Myself & Entrepreneurship
When thinking back on my history of entrepreneurship it goes back really far... I think it was as early as 6th grade, the year I started my own lawn and landscaping company. I know what you're thinking, I was just another kid looking to cut some lawns and make some coin in the summer but it evolved into a very competitive and marketable business that I ended up selling my senior year of high school. It all started with just printing some shady looking flyers and recruiting my friends to help me put over 700 of them out into the mailboxes of my neighborhood. It only took a matter of days before I received a call requesting a quote and I can remember the excitement and the feeling of success simply from having results come about from my efforts... basically the whole theory of entrepreneurship. So back to the story... within a few weeks my schedule was booked and I was cruising the streets on my dad's John Deere tractor going from job to job collecting a cool $30 for driving a tractor for about 20 minutes! I thought I was hot stuff!
Ok so when I reached the point where I had multiple lawns to cut every day, things were starting to pile up and I knew I needed to start looking for potential expansion opportunities. While the natural next steps in my mind looking back on it are clear, as a little kid in the 7th grade, operating with little capital resources, I was honestly a little lost. I ended up buying a second lawn mower from a guy down the street and buying pull behind trailers that could be pulled by the tractors as a means of hauling fuel and additional tools to job sites. While this may have been a small step for my small summer hustle, it was a movement in a positive direction!
Fast forward to 2016 and I purchased a 2012 Chevy Silverado 2500 to haul my series of mowers and other equipment to my clients across the area! I had now hired many of my friends to work for me and we had more clients than we had time! That's probably one of the few times in my life where I've had to turn away business simply because we weren't big enough to handle all the clients who wanted our services. While this was a great example of my passion for entrepreneurship and my past with building businesses, that is just the tip of the iceberg. I've build seven websites, started a social media and SEO agency, and currently find myself investing most of my time in my three e-commerce stores! Some kids took up soccer or had fun at sailing camps but Entrepreneurship is my hobby. I love the idea of being able to build something physical out of a simple idea and being able to watch your ideas come into fruition. There's something really special about being able to look at a brand or company and think "I did this".
Looking forward, I want to pursue my future in entrepreneurship to be able to one day create a set up in which I am generating enough passive income I can spend my time doing things that I truly enjoy. No one dreams of working a nine to five or sitting in an office day in and day out, but I think that many don't have the visualization skills to keep the end goals of self ownership and entrepreneurship in mind and it becomes to easy to take the brief "security" offered by a major company. I would much rather risk everything I have and build something for myself than take a position at a company and work to make someone else's dreams come true instead of my own.
I enrolled in ENT3003 to better learn and explore how I can make this dream possible. I've had a large background in entrepreneurship but I still lack many skills necessary for running a longer lasting and more sustainable entity.
I find your story interesting and inspiring. You started your own business in the 6th grade! That is pretty cool. Not to mention since then you've made several other start ups. I agree that having vision or clarity as some may say is really important when it comes to taking risks in order to achieve your goals. From the way you wrote this article it sounds like you may be a fan of Timothy Ferris's book The 4 Hour Work Week. If you have not read it yet I'm positive you'll love it and that it will help answer many questions you have on entrepreneurship.
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