Business Plan - When did I realize I was an entrepreneur?

When did I realize I was an entrepreneur? So I got a question that came in on Twitter, love you guys, from Crawford and Wilcox who wrote in to say, "When did you first realize you were an entrepreneur?" That's a great question. I think I've been, I've had entrepreneurial tendencies my whole life. One of my earliest memories was when I was 5 years old and I encouraged my 3-year-old little sister to create drawings with me, paintings with me, that we then went door-to-door and started selling to our neighbors for 5 or 10 cents. And so I made my first, you know, nickel from my neighbor selling them a piece of art that I made. She probably just felt sorry for me or saw this cute little kid and wanted to support the cause. And I guess a nickel or dime isn't that much money. Through my childhood, I was always involved in various entrepreneurial ventures. So I sold lemonade, I sold baseball cards, I created garage sales. I remember one time trying to turn raisins into grapes on a hot summer day, and I had this plan to sell these grapes, not realizing that it was the opposite, where you turn grapes into raisins. Anyway, you know, that being said, throughout my, my early life, I thought I was going to have a job, you know. One of the One of the greatest experiences I had was with Junior Achievement, which was a program that's in elementary and high schools. And I remember when I was in grade 9, they taught us the basics of running a company through this couple-day course called Business Basics, where you launched a pen company yourself. And then they had a program called Company Program, where you launch a company in school after hours, and you have advisors and mentors who come from companies to help you actually launch your own product. And I started off just as an employee at that company, and then the next year became Vice President of Production, and the next year became the President of the company. And so grew through that, and I enjoyed the challenge, enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit. But still, when I graduated high school, when they asked you in your yearbook, you know, what do you want to be when you, you know, in 10 years, where do you see yourself? I said I would be a VP at some investment bank. That was still my goal, I guess, getting out of high school. And it changed in university. I had an opportunity to partner up with two people who were at my university, and they had started a software company, biotech software. They needed help getting it off the ground. They had a great piece of software but needed help promoting it, marketing it. I didn't know anything about software, I didn't know anything about biotech, and I joined in to help them just as a fun thing to do, new experience. See what happens. And it got to the point where you guys have heard this story probably if you've watched my channel for a while. I was making $300 a month, you know, barely surviving with this company, and I had opportunities to go work with two companies who were in investment banking and strategic consulting, things that I would have loved to do. Like, that was my— that was what I thought I wanted to do with my life. And they were courting me, and they flew me to New York and put me up in nice hotels and, you know, wined and dined me. Offering $80,000 to $100,000 starting salary, traveling around the world, doing lots of fun, cool things. Jobs that my friends were killing for. Jobs that even, you know, 2 years ago would have been, "Wow, I can't believe I got this opportunity. It's so great." And I had to decide between taking these, you know, high-paying dream job of a lifetime and continue with the business that I had joined as an owner, making $300 a month. And rationally, it makes sense to go for the job, right? Like, everything leads you towards a job. It's stable, it's secure, it's tons of money, it's what I always wanted, it's travel, it's like the dream opportunity. And yet something in my mind was just telling me, I want to— like, I feel there's more out of my business. I feel like I could turn this thing around. I feel like it could become something great. I feel like— I really felt like I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't at least try. You know, I didn't want to leave it in the situation where it was just struggling to get by, and I would regret that I didn't give it my best. And I had a really hard time with it. I struggled, and making that decision of what camp to go with. And what it finally came down to was, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a year. So my friends were taking a year off after graduating university, explore the world, doing whatever. And I thought, you know what, those jobs may not be those specific jobs, the job opportunities will still be available for me in a year if I go try something and come back. But I felt once I got on that corporate track, that it'd be super hard to jump off. It takes a lot of guts and courage to leave to leave a corporate track once you're on and once you start having family and other commitments and a huge mortgage to pay, all that stress. That's what gave me the confidence to focus on my business. I said, "I'll do it for a year and I can come back. I can always go back." And I never went back. And I think that was the defining moment for me, making that decision. That was the moment where I felt like I am an entrepreneur. And I'm so glad that I took that path and wish I could say that, oh, it was simple, of course, I'm gonna be an entrepreneur, it just makes sense. But I was scared, I was nervous, I didn't know if it was the right thing to do, I lost sleep, I was stressed out over it. But I listened to my heart instead of my head in that moment and it paid off. So that was the moment that I decided to become an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur. Thank you for the question and letting me share that with you guys today. If you guys like this video, please give it a thumbs up below. I'd love to hear your story. How did you decide to be an entrepreneur? Leave it in the comments below. Or if you have a question for me, you can leave it below, make a video response. And don't forget to click on my face and subscribe to the channel. Thank you guys so much, and I'll see you soon.