Lessons learned through his years entrepreneurial endeavor

For the past four months, I have been taking a business consultant class. In this class you could do two things. A) Consult for an existing business or B) Make your own business. I choose the later. The business I choose to start was one I had already been working on last semester. Now, I can't say that any of the material in the class itself helped me, but what I can say is that the feedback was of huge help.

When I first got into this class, the one thing that I thought was clear about the business wasn't. The only things that honestly was clear about it was the philosophy behind the business. But I soon learned(and continue to further learn) that too much theory takes away from doing much to make things actually happen. Too much theory can also make too much happen at once. Everybody has a theory on something. As a matter of fact we have theories about alot of things. But imagine trying to live out every theory that you had at the same time. We would self-destruct, and I know this because I almost did. basically I started out trying to do so many things that I wanted to do with the business at once that after a while I couldn't do much of anything for the business. A divided self never stands. When your trying to do so much at once- monthly networking session, creating promotional campaigns for companies, creating thought leadership programs for companies, starting an online integrated media platform, and creating a trailer for a company, YOU END UP DOING BARELY ANY OR NONE OF IT AT ALL! More importantly you can't appreciate or enjoy what you are doing fully. Having that class help me greatly see this.

I also learned that business driven people want to know two things when you tell them an about a venture your want to do or are attempting to start- 1) what are the outcomes and 2) where is your income. That is the bottom-line in business and understanding that is key when doing business(or working with people who are business minded). I finally grasped that when everytime that I went to meet with Matt French(my personal business consultant for the class and Co-Founder of DE Premier Products), Dr.Mary T. McKinney (the professor teaching to class and the director of Duquesnes Small Business Development Center), and Carmen Dawson ( a mentor, and entrepreneur) I got basically the same questions. I would hear, "I don't see how your making money" or "what is the point to what your trying to do." As much as those questions frustrated me, they forced me to evaluate the value proposition of my endeavor, which I am now seeing is making this idea a hell of a lot better.

Another key lesson that struck me ,thanks to the help of taking this class, is that most successful businesses happen out of a mix of being simple, focused, and done one step at a time. Mine was none of those things. On both a theory and practice level lied a deep and complex way of approaching and explaining what I was doing. I was also trying to (like I might have said eailer) to bring out everything I had in my vision of this business out at once. But once I started simplifying what I was doing, I found it easier to seeing and explain what it was that the business did and the value behind it. Once I started streamlining my business to focus on just one out of the many aspect of the business I wanted to implement, I found it easier to begin implementing. And the minute I starting focusing on one step at a time, I begin to start doing and living out what the business was with ease. In doing these three things, I realized that these are things that are constantly recurring and will never stop in a start-up.   

The last thing that I learned is that although I am an entrepreneur, that I am not a business person. Not to say that I couldn't be, I just don't want to be. To me entrepreneurship is someone who is obsessed with bringing something into the world that they feel either a)should be there but is not or b) is there but not good enough. That can done as a musician, a scientist, an artist, an author, a business person, or anything you do in life. But I repeat, that is in no way owned by the area of business. It is in fact a way of life. During the course of this past four months I have meant entrepreneurs that were not business people, and business people that were not entrepreneurs. Those interaction have helped me understand that I am an entrepreneur, and I can leave that class confident that my entrepreneurial endeavors will succeed and grow as I do.
The Movement Continues...
Adam