Anyone that has known me for a while, remembers some of the very crazy and unusual business ideas that I have thought up over the years.
At age eight, my sister, my best friend and I developed our first business...door to door sales. We filled Zip Lock bags with old pieces of string, little segments of duct tape, broken pencils, and paper clips and then proceeded to walk door to door selling these bags of....crap, to our neighbor for 20p each. As adorable eight year olds trying to start our own business so that we could afford to buy gummy bears at the sweet shop we were very successful. Our business plan worked, and we sold at least 5 bags to our neighbors. When my mom discovered what we had been up to all day, you better believe she went ballistic. We spent the rest of the day walking around to all the neighbors apologizing and giving them back their money.
At one point I developed an entire chain of restaurants, one of which was going to have an aquarium underneath the floor so that while customers were eating dinner sharks would swim below them. Another restaurant was a stiletto bar, shoes would line every wall and ceiling and it would be a shoe lovers dream- I did not take in to account that people might not want to eat surrounded by old shoes. And finally, there was the restaurant in which you could write on everything. You could write on the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor, on your plate, on your glass, on your fork, or on your server. Literally....anything.
Years later, while at Bowling Green State University, I was given the opportunity to work alongside a great friend of mine to develop a marketing consulting company. We hired twelve other marketing consultants and spent the next year creating and developing marketing plans for small businesses in the Bowling Green community. It was a truly rewarding experience.
At BGSU I had a wonderful professor, Gene Poor, who wrote the book "The Entrepreneur's Journey: From Dreaming to Doing." This book has truly been my entrepreneurial Bible, I have probably read it 15 times in the past 2 years. It reads:
"The traditional definition of an entrepreneur is simply a person who starts, organizes, and operates a business. But over the past few years, the term entrepreneur has taken on a broader definition. It's now defined as a state of mind. It's about having a passion for doing something you love. It's about a spirit. It's about a "can-do" attitude. It's about a unique, opportunity seeking, mind-set."
Some of my ideas may not have been great, some of them have definitely been unrealistic, but it is truly about FROM DREAMING TO DOING!
As I sit here writing my first blog, I sit here excited, passionate, grateful and with entrepreneurial spirit, because after many, many years of dreaming..... my store Carnaby Street Style is being built.
And with passion, a vision, and a lot of assistance from my friends and family....I have gone from dreaming to doing!
I hope you will follow me in my Entrepreneurial Journey!
