3A)Entrepreneurship Story, learning from failure.

There have been just a few times in my life where I have felt like an entrepreneur. One of them was when I tried to start a mobile car wash with a friend. We had it all planned, we bought all the instruments we would need and the trailer to carry them around, later on, with the earnings, we would finance a minivan (here all instruments would go inside the minivan) to have two cars. Then, we made a deal with Washe, an app that works just like Uber but for car washes, people would request the service on the app, and we show up and do the job. I was in school, so I invested most of the money, and I would work just a few hours a week, while my friend would be full time. But then we got a problem, my friend got his license suspended and we couldn’t start by the time expected (he wasn’t able to drive). After a couple of months when he got his driver license back, he got in a car crash, which meant that we would have a car to do the job. After a while I got a job and decided that it wasn’t worthwhile anymore.

I don’t regret this experience, even though it was a rough period, it taught me a lot. Now I know that doing business isn’t just finding a need, or think about something “cool” and done, you start “making money”. Businesses take time and effort, they require patience and thinking about what could go wrong and how to avoid it. Business requires to be with the right people, because from the moment you get involve in one deal you must keep your word.

I was born and raised in Cuba, I lived there for most of my life and it is hard to be an entrepreneur and start your own business there because of the government policies and the lack of resources. But interestingly enough, I always liked to learn about economics, commerce and how businesses work, that is why my major is in Business Administration. Because of my experience from Cuba, starting a business isn’t something that comes to my mind naturally and that is why I wanted to minor in Entrepreneurship. I think that understanding how businesses start and how they work is essential for anyone in this country. Also, I want to be able to help others that have ideas but don’t know how to bring them to reality or lack the resources to start. In ENT 3003 I hope that I learn how to think like an entrepreneur, how to solve problems using critical thinking and analyzing situations, and I expect to learn what are the different resources that could be used for a startup and how to find them. This course is a requirement for my minor, but as I said before, I think that it is an interesting class that would be useful for everybody.