Insights on charting your entrepreneurial and educational journey.
What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? Even more importantly, what does it take to be one? HSCF Founder and CEO Tina Taylor answered these questions and more during her very own Masterclass. Being an entrepreneur essentially means being an innovator of business. Entrepreneurs get out in the world and create their own businesses, usually to fill in gaps that they see in particular markets. This usually requires accepting and taking high amounts of risk, but as Ms. Taylor can tell you, the rewards of entrepreneurship are equally as high.
So, what does it take to be an entrepreneur. Well, first and foremost, entrepreneurs have passion for whatever it is they are doing. Arguably, passion is the most important and influential characteristic of any and every entrepreneur. In order to want to do the dirty work and long hours needed to successfully start and build your own business, you need to have a natural passion for it. Anyone will tell you that passion makes everything easier.
As Ms. Taylor also told us, education and degrees are not required to be an entrepreneur. What’s important is that you build a diverse skill set. And while some may develop that skill set through education and multiple degrees, others may develop it through travel, work, or just life experiences. For instance, what you’re most passionate about may not be figured out through a class in school. Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen created the Ben & Jerry’s brand after taking an ice cream making course, but Judi Sheppard Missett founded Jazzercise only after teaching dance classes to women and learning their true motivation in those classes was to tone up and get in-shape, rather than actually learn the dance moves. Ben and Jerry loved ice cream, and Judi Sheppard Missett loved dancing. These are just two examples of entrepreneurs taking their passions to solve problems they saw in the real world.
Which leads to the next important aspect of entrepreneurship. There must be a problem or gap in the particular field that you are interested in for you to build your business around. For Ben and Jerry, it was the overall lack of unique flavors of ice cream, as well as the lack of access to these unique flavors for most people. Because they were able to build their business around this problem, they were able to really grab that corner of the ice cream market first, setting them even further apart from their competitors and making themselves the standard for fun and unique ice cream flavors.
So, think about potential problems you, or people you know, may face. Could you solve it? Why not try? To see what past and current HSCF Ambassadors have done, be sure to link up with us through social media. Let’s learn together!
