Second Wave of Opportunity
From Entrepreneurship to Covid-19
I feel that entrepreneurship is like surfing. I see a wave coming at the horizon and I want to ride it. The wave grows bigger and bigger and then suddenly, I realize it’s much bigger than I thought and that I’m really not ready for it. I’m not ready for that wave.
Today I see so many businesses going down the primrose path and headed to disaster as well as well-founded industries crashing and burning. Perhaps Covid was the catalyst in this destruction or the tide that submerged all the surfers. Where they all prepared?
I studied management and entrepreneurship in university and was always passionate about the great entrepreneurs of our world, the Fords, the Carnegies, the Edisons and the Musks of this world.
I made sure I knew entrepreneurship theories as well as possible and read about everything these great magnates had accomplished and how they got their claim to fame.
After graduation, I decided to build my first startup. I figured that with all of the knowledge I had acquired it would be easy right? I was already making my business plan and my financial projections. We hadn’t made our first sale yet but would be hitting a million dollar in revenue within 2 years!
Being an entrepreneur was easy, I was wondering why only a few people were doing it!
And then, a few months in, that’s when I started to realize. “Wow this is HARD” “What am I even doing! I know nothing about entrepreneurship!”
How do you incorporate? How do you do bookkeeping, accounting, legal? How do you even hire someone to get started with?
I was building a food preparation and delivery business. I did not know how much regulation there was around that industry, you need a special machine to record all your sales, dozens of hours of food safety training and then all the logistics, planning and provisioning that come with perishables!
Yet, my cofounders and I didn’t get discouraged. We kept powering through with it and withing the first year, published our ordering app online, started marketing it and growing organically! We had a food subscription service. You could subscribe to 5, 7 or 14 meals a week, all warm and ready to…
