Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour in a Box

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Adam Witty, Founder & CEO, Advantage Media Group

Quotes/story about Walt Disney
Benefits of Entrepreneurship
- "It can allow you to have freedom and flexibility, it allows you to pursue your dreams, It can give you vast financial resources that can allow you to touch the lives of many people, and live the life that you want to live…"
Important Trait #1 of Entrepreneurs: Optimism
- “Thomas Edison said this, “I haven’t failed, I just found 10,000 ways that it would work… pretty good way to look at failure isn’t it?”
What is an Entrepreneur?
- “An entrepreneur is someone who can identify opportunities and see things that others can’t see…”
Important Trait #2 of Entrepreneurs: Persistence
- “If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being the most highly correlated with success in any field, I would choose that of persistence”
- “Listen Guys, it’s all not about the money… but its about pursuing your dreams and if you pursue your dreams and if you have persistence to purse those dreams... I call it consistence persistence… you can get there…”
Important Trait #3 of Entrepreneurs: Ability to Sell
- “You may say you hate sales, well it’s not just selling your product, its selling yourself… ‘To get that girlfriend, to get into college… Every single day you are selling, whether you like it or not you are selling…”
- “Every successful entrepreneur that I’ve ever met can Sell, Baby”
- “The world belongs to a salesman with Leadership”
Adam talks about his companies and how he got started out with his first company, Ticket Advantage.
Adam on Resourcefulness of entrepreneurs:
- “All entrepreneurs are resourceful; it’s like making chicken salad out of chicken shit”
- “They have the resourcefulness to learn nothing into something”
There are more benefits of being an Entrepreneur than money:
- “A lot of people may say they’ll all greed, their in it for the money… and yes you can do very well financially when you start your own business but that’s not the only reason to go into to, there are lots of good things you can do for people”
- “I have 6 employees at my company… and I take pride in knowing that I provide the livelihood for these 6 people”
Where is Ticket Advantage today? And what do my other companies do?
Six Things you can do today to get you on your journey:
Have a Vision, Have a Big Dream
- “Dream big dreams… The dreams, the innovators, the change agents of the world… there the ones that are think of these great ideas… If you can dream it… do it...”
Set Goals
- “I realized as I study that the successful people I come into contact with have written goals…”
Time Management
- “I think the tube (TV) is the great American income reducer… I walk away dumber from watching TV”
Read Books
- “Our Lives change (for the better) in just two ways… the people we meet and the books we read”
Seek Mentors
- "I believe in modeling… going out there and finding someone who is doing what you want to do and learning from them"
Take Action
- “I can sum up all motivation and inspiration into one word… do”
- “Take action, if you get off your butt and do something..,. Whatever you want to achieve in life, you can”

Ephren Taylor, Co-founder & CEO, AmoroCorp

At 12, I was addicted to Video Games, How do I pay for it?
Getting a Real Job
Creating the next Monster.com: how do we get our customers?
We have 30,000 hits on our website, but no money? What do we do?
College or the company? How do we sell this thing?
Let's try to scale this thing. Where do we get funding?
The next venture. I found it in a church
Two things you need to be when pursuing an entrepreneurial venture:
- “You definitely want to be relentless whenever you are pursuing an entrepreneurial passion.”
- “You want to be passionate about it because if you aren’t passionate what your attempting to do, whether it's a business, or its your career, faith or family… It will fail”

