Leading Edge for Entrepreneurs – Class One
After many weeks of waiting and one postponement my Business class Leading Edge for Entrepreneurs finally began! Unfortunately, I was still recovering from Covid, so my first class was via zoom with a lot of technical difficulties on their end. So, I didn’t get much out of the actual first class but they did email me some really good information and they gave us homework which has been really interesting.
The first piece of homework as something called Entrepreneur DNA Test. I really didn’t see the point of this one and noticed at the end there was a plug to purchase a book which I didn’t think was very cool. The second homework assignment was to watch a Tedtalk video by Simon Sinek called How Great Leaders Inspire Action, see link below:
https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action
This was a really interesting talk which lasted a little over 17 minutes and in it Sinek talked about and explained what he calls the “Golden Circle”, in the center is the word ‘why’, the next ring is ‘how’ and the last and outer ring is ‘what’. In a nutshell, what Simon Sinek said was the companies, ie Apple for example, that succeeded focused on the ‘Why’ as in why do we do what we do? The ones that were less likely to succeed focused on the ‘what’ as in what do we do. The key take away here is the ‘Why’ tells our story which in turn is more engaging to our potential audience/market. Make a connect so that people can relate, and they will be more likely to be interested in your product or in my case Airbnb. This makes perfect sense to me and explains the response I get when I tell people why I’m starting my Airbnb, which is so I can finally live a more balanced and joyful life and I go on to tell them what the Airbnb will allow me to do which is focus on my art, garden and eventually open up the studio to other artists as a Retreat, they get very excited! It really is all about the WHY! I highly recommend checking out the Tedtalk, I’m confident I’m going to be watching it more than once… I even reviewed it again for this blog post.
This then leads to the last homework assignment, which was to complete the Big WHY Canvas, which is kind of a knock off of the Business Model Canvas which I wrote about in an earlier blog post. However, the Big Why… focuses on the Why as mentioned in the Tedtalk as well as, or perhaps even more so, how we, the Entrepreneur, are going to take care of ourselves as we strive to start our business. I thought that was an interesting twist. The center of this chart was called ‘Your Big WHY’, which again relates to the Sinek talk. Then surrounding it where boxes that asked the following questions:
How will you support yourself emotionally?
How will you support yourself physically?
How will you support yourself mentally?
How will I financially support this endeavor?
Who will be your champions among family and friends?
Who will be your champions among small business?
Who will champion me, as in what will I do for myself to champion myself?
Who will I Champion?
It was an interesting exercise which required a lot of self-reflection. My Big Why was to Live a Balanced and Joyful live which includes more time to make art. While creating this kind of lifestyle for myself, I would in turn create an environment that would allow my guests the opportunity to do that as well by providing a quality, luxury experience for them while visiting Palisade. Balance and joyful are the key components of why I am doing what I am doing. So, the big take away from my first class… make sure you are clear on the Why! That clarity will be the key to your success and hopefully the key to my success!
