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After a lengthy discussion with Tania Luna of Renegade Campus about entrepreneurship education and marrying up specific skill sets (medicine, engineering, the arts, music, etc.) with entrepreneurship, I got to thinking of some skills I wish I had or some things I wish were invented:

1.  Cat Communicator:  I took six years of Spanish as a kid and while I see the necessity of learning the language, I now spend more time trying to decipher what my 18-year-old cat, Bob, is trying to tell me.  See, he’s been peeing on the floor and while I suspect he’s not sick, I do think he’s pissed about something.  For all I know, he could be saying, “Hey lady, can I have the keys to the car so I can go buy some better-tasting cat food,” or “How are your shoes smelling today after stepping in my urine?  Maybe tonight you won’t push me off the bed.”

2.  Plumbing:  I have a broken gate valve.  I know it’s a broken gate valve because I looked it up online.  Actually, I looked up a lot of different types of valves, starting with the ones listed as covered items in my home warranty protection plan.  As a layplumber, all I know is that in the morning, I hear screams from Syd as all of the water in her shower shifts abruptly to the kitchen sink that fills the coffee pot.  Have you seen a gate valve?  While it might not look like much, I believe there’s welding and special tools involved and I don’t think my Deluxe 25-piece hand tool kit can handle it.

3.  Website Design:  If you’ve been to this blog before (and that excludes all of the bots or spammers or whatever they’re called that leave me gibberish messages about jewelry, sunglasses and Levitra) you’ll notice the theme appearance has changed and is continuing to change.  I didn’t grow up with computers or the internet like some, but I’ve dabbled with them since the early 1990s.  One thing that escaped me was learning how to code (although I did take shorthand in high school and it kind of looks the same.)  Syd and her friends seem to have mastered MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and texting, but I have yet to hear any of them have a discussion on HTML. (They’re of no help to me.)

I use my website for my business and need to constantly update it, but I’m dependent upon my website guy for changes.  And every little change costs me money.  HTML for Dummies is good, but I’m even dumber than that with this stuff.  Someone please create a specific guide with the exact coding and where to put it.  I don’t need an explanation of what anything does, just something I can copy verbatim.

4.  Auto Taxi:  I spend more time in the car than I’d like to with the majority of it schlepping Syd to and from school and extracurricular activities.  If we lived in Ethiopia, Syd could be driving legally now.  Considering that’s not a likely probability, an auto taxi might be.

Sure, public transportation works relatively the same way, but we live in Phoenix and we’re not too keen about standing outside in 115 degree heat and waiting for a bus to come.  Now if someone could invent a car that I could program to go pick Syd up and take her to where she needs to go, I’d be all over it, even if it came in minivan form.  (They don’t call it a people mover for nothing.)  Besides, the early 1980s brought us the fantasy sci-fi show Knight Rider and KITT and David Hasselhoff.  And we now have GPS.  Totally doable.

So what’s the point to all of this?  As I told Tania, entrepreneurship isn’t black and white.  You don’t have to become just an entrepreneur or a doctor or a lawyer.  Every single industry dabbles in the business world and it takes more than just entrepreneurial skill sets to innovate and bring new products to the market that solve problems.

Right now, Syd wants to study Journalism in college.  She knows that she can either become a journalist and be an employee or she could start her own media outlet.  Like Oprah.  She understands marrying up journalistic skill sets with entrepreneurship.

Kids, if you want to become an engineer, an artist, a teacher or a scientist – Do It!!  But combine it with business education and experience, too.  There’s an abundance of opportunity just waiting for you.

Success to you.

Melissa

Biz in a Boxx

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The other day I was reading a blog post by Leslie Haywood, the inventor and entrepreneur behind Grill Charms who successfully swam with the Sharks on Shark Tank.  On this particular post, Leslie talks about not having a receptionist and personally taking calls when her customers come a knocking.

We’ve become accustomed to the world of automation and voice recordings and pressing numbers on our phone to try to reach a live person.  I don’t know too many people who actually like this form of customer service and yet it seems we accept it to the point of even doing it ourselves with our own businesses.

Leslie’s no small fish, but her willingness to connect to the consumer defies common standards.  She’s smart.  People do business with people they like.  People.  That’s the magic word.

I once wrote a complaint letter to Nordstrom and got a pleasant letter in return from Mr. Nordstrom.  Now I have no clue if he actually wrote it or even signed it himself for that matter, but the fact is I didn’t get some lame response from someone else down the ladder.  I liked that.  I liked that I came away feeling as though my voice was heard.

That’s precisely what I like about Leslie.  She wants to be in the trenches with her customers.  She knows she’s not conforming to corporate standards, but she’s providing a face, a real person behind the product.

To me, that’s just good business.

Success to you.

Melissa

Biz in a Boxx

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A Jobless Generation

August 16, 2010

As a kid, I can remember my grandmother telling me stories of how people coped through the Great Depression.  I now suspect that living through that era altered her life path mentally. Of course it all seemed foreign to me and the thought of experiencing anything remotely like it in my lifetime appeared more fictional [...]

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Is College Such a Bad ROI?

August 4, 2010

In just a few weeks, Syd will be cruising the halls of high school as she strategically executes a plan for the next four years of her life.  It doesn’t seem so long ago that she was in the 6th grade, performing miserably and I was fretting about getting her on the right track.  Back [...]

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Discovering New Customers

July 28, 2010

Last week, Andi and I participated in our first home school trade show.  Of course we studied the market prior to forking over the booth fee, but so many times buying behavior and consumer characteristics can’t be boiled down into statistical numbers.  Sometimes you just have to test and observe the waters.
The two long days [...]

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When Customer Service Throws the Customer Out the Window

July 22, 2010

We’ve all experienced it before; customer service that flies in the face of logic.  You know, the head scratching amazement of a company rule that defies common sense and immediately disconnects the customer from the institution.  Some companies are really good at alienating the customer while others seem to have mastered this value-added service.
What I [...]

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FamZoo Helps Biz in a Boxx Entrepreneurs With Money Management

July 13, 2010

My daughter is a fabulous mental accountant.  She can mentally note how much money she has at any given time as well as name her income sources.  I think it’s because she has plans for her money even before she earns it.  Shocker.
She’s deficient in one particular area though.  While she has a knack to [...]

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Youth Entrepreneurship Overseas

July 7, 2010

Back in May, Biz in a Boxx appeared in the online publication of Emprendedores (Spain) as a suggestion to readers to distribute our product overseas.  (I had to do some online translation;  apparently six years of Spanish classes weren’t enough.)  Since then we’ve gotten a slew of emails from entrepreneurs in Spain, the Caribbean, Australia, [...]

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Lessons Learned from Typewriting Class

June 15, 2010

It was the summer of 1977 when my mother enrolled me in a typing class at my elementary school.  While neighborhood kids were spending their days “boogie boarding” in the Pacific Ocean, I was schlepping a green, 1960s Smith Corona typewriter to a typewriting summer school class.  (Today they would have called it Typing Camp.)
My [...]

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Jerry Vallejo Update

June 2, 2010

Jerry’s been working on structuring how he is going to teach the Biz in a Boxx program.  He came up with the name of Tomorrow’s Entrepreneur’s Involved Today ( T.E.I.T) with the purpose to teach kids about entrepreneurship, leadership and education.  Though juggling school and work, Jerry is working on the lesson plans and finding [...]

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