story.

He passed away just over a year later on July 29, 2019, leaving an incredible legacy.  I went through and found many, many YouTubers doing tribute videos. There were many from people he had collaborated with and was friends with.  From what I have seen he appeared to have a heart bigger than his channel, and often reached out to the little guys to encourage them when they were down. His channel will continue at the request of his wife, and I do believe his family will be well cared for.

This made me think of my business and my legacy.  When I first started up, I was so excited about running my own business, being the boss and having 100% freedom to choose the direction of my company I never had a thought about what I would do with my business in the long term.

This changed, thankfully early on when I read a book titled “The E Myth” by Michael E. Gerber. The book has a lot of great advice for entrepreneurs, and one chapter he discusses what do you want to do with your business? Close it down upon retirement, leave it to your family, or sell it? As I built the business up over the last few years this has been in the back of my mind. 

Over the last few months, the question of where I am going with my business has been moved more and more to the front of mind, with this incident, bringing it starkly into contrast.
I have in the last year or so, seen multiple balloon artists calling it quits.  People that have been in the industry for a long time. Each for different reasons. Most simply shut down sold off all their equipment, and left.

Some transferred ownership by sale or simply by having a business partner take full control. A large amount of them had, sadly, some form of tragedy strike that simply made it impossible to continue, and they did not have a plan in place. This had me thinking about my plans for my business.

My ultimate goal became to sell my business, relocate and try something new. I still have a passion for my current business, and will likely still use my skills to bring in extra income in the future. I feel the time to change is coming so I am preparing to do so.

In conclusion, we can all learn from Grant. He was a giver, he did what he loved, and was passionate about what he did. His life touched many others and he left a powerful legacy.

Rest In Peace, Grant Thompson, you will be missed.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Entrepreneur,
Isaiah O’Connor.

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