For many, it often feels like you're starting over. However, each business endeavor you pursue and every job you take builds new experiences and new skill sets. We will be exploring how to become aware of your collective skillset to be successful moving forward.
Exploring many different opportunities is a great way to gain a broad range of experiences while narrowing down what craft you want to pursue. Travis Devitt engaged in a plethora of different entry level jobs, leveling up each time until he attended a presentation that pushed him into his core discipline of investments. Now marrying education with his domain expertise, Travis is helping others understand the 101s of investing.
Some people love the process of building a business. Figuring out how the puzzle pieces fit together at every stage is part of the fun. But those individuals don't always find immediate success, instead they serially start at the beginning until something hits, which can be years in the making. William Griggs, after years of gaining a broad range of experiences, found a gap in the events market renting expensive technical virtual reality experiences.
What makes you select an item off the shelf in your local grocery store? Pretty packaging, the name, or just a feeling? Social media companies like Facebook have become behemoths because they can sell ads on a very granular level to marketers. Alison Smith at Umai Marketing does just that for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG). Having bounced around from the family pump business, to LA fashion, and drop shipping in Vietnam; she now helps you make the decision on which eggs or coffee to pull off the shelf long before you step into the store.
Entrepreneurship is serendipity. Chance happens and if you're paying attention, it can turn into opportunity to realize that 5 hour/week lifestyle. It doesn't happen overnight, but if you're willing to put in some hard work up front and sacrifice "safe bets," then you can be like Nick from Storage Squad. One phone call changed Nick's career trajectory from a safe $70k a year job to sweat through moving boxes in the summer heat. Five years later, Nick is helping others realize this same dream through sweatystartup.com
How do people know that your business exists? How do you spend money to educate the right people and avoid wasting money advertising to the wrong ones? Michael Gaman from Gudnow Media specializes in a special intent based marketing known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). If you've ever searched on Google, you're interacting with the type of ads that he delivers. Michael and I discuss his background while attempting to explain the basics of this technical and complex type of digital marketing.
Not everyone pines after becoming an entrepreneur since they were young. Sometimes, opportunity is sitting right in front of your years of specialized experience and it makes too much sense not to take the leap. Austin Venue Collective is an outsourced service whose customers are the very bars and restaurants you reach out to when you want a private corner for a birthday or the entire venue for an engagement party. Allison's years of experience managing half a dozen venues prepped her for this next part of her accidental journey.
How do you think your electricity bill is calculated every month? Turns out there is a very complex system of buying and selling that goes on. Matthew Boyda stumbled onto a public data file while working on a related project, allowing him to start Energytics which provides market forecasts for power consumption across Texas.
Ever witness a great restaurant that opens a second location then goes downhill? Harlan discusses how an early experience at a corporate restaurant taught him how to avoid this folly and to run a business instead of owning a job. Having managed half a dozen successful concepts at once, Harlan has had his own issues automating himself out of a job until he decided it was time to launch his own concept.
What business is more common than a food service business? Out of all the types of services out there, the individuals that serve our food and drink are a special set. Cody Taylor started in the food service industry as a bartender, then a server, assistant manager, general manager, and now the owner of two fledgling restaurants. But during the 2008 recession, success meant staying open when no one was eating out. Follow along as Cody learns what it takes to compete in an aggressive foodie market like Austin.
You don't always have to be doing your own thing to be an entrepreneur. Part of the journey is learning from as many sources as you can then picking and choosing the lessons that you deem most important. Current Facebook Programmer Hunter Monk is 26, but has a decade of experience running various businesses. He has hired contractors overseas, managed over $1M in yearly advertising spend, grossed over $1M in annual revenue, and earned investment from Mark Cuban.
It me! So who am I and why am I qualified to have a podcast about turning your failures into a growing skill set? Hopefully this episode will give you a solid background on my 22 years of work experience. From my first job staring at satellite maps for 8 hours a day to my current venture BetterLegal, I go through the raw details.
Toni has spent the last 12 years taking Jacaruso Enterprises from a small Hilton contractor to a $15M a year business. Listen how she started her path towards hospitality CEO from humble beginnings as a babysitter then working the night shift at a hotel while still in high school.
Looking Backward will be about taking your life experiences into an official skillset that you can be aware of moving forward.
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