Entrepreneur Stories and Featured Entrepreneurs
Priceless Lessons from Four Impactful Entrepreneurs
Written by Ashwin Satyanarayana for Gaebler Ventures
Impactful entrepreneurs sharing their experiences where it could be truly inspiring to learn and educate. Here are four interesting accounts of entrepreneurs.
Can you learn from fellow entrepreneurs? You bet. In fact, it could be truly inspiring to learn from other entrepreneurs, to see how they came to be, how they survived, what their story is and what you could learn from them.
It could motivate you, educate and inspire you to know how others in the entrepreneurial club fared through. Here are four interesting accounts of entrepreneurs from whom you could learn a thing or two.
Ideas can come from anywhere -- my dorm bed can be a source of ideas too: Ryan Dickerson, studying as a junior at the Syracuse University, found himself in the smallest of the dorm rooms that could barely fit his bed and his study desk. What do you get if you could optimize that space? That's how his business idea was born and that made him turn the bed into a couch whenever he wasn't sleeping. Rylaxing was hence born - a company that makes pillows that transform your bend into a couch. Small, yet beautifully functional, don't you think? See how ideas can be born?
Health conditions aren't an excuse -- bound to a wheelchair but not confined to it: Ralph Braun - founder of Braunability -- is a great example of real heroics and triumph an entrepreneur should shoulder. Cursed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, he had to get a wheelchair even before he realized what he needed to do with his life. Starting from his own need to move quickly and easily using battery-powered scooters, he made that his business to make many others like him mobile followed by making wheel-chair lifts. Boasting of a $200 million in annual sales, he never stopped his health condition to stop him from achieving the impossible, did he?
If your Business can't be sold, your products won't get sold either: Ray Croc is one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever alive and that's because he could scale up his McDonald's operation in a way few people can. This small boy from Oak Park, Illinois, was instrumental in making hamburgers "assembly line style". An eternal optimist and a business owner who invested heavily in creating systems and spending on marketing, he is a legend other business owners can learn from. Do what he did to McDonalds to any business you own and it should work like a charm.
Be your own harsh critic: "@Radical.media, never established" reads the plaque outside the front door of Jon Kamen - founder of @radical.media -- a company that staffs about 140 people and produces TV ads, advertorials, music videos, documentaries, etc. What makes him special? He is his biggest critic. He is usually a part of spirited and animated meetings with his staff/clients and is forever caught in the vortex of constant debate on projects, production schedules, voices, ideas, and all things else. Being your own harsh critic makes sure that your feet are planted firmly on the ground and that you have a sense of "Quality control" as you work each day.
Ash has an undergraduate degree in engineering and an MBA from Ohio University. Today he is a corporate trainer, business coach and a freelance writer.
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