This year, I participated in a PhD candidate’s study on female entrepreneurs that provided a lot of insight into my path to become a small business owner. I wanted to share a few of these discoveries with you:
I don’t ever think about being an entrepreneur, really. When I think of the term entrepreneur, I think about a different industry, like biotech. Running an event planning business, for some reason, it doesn’t bring ‘entrepreneur’ to the forefront of my mind. Yet I define entrepreneur as somebody who starts a business, someone who is a risk-taker. And I don’t see myself as a risk-taker, which is funny! I also believe an entrepreneur is someone who’s good at building relationships and making things happen for themselves and I can easily identify with that. When I look in the mirror, I see the person who gets things done. I’m the doer.
I took a risk in starting this business but generally, everything is very calculated and thought through and planned. I have timelines for my life the same way I have timelines for my event, but I remain flexible. Once the business started to slow with the economy, I realized that’s what makes you an entrepreneur – going out to get that business and proving how you’re different from other people who also claim to be an event planner. How do I stand out? What do I do that’s different? How do I provide a better service? Defining that and promoting that. I think a lot of it also is the ability to work independently and to be self-motivated. That’s always been a part of me, even when I’ve been in-house in a full-time position, because my roles were always developing something from nothing. Positions didn’t exist, and I had to create them and mold them and make it something that could be carried out by someone else.
In regards to marketing, I get all of my business through referrals, so without those personal and professional relationships, I would have no business. Everything I do is about making relationships with other people to provide a service for me or for my client. Since I’m an event planner, I gather together resources to make something happen. So relationships are everything.
When I meet with a potential client, instead of sharing my stories and telling them what I can do and what I have done, it’s important for me to look at everything from the opposite person’s direction. So what are you trying to do? What are you trying to achieve? It changes the way you think and act and talk on a regular basis when you’re always asking that question. What do you need? What can I provide you? Focus on the other person sitting in front of you telling you what they need and what’s going on in their world.
I’ll send out four proposals for the same month, and I don’t like to do more than one event a month, because I want to provide a high level of service to my clients. I’m an external, internal person. I become ingrained in their company. I know, just like my full-time positions, if something is going on in another department that’s going to affect this event, and to do that, you need a lot of time for each project.
One of the things that I love about entrepreneurship is the ability to teach and tell others about your experience and help others move their efforts forward. So I could see myself eventually teaching a class on event planning or even teaching about building a business and sharing my experience. That’s something that I’d like to do in a couple of decades.
I’d love to hear from other entrepreneurs about your personal and professional insights! ~Ginger Donnan