Evan Carmichael advises a 17-year-old wanting to start in oil or catering to first work for a small company with 5-10 employees for six months to a year. You'll learn the full business, build contacts, and understand what works, all while getting paid, before launching your own venture with a real foundation.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter readers, Lynette, who wrote in asking, "Evan, I'm 17 years old and I'm an aspiring entrepreneur. My interests are in the oil industry, as becoming a dealer for oil companies, and also in the catering industry. I would like to pursue my dream immediately after I finish my secondary education this year." So thanks for the question and congrats. Being a young entrepreneur is awesome. Brings me back to when I was finishing up high school and wanted to start my own business as well. My best advice here is if you've already determined that you're really passionate about this, so if it's the oil industry, you're really excited about it, this is where you want to spend your future, I don't know how much you know yet about the oil industry. Maybe you're, you know, kid genius and know everything, but chances are you're probably going to need to get a little bit of experience in there to be able to create your company. I try to find a company who you look up to and go work for them just to get that experience. If it's for a year to learn the ropes, and I try to find a company that is not too big. So I don't want you to get locked into a huge corporation where you're doing one thing all day and you're not learning. And you're set on the corporate ladder, I guess. What I try to look for is an opportunity to work with a smaller company, someone with 5 to 10 employees who's doing what you want to do, where you can learn a lot, take on a lot of responsibilities. And I try to get close to the owner, not just do your job but ask for anything else you could do to help. And basically you're trying to learn how to be an entrepreneur in that field. It'll do two things. One, it'll teach you about the business and see, do you want to do this type of work or not? And two, it'll give you an education, so you'll learn exactly what you need to do to run a business in the oil industry. And the more you can tie into the entrepreneur owner that you're working for and take on projects and learn about how they run their company, the more of an education you'll get, and you can tie in a lot of those lessons learned when you start your own business. It doesn't have to take too, too long to do, you know. If you're there for 6 months or a year, depending on how much you're taking on and how much you're learning, you're basically getting paid to learn about how to be a successful entrepreneur. So you can go and start your own business, not have a lot of experience, and try to do things by guessing and by trial and error, which is going to take a lot longer and cost you a lot of money as well, and time to get this thing going. Or you go work for somebody else, even if it's just for a short amount of time, learn about the business, get paid to do it, make some contacts, see what works and what doesn't work while you're getting paid, and then you have your experience and education to, to go on and launch your own company. So it's my number one recommendation after making sure you're passionate about the business, is if you don't have any experience, get some experience by going to work for another entrepreneur. And again, try to find that small company 5 to 10 employees where you can really get hands-on and learn about the business. So when you're ready to go launch your own, you have a lot of experience behind you, a lot more than you get maybe working at a bigger company where you're on the lower ranks and you're not assigned a lot of responsibility. So hopefully that helped. I'm not sure if that was the answer you're looking for, but honest opinion. So if you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I love seeing those come in. And I'd love to hear what you have to think. Please leave a comment below about this video, or if you have a question for your own company, I'd love to try to answer it for you. If you want to leave it, uh, below, and I love seeing those come in, and it always makes my day when I turn on the computer and see those new comments in the videos. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode. Thank you.
