Young Successful Entrepreneur

Photo by HckySo

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

- Eleanor Roosevelt

For the past 6 months I have been a teacher, mentor, and boss for my Campus CMO team.  They hailed from 20 different universities across the nation, and we met each week on Skype to learn a new lesson about entrepreneurship, assign a new project, and review weekly milestones.  I can tell you right now that this has been the hardest, most rewarding experience that I have had so far in my year and a half as an entrepreneur.

The Beginnings

The Campus CMO program started in March 2008 as a program to get campus reps to brand Future Delivery at universities across the nation.  We interviewed, 25 undergraduates, and gave out 20 offers.  Since we are a startup, we do not have the capital to pay employees, so the goal was to give our interns a complete entrepreneurial experience. The compensation for participating in the internship was that upon graduation, the intern would have the knowledge, resources, and confidence to start his or her own company.  In that end I feel I have succeeded.

Let the process weed out the lazy

We extended offers to pretty much everyone that we interviewed.  We started the internship with 20 Campus CMOs, and ended the internship with 10.  What happened?

We let the process do the weeding out for us.  I made sure that each project assigned each week was difficult, but at the same time, taught those that completed it a tremendous amount about entrepreneurship.  These projects include:

• Starting a blog and Twitter
• Driving traffic and increasing followers
• Market research for the career industry
• Analyze the demographics and psychographics of the students at their universities
• Create a marketing plan to penetrate the undergraduate community
• Set up meetings with the Career Center Director and Major Counselors
• Meet at least one new person each day

As you can see, each project is meant to make the aspiring entrepreneur stronger.  Most undergraduates are not willing to do this without getting paid; they don’t understand the true value of experience over money.  But the 10 who did stick with it became my most valuable and trusted team members.

A family

It could just be the culture that we have here at Future Delivery, but the internship was a complete success.  I see my team as my little brothers and sisters, and I would do anything for them to help them achieve their goals.  I have already written two letters of recommendation and have acted as a referral for three of them while they interview for jobs.

We have extended 1 full-time offer to Joseph Yi, who was an outstanding team member and proved to be able to contribute to the team and company culture.

What I have learned

Here are the lessons that I have learned:

1. Undergraduates will work for free and only for experience if you provide them with the right company culture and learning experiences
2. It is possible to manage a team of undergraduates purely virtually: Skype, email, chat
3. Don’t assign tasks, let your team choose what projects they want to lead and accomplish
4. Weekly lessons should be very structured, but allow for conversations, questions, and input during the lesson
   • Have a lesson plan, but don’t stick with it.  Let the lesson take you where the Campus CMOs want it to go
5. Your team will only put it as much effort into the internship as you put in it

The new Internship

Our new Campus CMO internship will begin February 1st, 2009 and last til March 31, 2009.  You can apply for the internship here.  Anyone can apply for the internship; however, we will no longer accept the majority of those who apply.  We are looking for 5 undergraduates across the nation to teach how to become successful entrepreneurs.  The selection process will be very competitive, so bring your A-Game.

If you know of anyone who would be interested in the internship, please forward them the internship description page.  Thank you

My most memorable moment

My most memorable moment of the internship came in a series of text messages I had with Dorothy Lam:

Dorothy: “LOL, I just heard old people talking about Twitter”
Me: “Haha, tell them to stop using it.  No wrinkly people allowed”
Dorothy: “Better yet, they’ll pay me to teach them  :)”

I can’t tell you how happy I was when I got that text.  It shows that I have really taught my team how to think like business people, use social media, and realize that there is an endless supply of ideas and opportunities out there; all you have to do is go and take them by the horns.

Not a goodbye

Once you graduate from the Future Delivery internship, you are part of the FD family for life.  Thank you very much to Joe, Dorothy, Jeff, Max, Josh, Kyle, Jenny, Chelsey, and Dawei.  I will forever be your mentor, big brother, advisor, and friend.