Joshua Newman, Co-founder & CEO, Cyan Pictures

Story about screwing up
How to grow a company:
- “You wildly over promise (to clients), and then you go home and you freak out and you’re like ‘Crap, what have we gotten ourselves into,' and then you find some way to make it happen”
Jumping into the film industry
Why you don’t want a job
"All you need to do is just start the company, and keep it going, 2 steps... that’s it."
“Building a network is the best thing you can do to start a company and get a job, or anything in life”
“Just ask people out to lunch… 95% of them will respond back because you sought them out.”
Good books to read:
- Getting Things Done
- What Smart Students Know
Concepts of companies change, just jump in:
- “What you think what your company will do in the beginning is probably not its going to really be in the end”
- "Don’t start a lemonade stand, start a lemonade stand company that franchisees lemonade stands to seven year olds… Come up with something big to get yourself fired up."
Forget business plans. Can you sum up everything in 5 minutes?
- “Forget business plans. No one reads them, investors don’t want to, and you won’t read it after you write it. See if you can stand in front of a mirror and in 5 minutes summarize what your company does and why you’re going to take over the world with it”
Giving equity to gain employees:
- “Don’t be stupid, I know entrepreneurs don’t like giving equity away, but you rather have 50% of something then 100% of nothing”
Two rules to finding a team:
- “Only hire people smarter than you are because… Only rocket science is rocket science. Everything else can be learned”
- “They have to pass the road trip test… If you can’t go from New York to San Francisco without stabbing their eyes out, then you probably don’t want to work with them”
What your network is good for:
- “When you need to start a new company, then go back to your network and ask them for everything, as much help as possible… Ask people for funding who you might not think have money…”
Just do it
- “Every day you turn on that light... You won that day… You should just shoot, fire, aim… Just go for and fix it later.”

Nicolas Thomley, Co-founder & CEO, Pinnacle Services

What my companies do today…
Rewind: Deciding what I should do after high school?
Starting my first business
Getting the first break: Was it luck?
Where to get money to scale the business? Call Grandma!
Having time to build the vision of the company
The future of the company
Passion is key to entrepreneurship

Tom Szaky, Co-founder & CEO, TerraCycle

About TerraCycle
How did it get started?
The decision: To quit or not?
Raising money to grow without VCs or angel investors
Growing the business with no cash flow
Evolution of the triple bottom line

Rahim Fazal, Serial Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs and having jobs
- “Entrepreneurs tend to be really really bad employees. Entrepreneurs usually can’t get jobs... and even when they do get them… they can’t seem to hold them… Its like the way cats feel when you try to make them take a bath… they just don’t want to do it”
Personal history of jobs
Starting the business
Getting the offer to sell the company
Telling the parents
Was it luck?
- “It is partly luck… But luck only comes to people who look for it”
Important things to get your business going?
- Be an Expert
- Get a Crew
- Create a Plan
- Have a Mentor
- Get Noticed
- Get Going

Michael Simmons & Sheena Lindahl, Co-founders, Extreme Entrepreneurship Education

What is Extreme Entrepreneurship?
Two key things for success?
- Defining your dream
- Taking Action on that dream
Two ways of thinking about your future:
- Follow your dream
- Follow what is available to you based on your resources
History and lows of Michael’s web design business
Why it was so challenging: was I a failure?
What Is a dream?
Why is it important?
- Dreams guide your decisions now.
- Stating and pursuing a dream helps you be more successful.
- Sharing your dream helps you build closer relationships with others.
Exercise: how to find your dream
Comfort Zone
What’s that one simple step you can take today to get to your dream?

Ryan Allis, Co-founder and CEO, Broadwick

Overview on how to grow a company to a million dollars
How I got started
Word of mouth marketing is the best marketing
“When you get your business to the point where you have some revenue and you can grow, you can either do it yourself and create a job for yourself or hire other people to do the work to create a business.”
The fortune of using someone else’s money to get experience.
“I always say that it is usually very helpful to intern or work in the industry you want to start a business within before you start the business since it can help you save time and money”
Starting the first venture
“So from the happenstance of talking to someone at an entrepreneurial club meeting, we happen to create a company that employs quite a bit of people and is the second biggest provider of email marketing solutions in the world.”
Overview of the 10 Steps:
- Decide what to sell
  - “If you have a business Idea you don’t know if you want to pursue or you don’t know if it will work… continuously be aware of the products you use every day. How can they be better? What need or pain do you have in your life that can be fulfilled or solved by doing something slightly different or new that could make your life completely better?”
  - ‘If you don’t have a business idea, you can usually find someone that does at networking events, over half the room has ideas, work with those people’
  - “There are lots of ideas, if you are afraid of people stealing your idea, don’t be. Because there are millions of ideas in the world and the only thing that matters is people who can execute on them. In order for them to steal the idea, they would have to work their butt off for 5 years to get the thing to work right too”
- Test the idea
  - “Before you spend the next few years of your life working on this business, you have to evaluate this idea, put it through a set of filters to determine if it is a true business opportunity”
- Choose the type of company
  - Sole Proprietor
  - LLC
  - C Corp
  - S Corp
- Raise funds
  - How much money do you need?
  - “If you can do it yourself, if you can do it with a few hundred dollars, or a few thousand dollars, at least get started so you have something and you’re ready to sale. As a young entrepreneur it makes a lot of sense to do it because it takes a lot of people spends months and months trying to raise $50,000 or $100,000 for their business when they could have gave equity to that group of people to get the $50,000”
  - Choose the type of funding: debt vs. equity
  - Decide where to get the money
  - “Never send a business plan without it being referred to them by someone they know”
  - Bootstrapping - making money without having money
  - Create a business plan or parts of a business plan
- Develop your market positioning strategy
  - “Marketing to me is pretty simple. It’s about figuring out who the people are who want to buy your product. And how to position or market your product in those places where they are looking for your type of product.”
- Develop your sales strategy
- Build your team
  - “The four things I looked for was experience in the related areas you are hiring for, communication skills, and a very important one, the ability to take intuitive and also the ability to deal with ambiguous situations.”
- Become a good manager
- Build systems - investors invest in systems…
- Scale the model
- Plan your exit

