My Entrepreneurship Story

     An experience I had as an entrepreneur was more around the entrepreneur mindset. I was the store manager for a women’s clothing brand. The store I had taken over was a smaller volume location and had been through quite a bit of turbulent times between staffing changes and lack of team morale. Being new to the company, I had to win over my team and clientele. One goal that I set for our team was to be the best improving store for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital “Thanks and Giving” campaign we hosted every holiday season. For me it was more about creating a vision and a passion around something larger than the four walls of our store (essentially driving team morale). Our role as the store manager was to oversee the success of the campaign by collecting as many donations as possible. After being given our direction for the initiative, I made it my personal mission for our associates and clients to not only feel connected to the cause, but to possess a sense of passion for these children and their families.

     Where I had to start to my mission was transforming the thought process of my team and create a powerful connection to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s mission… “Finding cures. Saving Lives.” Connecting each individual associate to my personal vision and mission was imperative to our success. With much work and coaching, our team was set on the goal to do our best for the children and families at the hospital. After many weeks of asking for donations, educating our clients on their impact to the cause, and keeping a focus on our mission, we succeeded with raising over $6,600. (A location record with the previous year of $2650.) My team and our clients were elated to see the results.

     I had the pleasure of doing a second “Thanks and Giving” campaign in the same location. We had the same mission and vision; however, we wanted to do more for the hospital. This year we had raised our goal to strive for $10,000 (which was unheard of for the volume of store we were). My team and I were focused on our mission to create experiences that inspired our clients to give. We had a more difficult time trying to keep momentum going, and it was through those moments we found how we needed to improve or start from scratch in re-energizing our clients, and each other. After all was said and done, our store did achieve the goal with over $10,350 in donations throughout the campaign!

     To me a manager would have tried to achieve the objective and focus on the “how are we going to succeed”. After reading our Entrepreneurs’ Mantra, I realized we created an entrepreneurial mindset. We focused on with creating a need for both our associates and clients to get behind, we had taken our failures transforming them into opportunities, and maintained a vision to create a better world for those around us. Focusing on what we wanted to achieve and building up those around us created our success.

     I enrolled in ENT 3003 to figure out how to be more visionary and how to overcome setbacks. Many entrepreneurs have failures or setback, yet it is their drive that keeps them going. I would love to see how they overcame their pitfalls to become better business leaders in their fields.

(The photo above was taken during a visit to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in May 2015. The artist is a talented young patient that captured my heart.)