If you are a newly minted entrepreneur, you will need to stop caring what your former work colleagues and your friends think about what you are doing. When I started my business in 2002, my friends and ex-work associates thought I had gone completely nuts. I began as a franchisee of a company with the unusual but catchy name Maui Wowi. To go from being a bigwig at the likes of Ziff Davis, LendingTree and other respectable employers and plunk down a big hunk of cash to wear a Hawaiian shirt and sell smoothies for $5 apiece at events is rather a change of professional pace. Hey, no wonder my friends thought I was nuts!
Within weeks of completing franchise training in June 2002, I convinced the New York Yankees to allow me to run a concession in the Stadium. By early August, I was at Gate 4, right at the entrance, dressed in my wacky shirt, selling smoothies (with rum, lots and lots of rum) from my tiki hut to the well-heeled season ticket holders who sit in the good seats. I was so busy getting my business up and running that I hadn’t gotten around to telling a lot of my friends what I was up to. I will never forget the day my buddy Scott showed up at the stadium. The astonished look on his face when he saw his former publishing industry colleague slinging smoothies to hordes of rowdy Yankee fans was, well, astonishing! Not only that, but I had also recently memorialized my break from the corporate world by getting a tattoo on my left forearm. When he saw that on top of the tiki hut, blenders, and me in my shirt, well, I don’t think his eyes could have widened any further. I was immensely entertained by the look on his face as my one employee and I frantically made drinks, hundreds and hundreds of them, for $8 apiece ($3 extra for rum). For me, this business was the perfect rejection of corporate life. Rather than selling advertising programs for $100,000 or $1 million, here I was selling instant gratification in a cup. I felt not the least embarrassment for trading in my suit for jeans and an Aloha shirt.
The business has morphed almost entirely since then. I have shifted it from a high labor content/moderate margin to much lower labor and very high margin by dealing only with catered events and getting out of retail completely. I have hundreds of customers, including over 50 colleges, dozens of event planning firms and corporate clients, and countless individuals who book our services for parties.
It’s a perfect business for me. It offers nothing in the way of status, though. For many corporate executives looking to do something else, status is still important. In many businesses you might get into, after corporate life, you can count on your friends not “getting it” and wondering what’s up with you. If you care even slightly what other people think, my advice is not to go down the entrepreneurial road.
If you Want to Become an Entrepreneur, Check your Ego at the Door - To learn more about this author, visit Mitch York's Website.
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Mitch York
(Visit Mitch's Website)
Mitchell York is an executive coach and
entrepreneur dedicated to helping
corporate executives in mid-life renew
their lives through small-business
ownership.
His corporate career spanned 20+ years and
included senior executive positions with
high-growth companies. He was president of
LendingTree.com in its startup phase,
creating processes and procedures to help
the company position itself for rapid
growth and mentoring its young management
team and work force. Later, he was
president of NetCreations Inc. (now
ReturnPath), a leading email marketing
company, where he built the executive
management team and positioned the company
for a successful acquisition.
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