The First Interview

Last week, through the ISM program, I had the opportunity to interview a local entrepreneur. Due to confidentiality and respect, I won’t be able to share his name, details or business, but he allowed me to not only interview him, but tour his business, and meet his staff after. This was already more than what I could have asked for but on top of that, he gave me gifts related to his business along with a book my James Collins called Good to Great, which is about growing businesses and turning good businesses into great ones.

I learned a lot from this interview and gained information about business associations, strategies to find clients, hiring many employees, and also a lot of personal and philosophical knowledge and how it relates to business. One of the main points that intrigued me was when he told me that a really good quality to have as a business person was to know when to “butt-out.”

He told me that he was the type of person that would want his fingers in every part of the business, a quality I saw in myself, and that when your are running a business, your job isn’t to manufacture the product, your job is to make sure the business is able to do those and manage everything. When I applied this principle to entrepreneurship, I realized that an entrepreneur has multiple meanings. As long as I have interest in what I do, I don’t need to know every little step, just how to deal with people, and how to run the business.