My first real experience with entrepreneurship was when my father started to work with an entrepreneur from Cape Coral. We lived in the Florida Keys and my father was involved in the restaurant business, where most restaurants were located on the water. The entrepreneur owned a lobster company with Maine lobsters which do not live anywhere in the Florida Keys but are highly favored by many seafood consumers. My father was trying to find a way to bring more attention and business to the local restaurants that were being beat out by the expanding and cheaper chain restaurants. The entrepreneur thought of the idea to tear open some old toy claw machines that were sitting in a warehouse and add a chiller along with sealed glass to hold salt water in the tank instead of your standard stuffed animals or candy. He reached out to my father to help him contact the local restaurants to put live Maine lobster claw machines in them in order to gain more tourist attraction and revenue. My dad called his friends and local owners he knew and got 5 installed within the first month. How it worked was there would be a toy claw machine in the restaurants filled with salt water and live Maine lobsters and you would pay $3 per try to catch a lobster for yourself. If you managed to catch one, than you could either take it home or the restaurant would cook it there for you as your meal for $10 (an average full lobster entree in the keys could be anywhere from $20-40$ dollars). My father would always take me along to check on the machines and get more lobsters from Cape Coral would he would meet and talk with his partner as well about other destinations in the keys as well as expanding to other spots in Florida. Coming into restaurants some nights where the machines were located you would see crowds of people surrounding the machine to watch customers attempt to catch themselves a lobster.
I enrolled into ENT3003 because of an elective requirement, however, the class did come off as very interesting to me. I do have aspirations to one day own my own business and/or start up a small business on my own and there is no better way to start learning about the fundamentals to do that than by taking this course. I have already learned within a couple weeks of this course that a true entrepreneur is not what the majority population believes it to be and there are way more of them out there than I first thought once I began to understand its true definition.
No comments:
Post a Comment