The Early Entrepreneurial Bug
On today’s episode of Just the Tips, Dean and I are reunited over the Internet after being together in person for Dean’s wedding! After admitting the entire ceremony was a ruse just to get me to the U.K., Dean and I talk about a little cake controversy after the wedding, and all of the podcast fodder that Dean’s groomsmen bestowed upon me during their speeches. So today’s episode is all about war stories from jobs and companies past. And of course, we kick it all off with Dean selling parakeets. Because he’s Dean Holland and that’s what he does.
You say budgie, I say budget
Because it was brought up in one of the speeches, I had to ask Dean about selling parakeets (or as they call them in the UK, budgies) when he was a kid. And so it turns out that young, entrepreneurial, 12-year-old Dean decided that he was going to turn his parents’ garden shed into a bird sanctuary of sorts. But Dean quickly realized he could make more money if he bought show birds, rather than common parakeets. But the story took a tragic turn, when he went out to the shed to discover the birds were killing each other. And the story gets even stranger from there! Trust me, there are tips here on this week’s Just the Tips beyond “don’t be an amateur bird breeder.”
James’s first sale
I told Dean about how I first dipped my toe into enterprise. When I was about 10 years old, my parents had left me home alone, and I was hanging out in front of my house when a neighbor pulled his pickup into my driveway. After a little chit-chat, he mentioned that he liked my swingset. And boom, I made him make me an offer, and a salesman was born. There’s more to the story than that, and this is a really fun episode of Just the Tips, where we tell the shaggiest of shaggy dog stories from our past.
The early entrepreneurial bug
As many of our guests have mentioned on the show, there’s something about entrepreneurs that gets them started at a young age But as Dean says on this week’s Just the Tips, the idea of seeking help, of appreciating mentorship or studying under a coach, didn’t really sink in with him early on. For the most part, he always wanted to figure things out himself. But it was a spark of curiosity in people and what made people do certain things that eventually led him to his current path.
Follow your curiosity
I told Dean this story about a time in college when I was delivering pizzas, and I saw this guy driving this really nice car. So I asked him about it, what he does and how he got to the point where he could afford the car. And not only that, I took a quick break from my work to go chat with the guy some more, and he ended up being someone who gave me a lot of good advice after that, as well. And so you never know unless you start talking to someone, just what you can learn from them. This was a super fun episode of Just the Tips, opening up the closet and seeing what budgie skeletons are in there.
Outline of This Episode
- [6:13] The value of vacation
- [16:23] The early days of enterprise
- [20:20] Learning to accept coaching
- [22:30] Follow your curiosity
Music for “Just The Tips” is titled, “Happy Happy Game Show” by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
Digital Business Entrepreneurs: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DigitalBusinessEntrepreneurs/
