Why I Love Entrepreneurship!
At most student jobs time is being traded for money. As an entrepreneur in any field, value is being traded for money. The more value you bring to the marketplace the more you can earn and the more you can learn. This allows you to grow your business, to delegate, to innovate and create more value for clients. Selling knives for Vector Marketing and Cutco will teach you more about being an entrepreneur than any lecture or seminar will. Matthew Kelly, a consultant for fortune 500 companies and top-selling author once said that, “mastering a Cutco/Vector business is comparable to a Harvard MBA”. I believe it goes further than that because being an entrepreneur teaches people so much about what they are really capable of. The most beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur is anyone can do it regardless of background, age, finances or experience.
As our world expands and more huge corporations emerge in the world, entrepreneurial opportunities are created for people within these organizations. These people are called intrapreneurs and whether these skills are taken and applied to your own business or someone else’s you can gain skills to add value by becoming an entrepreneur.
I have been all across this great nation of ours and I’ve met many entrepreneurs in different industries from manufacturing to music to biochemistry and everything in between. I’ve met some who are old, some who are young but never have I met a baby who is a successful entrepreneur. So if they aren’t born entrepreneurs then they must learn somewhere along the way. There are a lot of great training grounds for young entrepreneurs and for me personally Vector didn’t turn me into an entrepreneur because I had several experiences before I ever sold knives. What this experience has done is sharpen my skills and turn me into a professional. Pun intended.
Some people will argue that selling knives doesn’t make you an entrepreneur; they think that no one will ever buy them and maybe even go as far to say that it’s not a legitimate business. That’s ok, it’s part of the process of being an entrepreneur because no matter what business you start there are people who will criticize it. I think you need people to challenge your beliefs, because if you cave after a little criticism, what happens when you have real challenges; a customer who cancels a large order, a bad day of appointments, a car breaking down or any number of challenges? You have to really believe in what you are doing in order to overcome these challenges. I love entrepreneurship because it’s not easy and when you’re up against a wall you have to make the tough decisions. You better believe that challenges will happen and if that excites you a little, trading risk for reward, the journey of it all then try it because at the end of the day entrepreneurs are the difference in the world. You can be the difference.
