Final Post

The entrepreneurial journey can be fun, fulfilling and very rewarding.  The path of entrepreneurship is loaded with difficulties challenges and some disappointments but if you have the drive and determination to overcome them you may very well find success. There are so many amazing things I learned this semester that can help any entrepreneur along this difficult and rewarding journey but there are a few that stood out to me more than the rest. I wish to share these principles with you now.

1.       Start with a plan – A business plan is what guides your business but a business plan is not enough. You should start by developing a life plan and understanding what it is you want from life and how owning your own business will help you achieve it. With your business plan be detailed and specific. Understand the market, what cost you may have and what milestones you need to reach to obtain success. Make sure your business idea is one that drives you, without that drive you will not have what it takes to get through the difficult times
2.        Work on your business, not in your business – This was a concept a did not understand before this class. Many business owners get so caught up in controlling the day to day operations that they leave little time to focus on the growth of the company and eventually lead themselves to getting burned out. To avoid this, think of your business as a franchise. Develop processes and procedures that allow other people to run the company without you overseeing every aspect of its operation. Another thing I want to add to this is treat your employees well, hire slowly and fire fast.
3.        Don’t Be Afraid to Fail – The last and final word of wisdom I want to leave with you is don’t be afraid to fail. It is in our failures that we learn the most. They may be difficult to swallow but the lessons the y teach us are invaluable. If you are too afraid to fail, you will not be able to take the risks necessary to be truly successful.        

Lesson 12

It’s crazy to me that there is only one week left in the semester. I have learned and grown so much as I have focused on the skills necessary to be a successful entrepreneur. This week was probably one of my favorites because it showed the importance of failing forward. In business and in life we all make mistakes, we all have disappointments and at times we all fail. This week we focused on learning from those mistakes, and failures and getting back up with every blow. Some of the most respected and successful people face many failures and disappointments on the road to success. The biggest difference is they learned from those failures and disappointments, got up and persisted on. This week I learned a lot more about Walt Disney. When he was young he was fired from a newspaper in Kansas City because they said he lacked imagination. He then started his own cartoon production company but ended up going bankrupt. He moved to California and started another animation company, where he created a cartoon character for Universal by the name of Oswald the Rabbit. Due to the contract Walt Disney signed he soon found out he didn’t own the rights to the cartoon he had created. Universal hired his animators out from under him and continued the cartoon without him. It was on the train ride home after learning he had basically lost his company that he created Mickey Mouse.  He faced many more blows throughout his life but he never gave up, he kept pushing forward. Many other people faced similar challenges. Michael Jordan was cut from his High School Basketball team and was told he would never be good at basketball; J.K. Rawlings was rejected by many publishers before she found one willing to publish the Harry Potter series. The one thing in common is that they didn’t give up and they learned so much along the way.

Failure has such a negative connotation in our society and people have become to see failure as a horrible thing rather than a learning experience. The one thing I really learned is that failure is not bad if you are able to learn and grow from it. I have thought back on mistakes and failures my dad and I have had with our company. Instead of seeing it as an opportunity to learn and grow I wrote it off as someone else’s fault. This is a common reaction but it stunts growth and keeps me from reaching my full potential. As I thought about failure I thought about the plan of salvation. We were sent her by God to make mistakes face disappointment and fail. That was part of his plan for us to learn and grow. Failure is such an important part of growth and if we don’t view it that way we don’t take full advantage of the opportunity to learn. This is something I needed to hear and hopefully I will be able to use these things to be a more successful business man in the future.