Entry #13

If I were to talk to someone before they began their entrepreneur journey, there are a few different things that I would want them to know. The first lesson that I would teach them would be to not ever be afraid of failure. Of everything that I learned in this class, I believe that principle to be the most important. I would explain to them that failure is necessary in order to improve and grow your business. I would then teach them to strive to be original. We had the opportunity to learn about the experiences of so many different entrepreneurs this semester, and something that stood out to me about them was that they all had very original stories and business experiences to share. What I learned from that is that originality opens many paths to potential success. One word of caution that I would share with this person would be to be aware of the temptation to give up that will surely come and to fight that temptation with everything they have. I would tell them that giving up will not help them achieve success and that they just have to push through the difficult times, learn from them, and then use what they learned to become better.

Entry #12

This week for the $100.00 challenge, I had the opportunity to create a presentation about my business to report on my experience. I appreciated the opportunity to do that because it allowed me calculate my profits and/or losses and it also allowed time to reflect on what I had learned from this experience. When considering the importance of failure on the path to success, I feel it to be absolutely crucial. I think that it is safe to assume that everyone who has been able to achieve success has had to face great failure in the process. Failure is what teaches us how to be more successful the next time around. If it were not for failure, we would not know what needed to be changed and we also would not learn nearly as much. Failure is an important part of life. There are countless stories of very successful people who first had to face one or multiple major failures before they were able to achieve that success. Michael Jordan, for example, was actually cut from the basketball team in high school, and it is clear that that failure taught him what he needed to do in order to become better at basketball.

Entry #11

This week for the $100.00 challenge, I was able to continue working with my business by continuing to advertise and by servicing clients. I have most recently been focusing my advertising efforts on friends and family members who live nearby, and it has brought me some success. I really enjoyed this week’s discussion board assignments because I feel like they taught me a lot about what it takes to buy a business and how to successfully run a family-owned business. Those are two things that I had not before learned much about, so I was excited to complete the assignments this week so that I could learn more. I did not realize before this week how many decisions must be made before making the final decision of what business to purchase. I did not know that there were so many different financial aspects of buying a franchise and how crucial it is to make sure that your finances are in order before making such a purchase. I also especially appreciated the chance to learn about another entrepreneur this week, Eric Slaubaugh. I thought that his story did a lot to reiterate what we had learned this week because he was an entrepreneur who ran a family-owned business.