Evan Carmichael says you need real-world experience before launching a venture. His two-step strategy: research how successful companies in your industry got started, then work for an established player to build skills and contacts while getting paid to learn. He applies this to someone wanting to start a fashion show, recommending they first work at an existing fashion-event firm.
Chapters
Go get some experience. If you have no idea what you're doing, if you are trying something you've never done before, you have zero experience, before you start and invest a ton of money into this and risk losing everything, go get some experience. Okay, learn from someone who's done it and can give you some advice on it so that when you go do it yourself, you have a higher degree of being successful. If you think about business and making money, okay, making money comes from providing value. That, that's one of the most important rules in business. You want to make a lot of money, provide a lot of value to somebody. If you've never done something before, how can you provide somebody with a lot of value? It's probably not going to happen, and you learn how to give value through experience. So if you've never done anything before, before you launch, go get some experience. It's not that you can't learn by doing and learning your own business from, from scratch, but your chances go up dramatically when somebody can show you what to do. They can teach you the ropes and you can learn on somebody else's dime. You get paid to make mistakes. I got a question from one of my YouTube viewers. Love you guys. Naim, name Sorry for mispronouncing that. I have a question. I'm planning to have my own fashion show, but I have no idea how to make an event plan to convince sponsors. Thank you very much. So first of all, congrats on being willing to reach out and ask for help. Okay, that, that's a great step because a lot of entrepreneurs try to do everything themselves and end up failing. And a lot of fashion shows fail not because they don't have great clothing, but because they don't have the support to make this thing happen. My best advice for you, okay? I'm not in the fashion show business, but if I was, if I wanted to start your business, here's what I would do. The first thing I would do is start researching who's been massively successful in this. I'm a big believer in modeling success, so find out who puts on some of the biggest fashion shows in the world and how did they get started. Okay, I don't care how they make a new fashion show now, whatever the biggest fashion show in the world is. I don't care how they do it now. How did they do their first one? How did they get their first sponsor? And the bigger the company is, the easier it's going to be to find their story. This is what got me through when I started my software company. I started researching companies like Microsoft and McAfee and Intuit, big software companies. Looked at how did they get started, and I used their strategies to help me build my business, and it worked. And finally, after seeing just struggle after struggle after struggle, I started seeing some results. I started seeing some success. So think about how you can model somebody. Step 2 is go work for somebody. And you might be thinking, Evan, what are you, crazy? Go work for somebody? I'm an entrepreneur. I'm doing my own thing. I want to be my own boss. Why? Why would I, you know, want to start my own business and go work for somebody else? To learn. The only reason you get a job is to learn. If you go work at company that is putting on fashion shows and doing a great job of it, they will ramp up your, your experience level and your knowledge gap so quickly, way faster than if you try to do everything yourself. Target a company that has 10 employees or so and go work for them. Maybe it's for 3 months, maybe it's 6 months, maybe it's a year, and you start your things on the side. But on the, in the meantime, You're making money from your job, you're learning the ropes, you're building experience, you're building up contacts so that when you do your own thing, it has a much greater degree, much higher percentage chance of being successful. Because what I don't want to have happen for you, you know, I know how you're making money right now, but I don't want you to invest everything into this fashion show, it's a bust because you've never done it before, and you have to go back and get a job and you give up on your dream. That's what I don't want to have happen. That's what happens to most people. They start up without any experience and they fail and say, "I can't do this," and go back and get a job. Better to get a job sooner in an industry that's going to teach you something and use that experience to launch your company. So maybe not the news that you wanted to hear, but it's the best advice I have for you and will help you save your business. So step 1: Model success. Find somebody who's already done what you're trying to do, Find the biggest players in the industry, the ones who are hugely successful right now, and look at how they got started, how they found their first sponsor, how they made their first million. That's where you can learn. And two, go get a job working in your industry. Work for a company who you look up to, who you respect, who you wanna be in a couple years, and learn how they got there, and get paid to make mistakes. Good luck, and believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. Let me hear what you have to think. Leave a comment, let me know what you think about the video, If you have a question, leave it below. I'll make a video response. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