Scott Hill, Founder & CEO, CIK Enterprises

How did I get here?
Things I took advantage of in college:
- Volunteer management positions
  
  “Try to find a volunteer management position somewhere… There is nothing harder than managing volunteers”
- Public speaking
  
  “I have to speak for my company all the time and though I may sound great at it, there is a great comfort level that exist that I was able to get [from public speaking]”
- Cramming
  
  ‘Cramming prepares you to be able to do a lot of things in a short amount of time… In business, you don’t have two or three weeks to get on something, either you do it now or you lose…’
Business is a game
Internships are practice games
Playing the game and being seen as a star
Finding your niche in a company:
- “ In Business, There are all kinds of components as to being players on a team… its figuring out what your unique ability for that team… you need to be able to contribute and focus in on that and internships and a lot of other things like that can help you learn a little bit about that before you get started.”
Inspiring a new team: without direction, they will think you are lost.
Finding my way into the game
Making sales calls to eat! Either I get it or I eat crow…
Just keep going:
- “I felt that if I stay in this game long enough… I could get it figured out so I could do great thing… It’s one of my big beliefs that people spend too much time figuring out… What type of business can I get going… I need to find something I love… when I look back… It really doesn’t matter… Because if your successful in building your business… here is what business ends up becoming… managing people and setting direction.”
That first employee
- “Once you get that first employee, you stop working for yourself.”
Selling is apart of life, you sell all the time…
“You have a lot of freedom in entrepreneurship but you also have a lot of responsibility.”
Bad things happen and luck is key, but taking advantage of the opportunities you have is most important.
Best time to start a company is in a recession
Motivation, vision and open book management
A college degree only gets you that first job… you are an equal to everyone after that.
My next venture
Believe in open management even in the early start-up days…

Tara Dawood, CEO, Dawood Capital Management

Believe in yourself
- “If you don’t believe in yourself, no one will.”
Building your idea
- “When you have an idea, you have to believe in it enough, because of a lot of other people won’t”
- “The biggest ideas have the biggest critics.”
About Dawood Savings Fund
Being an entrepreneur
- “When you are an entrepreneur, anything is possible if you are willing to work for it.”
An entrepreneur needs three things:
- Good Idea
- Great Team
- Capital
“A good idea can get you only so far. You need strength, momentum, and a resource of people, that’s your human capital. Your great team makes those ideas grow. An amazing team can overcome impressive boundaries, but if the idea is weak, you can only go so far”
Ingredients of your idea
- “Your idea needs to be defensible, that can be protected, and it needs to be unique and justifiable.”
- “Stake your claim on what your idea is. An ad/marketing campaign early on is a huge advantage.”
- Get legal protection.
- “Your idea has to be realistic, no venture capitalist will listen to you if you say you want to make people invisible or make Michael Jackson an Oscar winner”
- "Your Idea has to be scalable for it to be sustainable in the long run."
- “Can you make your idea come true,? It has to be executable.”
Ingredients of a good team
- “You have to find great, talented, hard-working people for your idea that you can afford”
- “So when you get together with your team, you have to build it slowly.”
- “Get people who believe in you and get people based on your needs not what someone else has heard of”
Money?!?
- “There are more resources and ways to get money than ever before.”
- “Be careful with your spending especially in the beginning.”
Just do it
- “Don’t be afraid to fail. You are young and you have a lot of time.”

