Lest you think blog entry #1 got us caught up to date… we are not quite there yet. This might feel a little like those annoying TV series that go forward for one or two episodes, only to then drag you backwards to show you a character’s past, then forward, then back again – I’ve always had mixed feelings about that whole see-saw feeling I’d get from those. Well, now I’m doing the same thing, and I just wasted two sentences getting there. Well, if you’re still reading, you either have too much time on your hands, or well maybe you are truly interested. I’m not a writer, but I probably just broke one the writer’s rules – don’t insult your audience right… sorry about that.
So stepping back a bit, my career has always been as an entrepreneur. Even while I was still in college, I had my own business teaching tennis to not just other students, but predominantly to local towns people – it is how I stayed in State College (PSU Happy Valley) through the summers, and how I paid my way through most of my college years. In fact, this led to me spending 1.5 years working on a business plan to build a private tennis club in State College, where at the time, there wasn’t any outside of the University’s 4 courts. I was not a business major, and didn’t realize how completely unprepared I was to take on an idea that big. In hind sight, my ignorance probably helped me think more boldly, even if it was also a bit more blindly at the same time.
By the end of that process, I still wasn’t graduated, but I convinced a local bank to lend me $800,000 – which in the early 1980’s was a huge sum of money (actually, I still think that’s a huge sum of money). However, I had to get $300,000 upfront from local investors to back me. I managed to get $200,000 committed, and before I could get the final 100K, an outside firm came to town with their own funding and built an alternate club, in nearly the same location as I had identified.
It was 18 months of continual work, in between work and school, only to end with someone snatching it right out from under me. I should have been devastated, but I wasn’t even angry – in fact, I was both relieved and satisfied at the same time. More than anything, it validated that I was right, and that while the timing wasn’t right for me, I just got my REAL education while at Penn State – it just didn’t happen in the classroom. Every step of that process; working with realtors, architects, market researchers, town council, local business people, etc was invigorating. I was putting a puzzle together piece by piece, seeing a concept become a clear idea, and then the idea growing up to become a real vision, and seeing the vision take on skin and bones in the people and places that contributed to the final proposal I submitted to the bank. It was the most exciting thing I had ever done. I was hooked… I knew at that point my ultimate goal in life was going to be entrepreneurship.
