Another Reason Why I Became an Entrepreneur
There are many reasons why I became an entrepreneur, perhaps I may have been born an entrepreneur and it just took a few years to figure that out. Regardless, an event happened last year that provided additional reasoning and inspiration for being an entrepreneur. Except this was a bad experience, it was my first (and only) traditional “internship”.
I took a job in the fall of 2005 as an Analyst/Research intern at a market research firm. The job sounded interesting enough, the company sounded really interesting. They were involved in technology, marketing, research, cutting edge trends, etc…or at least that is what they told me.
They put me in a cubicle, my first time ever in the gray box as an employee. I was given an organization chart and that is when I noticed something strange…the entire company consisted of only VP of X and interns…that’s it! There were no employees? Odd. There was also about 3-5 interns for every VP. I thought this was strange.
They gave me some tasks that for the most part consisted of a lot of cold calling…not fun at all but it did discipline me because before I was afraid of cold calling.
They had me build an entire project from start to finish for a client. I did pretty much everything, all they did was tell me what to do and when. I noticed a document that was from the client that noted the tasks they requested (of which I was doing 95% of them) and the payment the company was receiving was $XX,000, I received $500 to do 95% of the project!!! I left a few days later and never looked back…
Moral of the story? You can create value as an employee or as an entrepreneur, the question is: Who is receiving the benefits of that value creation?
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