Meet The Entrepreneur Who Started with Junior Achievements!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and today I want to do something a little bit different. Usually I do profiles of famous entrepreneurs and the top lessons you can learn from their success, or I'm answering a question from one of my readers. Today I want to share a little bit about my story and how I became an entrepreneur, as well as a program that really helped give me the confidence to start my business and the top 3 lessons that I learned from that program. I hope you enjoy. Okay, so here's a little bit about my story. I've been an entrepreneur as long as I can remember. The first memory that I have of being an entrepreneur is when I was 5 years old, I convinced my 3-year-old little sister to draw some pictures with me with crayon, and then we went door to door trying to sell it. And we made our first sale to our neighbor for 10 cents, and I've been an entrepreneur ever since. Most of the businesses that I had early on didn't go anywhere. Baseball card businesses, you know, I made a little bit of money, extra spending money, but but that weren't really businesses. It wasn't until high school where I joined a program called Junior Achievement that really gave me the confidence to become an entrepreneur. And what Junior Achievement is, is they have 40 kids that they get into an after-school program called the Company Program and they launch their own company. And you have to come up with a product idea, you have to elect a president and vice president, you have to do a business plan, you have to raise capital. Basically all the things that you have to do to run a real business, but you're in high school and you've got some mentors from different companies to help guide you along the way. And so Junior Achievement really gave me a lot of the confidence that I needed to start my business. When I got to university, I remember not having anything about entrepreneurship until I got to a fourth-year course, and in that class, I had already done most of the stuff that they were teaching in my Junior Achievement program, and I was already running my business. So I really give Junior Achievement a lot of the credit to me wanting to start my own business and to the success that I've had as an entrepreneur. And so I thought I would share the top 3 lessons that I've learned from my experience with Junior Achievement that have helped me grow my business. So the first lesson that I learned was you have to sell. I was in Junior Achievement for 3 years, and some years we had really good products but bad salespeople on our team, and we didn't really go anywhere with our company. And in other years we had not so great products, you know, decent products, gift baskets, these aren't high-tech products, it's high school. But we had a really good sales team and we were a lot more successful. And selling isn't really a skill that they teach you in school, but it is a really vital life skill that you need to be successful as an entrepreneur and as even a professional. And so I really credit Junior Achievement for giving me that skill. But you have to really think about in your organization selling. You need everybody to know how to sell in order for your company to get to that next level of success. The second thing I learned from GeneAchievement is get big corporate orders. When we first started, we tried to sell to our friends and our family and basically everybody that we knew who would, you know, maybe we could guilt into buying one of our products. Then we quickly discovered that we were out of friends and family to be able to sell our stuff to and sales dried up. So we had to figure out other ways to go out and get orders, and my most successful year with Junior Achievement was when we were able to get a big corporate company to make bigger purchases. So we had fewer clients, but they made a lot more purchases, and it was an ongoing type of transaction. So with your own business, something I still think about today, a lot of people are struggling trying to sell one-off deals to customers who may not come back, or maybe a long time before they come back again. And it's really time-consuming. But if you can go out and get bigger orders that are more dollars for you and could be an ongoing type of deal as well, it's much more profitable for your business. The third thing I learned from Junior Achievement is get everyone involved. In a Junior Achievement company, you might have 40 high school kids in the program, and there's only so many management positions. Once you elect your president and all your vice presidents, everybody else are just workers in the company. And it's really important that you make them feel involved and an important part of the company, or they're going to leave the company and it's just going to be the management team that's left. And that's an important lesson for your own business. You might be by yourself now, you might have a couple of people around you, and you're the founder of the business, you're going to care way more than everybody else, but you want to make sure that everybody does feel like they're attached to the company and they feel that they're important. They feel like what they're giving is a meaningful contribution and they're happy about what they're doing with your company. The more you can make it feel like employees are really happy with what they're doing and that what they're doing is really important, the more likely you're going to get better workers, you're going to retain them, and your company is going to grow. So Junior Achievement helps over 250,000 students here in Canada and many, many more around the world. Wherever you are, There's probably a local Junior Achievement chapter close to you, and I encourage you to check it out, get involved, and be a mentor to the new up-and-coming generation of student entrepreneurs. So that's it for today. Thank you for joining me for this video. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up. I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment below, and Stay tuned for the next episode.