Entrepreneurship is in my Blood

As a kid we ate at the dinner table every night. With a gleam in his eye my father would fill us in on the latest details of the big deal he was working to put together. Who the players were. How he made a connection with the client. How the negotiations were going. He told us about his dream of becoming a millionaire by the time he was 30 and reminded us that we would never be successful working for someone else. My dad started his own business selling metalworking machinery. He was a tool salesman selling the small tools these machines used. He was sitting in a restaurant one day and overheard a man talking about a machine he was in the market for but couldn't find. My father happened to know a company that had such a machine, but it was in pretty rough shape. He walked over and gave the man his card and told him he could supply him the machine. Keep in mind my dad had no idea how he was going to pull this off at the time. He was able to get a contract to sell the machine and then arranged to have a third party rebuild and refurbish it. He then sold the machine to the man he met in the restaurant, earning a healthy commission. All with no money out of his pocket. Sound familiar? After making this deal, he quit his sales job and started his own business selling metalworking machinery.

I watched my father struggle as the steel industry in the Northeast eventually died and moved overseas. Manufacturing in America slowly was taken over by other countries like China and Taiwan. His business failed and he eventually put his sales skills to work selling life insurance. He became one of their top producers. Seeing what my dad went through was my motivation for getting an engineering degree and working for someone else for the past 25 years. I didn't want to go through what he had. But thinking back I never saw the same excitement in him when talking about closing a sale in insurance. The excitement of building something for himself and his family wasn't there. Now, as I begin my entrepreneurial journey I find myself getting excited about closing my first wholesaling deal. I even catch myself talking about it to my kids just like my dad did years ago. I guess it's in my blood too.