Great Mentor Meeting

Today I had my first meeting with my mentor from The New Venture Mentor Program, which is part of the 80K NYU Maximum Exposure Business Plan Competition. My mentor is currently the President of The Associated Blind and has a lot of publishing industry expertise including growing a company to 9 million in sales. After our nearly 2-hour meeting (the time definitely flew by!), I came away with three pages of notes. Below are some of the key take-aways I had:

1. Strategically leverage your assets. As the company grows, we will have content, which we can repurpose and license/franchise to different market niches and geographics. For example, if we were to write a book for student entrepreneurs by student entrepreneurs, 75% of the content might be applicable to anybody who wants to become an entrepreneur. Therefore, we could license the model and content to organizations from market niches such as inviduals with disabilities or individuals over 60 years old, both of which may be more prone to starting a business than the general population.
   
2. "As you do things, you become invested in them and think of them differently." I notice that one pitfall of students interested in entrepreneurship often make is that they get stuck in planning or coming up with a billion dollar idea and never actually start anything. If instead, they started small, but moved forward, they would begin to see more opportunities and move in the right direction instead of staying stagnant. For example, many Fortune 500 companies were started by "small-time" entrepreneurs who evolved their companies over the matter of a few decades.
   
3. The government is one of the largest competitor of information providers. In the past private enterprises were able to compete by organizing the information in a more usable way then the government. However, as the government digitizes and organizes more of its information, it becomes a larger competitor. While this doesn't affect me right now, I thought it was very interesting.
   
4. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. She said that during one period of her life, anytime she wanted to say, "Nahh, I don't want to do that", she would force herself to do it. I really like this idea of pursuing what one is uncomfortable with as a way to grow and I think I will start doing this more!