Ray Dalton, Founder & CEO, Parts Source

Story about tough childhood:
- “In the early days, the motivation for me was my fear of failure… because I wasn’t going back... So I was willing to put in the extra effort… I was willing to do more than someone else was…I was willing to study a little harder …to do something that says I’m not going to be like everyone else”
Problem solving:
- “The resolution to your problem is first recognizing that there is a problem to be solved… you can not possible say you got a problem if you can figure out what your problem is… since you are the closest person to the [your] problem, you’re the closest to solving it”
Value of Time:
- “Best advice I can give to a student about to graduate is that the most valuable asset you have is time… Don’t waste it...”
What a CEO really is:
- “A CEO is a Chief Encouragement Officer… it is to cause other people to do more what we believe to be true, so we can all move forward here”
What is entrepreneurship?
- “Entrepreneurship is really just accelerating the enterprise… It's achieving more with a person who doesn’t have an entrepreneurial spirit… A person willing to take a little bit more risk than a person not willing to take that much risk… A person who is willing to move faster than a person who isn’t willing to move as fast.”
Importance of utilizing your resources:
Treating employees with respect:
- “The key to success is that I never forgot where I came from… I know the name of every employee…I give equity of my companies to the employees…why? Because owners treat their houses better than renters do”
- “When you have an attitude that all businesses are services businesses the first four letters of services is the same as servant… then all of a sudden it really isn’t about me, it’s really about me representing them [employees]. Willing to come beside them, willing to celebrate with them, and being able to work through things with them.”
What are you willing to work for?
- “I want you to look inside your life and say, What do I want to be? And then ask am I willing to work to get there? And then if you say no, you figure the answer to A is wrong and go take the test again… So don’t kid yourself.. because the only you are lying to is yourself, nobody else and the only person you think you will disappoint is you but it will be a lot of other people”
5 C’s of Success
Confidence
- “Do you believe you can do it? If you can’t believe in it, no one else will be willing to believe you”
Creditability
- “Creditability is not for sale; once you lose it... it does not come back”
- “We all stretch where we’re we are going… but if you ever stretch so far that you don’t believe you can get there... then that’s a loss of creditability”
Communication
- “Does it excite you to talk about your company? Do you feel good when you talk about it? That’s passion and that's what causes it to grow because everyone wants a little piece of that passion”
Community
- “If you want to be success, it cannot be all about you… Because if you want people to be successful, you will benefit from other people's success”
Compliment
- There must have been someone who did something to make you successful and when you realize and appreciate it, that is what makes you successful”

Doug Fath, Founder & CEO, Faithful Investments

Background info on my companies
Main messages:
- “Anyone in this room can build a profitable business from their passion.”
- “Entrepreneurs and leaders aren’t born that way, entrepreneurs and leaders are developed.”
- “70% of graduates are dissatisfied with their careers within 5 years of graduating.”
Story on why you shouldn't listen to everyone else
- “People are dissatisfied with their careers because they listen to what everyone else tells them they should want.”
Being rejected and that little voice…
Sharing my business idea and the silence that followed…
The 30% that get it
- “30% that are satisfied with their careers are the ones that follow their instinct.”
I got an idea but how do I get started?
- Take action and ask for help!
The biggest mistake that I have made
- “When your company is growing, you can’t do it by yourself.”
- “It’s important to have a business system in place that runs even if you aren’t there”
- “I lost out on 100,000’s of dollars because I didn’t create business system, I had to sell my company for a fraction of what it was worth.”
How do you start without money?
- "There is so much money out there, if you can prove that you can keep doing it, people will throw money at you."
Banks vs. investors: what’s the difference?
Start a business on your own or with a partner?
Honesty and Accountability is worth more to Investors even in the Bad times.
How I built my network and mentors
- “I just went out there and found groups and people and told them what I trying to do.”

Extreme Entrepreneurship philosophy based on bestelling book, The Student Success Manifesto.

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