The lost soul from South Africa

[decypha77]

Hello everyone, I found this forum by chance while sitting at my desk at work and decided, what the heck, let me sign up.

So I am an employee but a bit of background may help everyone see why I feel like I belong here.

I have always wanted to be in business for as long as I can remember and so at the age of 15 a friend of mine and I had written a shoddy business plan with a restaurant/lounge idea that we thought would be a fairly simple way to get started. We found the nearest VC and showed up without an appointment and actually got someone nice enough to listen to us. We walked out that office without even a scrap of the cash we would have liked to leave with but we did leave with a taste for something we loved.

Fast forward a few years and we had come up with a few more ideas but my dad started singing a tune about how business can wait and that education should come first. So I went by his word, dropped the business I was working on at the time and finished high school.

I got into varsity and started studying mechanical engineering, which was not for me as it was missing that business component I was addicted to.

I decided to relook some of our ideas and in research found that in the space between me dropping one of the ideas and picking it up again a few similar businesses had popped up. We went with it anyway and put together a much better business plan then our first, sent it to a VC and we got called in for an interview.

The analyst interviewing us really liked the idea but was put off by our lack of managerial experience as well as the lack of our own capital to put down so it was back to the drawing board again.

We slacked off business for a few months, with the itch to get back in it growing stronger and so we decided to find a business which needed no capital and no VCs. We could start this business, run it, grow it and get the experience they wanted and could then go back there with another one of our ideas that had been on the back-burner. The business in question was a marketing company (which we couldn't really define at first so that's all we said whenever someone asked).

In growing and learning we learnt that we gravitated more towards branding as a subset of marketing, and then that evolved to us understanding branding as more than marketing. The idea was that branding is about the customer, as is marketing, but the end goal of a good brand was to remove the risk of a bad experience for new customers (through the experiences of others) as well as to keep old customers coming back with the knowledge that the business will always be what they initially liked it for - it is the reason why each generation of humans doesn't need to experiment with lions or bears because someone a long time ago did, had dire consequences for it and then spread the word to everybody else. I love my business so I will cut it right here and get back to my story. I will discuss that in another forum sometime.

Now, my family kept pushing me to get my qualification and my dad told me that I could be in a better decision to get my business going when I start working.

Now I am working, the momentum in my business has slowed considerably and I slightly hate myself for listening to my dad's advice. I want to remedy this though and, having read some posts here, this may be one way to get my mind back on track.

I have some experience running a business now but it isn't extravagantly successful yet. And I am looking at reviving one of the business ideas we put on ice.

That's my story, so hello Fastlane Forum, I will be sharing with you my own personal journeys and immersing myself in all of yours.

Decypha

 

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