Serial Entrepreneur
February 2022
There are years when you find your purpose. Years when you lose it. Years when you find it again.
It’s called growth.
You’re going to be ok.
It’s so funny how time, events, and life sometimes bury original intentions, dreams, goals, and thoughts.
Yesterday, I was reminded that I have wanted to be a serial entrepreneur since 2014, when I launched my first company to resounding failure. Haha. I’m not joking - my first ever entrepreneurial venture failed.
It was an essay writing service for college applicants, but I had no idea how to market it. It didn’t even have a name.
I was a good creative writer – this I knew. But, I had no idea how to get others to believe in me without testimonials or recommendations. It’s the same old chicken-egg situation entrepreneurs face on a daily basis: I need customers to get testimonials, but I need testimonials to get customers.
You’re not alone, but this is not a marketing lesson (maybe another day).
What I did in 2014 was print fliers for my service at the library and then literally walk around all of Queens (NYC) putting them on cars’ windshields and in people’s mailboxes (even the ones that said no soliciting - whoops - I definitely made a few people angry). Aside from that, I tried going to a few high schools around the time school was over in order to physically hand my fliers to students and/or parents who might be around….
I never got the guts to actually hand anyone a flier. The second-hand embarrassment was too much to handle…except it was me, not second-hand. I was just disassociating myself from myself so much at that point lol.
The point is that I knew, even after that particular venture failed, that I loved the thrill of starting businesses. And as I began to create my second, third, and fourth service-based business, I fell in love more and more.
Except that…
It was sort of like dating and falling in love in that the beginning was BEAUTIFUL.
I loved coming up with an idea and imagining all of its potential. I thought about it non-stop for days while I hashed out the details: the costs, the viability, the potential revenue and profit. I also looked at the impact and how people would be so much happier due to what I was offering - their lives would be BETTER.
I was starry-eyed for months as I diligently worked.
Mind you - I didn’t pursue all the ideas I had, just the ones that passed all of my tests (again, much like dating).
And as I began business venture after business venture, made money, and got more involved in what I was doing, growing pains began to set in (um, in other words, the honeymoon phase began to fade).
There are people who thrive at starting businesses and there are people who thrive at growing businesses. I read about this not long into my second business venture (tutoring company - 2016), and I began to identify with the former.
I love coming up with business ideas, but even that statement isn’t accurate. I do not, ever, actively set out to “think” of ideas – ideas just come to me.
Ideas come from the things I see, things I read about, things I struggle with, and things I see others struggle with. Even as I’m writing this, one of my dogs is climbing around my legs, and my brain is already thinking of a product solution.
But somewhere in nearly a decade, despite writing in my journals that my greatest goal was to become a serial entrepreneur, I forgot.
It might’ve been because I have an awful memory or because I’ve been insanely busy trying to figure it all out, but I genuinely forgot that being a serial entrepreneur was the goal.
Furthermore, because I forgot, I might have been wasting my time on learning and stressing things that I don’t need to learn and stress in order to, essentially, start ideas. Because I forgot, I also haven’t spent enough time learning what it means to be a serial entrepreneur and how to work towards my exit strategy for the various ideas I am starting.
Right now, in this moment, on February 8, 2023, there is so much that I don’t know about the businesswoman I want to become. Although I am working on a lot of exciting things, there is a lot more that I need to learn, and that in itself is exciting.
But – make no mistake – it is also exhausting.
Although I love coming up with ideas and executing them as well as helping others execute their own ideas, having an increasingly creative, innovative, and solution-seeking brain is something that I can’t just turn off. It is always on - yes, sometimes even in my sleep.
So perhaps my biggest project of all time will one day need to be how to turn my brain on and off when I need it to.
Stay tuned. There’s more coming.
Whether I actively want it or not lol <3