This past week, I had the
pleasure of meeting at the entrepreneurship center at Belmont University's Massey Graduate School of Business and speaking to a packed
room of business school students. The event location was the “Hatchery”
which is actually more of an open work area/office rather than a formal
conference room. Once I arrived my first thought was that this was
a perfect location/setup for early stage entrepreneurs who have a need to
collaborate, share creative thoughts, strategies.
And for me, I must say I
LOVED the location and the format. Not only was the location different from the
typical business school classroom setup (with a PowerPoint, projector, etc.), the format was truly more of a “meetup” and not a formal
speech/presentation. In fact, I showed exactly one slide (about my
book) at the start of our discussion and never thought about another slide for
the next hour. One thing I emphasized in my comments to the students was
how you had to be able to “take a punch” to be a successful entrepreneur
and after hearing the stories of ISI’s past (loss of startup funding,
embezzlement, 80% sales team turnover etc.). I think they got the message loud
and clear.
I also talked a lot about how
ISI has focused on creating a “farm system” of millennials and how important it
is for a business to develop their young talent in order to have a
sustainable future. I also noted that as entrepreneur, the #1 thing you should
do (from day one) is to focus your time on “building quality relationships with
not only your employees, but your customers, suppliers, partners etc. I have
always believed that ISI’s relationships and reputation (honesty, integrity,
ethics etc.) are the 2 key ingredients to our success almost 20 years later
The last half of my visit was
answering a wide variety of really great questions about how ISI
identifies potential employees, calculating early stage equity share (as a
startup) as well as developing future new healthcare products, not “growing
broke” (as a business) and the long term sustainability plans for the company. Very
thought provoking and I must say that some questions were easier to
answer than others! As I left the campus that afternoon, I truly hope
that my visit to the Belmont entrepreneurship center provided the students some
encouragement and real value in their pursuit of the American dream.