The Relevancy of Pond Scum and Entrepreneurship

When I was in high school, I opted to take aquatic biology instead of chemistry for the sheer fact that cutting into the head of a shark seemed much more appealing than studying proteins and molecules. I took science classes only to fulfill graduation requirements. It’s not to say that science wasn’t interesting because it was at the time. I just never found the relevancy to integrate it into a future career.

Before we got to use our scalpels to cut open our sharks, we had a project that revolved around water and organisms. The assignment was to find a pond, lake or reservoir and collect jars of water and scum from it. Fortunately, there was a small pool of water that formed in the fields behind my house from recent storms and my lab partner, Erin, and I were able to collect three jars of the stagnant water to bring to class.

There was a lot that happened in those jars over the next few weeks. At first it was rather mild – an organism or two emerged from the bottled scum; but by the end of the second week, new bugs were all over the place. And the jars smelled. Really smelled.

It was a cool assignment. Every day we’d come into class to see a new type of bug floating or flying inside the jars and we were able to identify them all. But what lesson did I learn from it? It’s been 25 years since I took that class, so how has it been relevant to my life?

Here’s what I know:

1. Don’t have a pond or stagnant water near your property.

2. Don’t swim in a pond.

3. Don’t open jars of pond water/scum in an enclosed room.

There’s a lot of what our kids learn in school that has life-long relevancy, especially when presented in such a manner. When it isn’t integrated into everyday life, understanding the usefulness of a topic becomes lost. Math is an excellent example of this. I haven’t had to prove a right angle since leaving high school, but I also know there’s probably a lot more I could have done and products I may have been able to invent had I found a connection to those earlier lessons.

In the world of entrepreneurship, there are people with great ideas who lack specific skills to fully develop those ideas and there are people with great skills who lack the ability to foster ideas and take them to the marketplace. They’re dependent upon one another. For those who can do both, you’re a diamond in the rough.

Just think of the ideas and inventions our society as a whole could come up with and develop if we simply understood the relevancy of our early education.

I don’t remember how I came upon Bianca Fortis’s blog, Young and Unemployed, but I was empathic enough to send her an email. Bianca is a relatively recent journalism graduate from the University of Central Florida who most likely had high hopes for easily pursuing her career once she completed her education. Like many, she just happened to have graduated during a period of high unemployment. She got the short end of the stick.

Bianca began chronicling her employment search back in May and has not yet been able to land a job as a reporter of sorts. She’s given up the independence she gained in college to move back home with her parents; it’s estimated that nearly 54 percent of college grads today are doing the same.

The short-term outcome looks rather bleak, especially in those states like Arizona, California, Nevada and Florida that are having a tough time rebounding from the recession. For places like Arizona, the AZ Department of Commerce estimates that it will take approximately seven years to get back to 2005 employment levels. (To put it in more perspective, in AZ the private sector added 700 jobs in September; the pre-recession average was 6,900.) For those of us with kids who will be entering the workforce then, you might want to delay converting their bedrooms into that second den or exercise room. Chances are they will be coming back home.

The long-term effects are even worse. If the young cannot get significant work experience until their early or mid-twenties, their entire careers are delayed. Experience is a critical factor in professional advancement.

We can prepare our kids for jobs all we want, but if those jobs aren’t there, they just aren’t there. Employment needs to be created.

As I went through Bianca’s blog entries I couldn’t help but think, “What if that happens to my own kid?” Would it be prudent of me to simply tell her to study hard and go to college because when she’s done, there will be a job waiting for her? It’s akin to telling her Santa brought all of her Christmas gifts – at some point we have to fess up that we lied.

I’m doing more for my kid. I’m instilling skill sets through entrepreneurship training that will give her options as an adult so that she doesn’t have to be financially dependent upon someone else. Besides, I don’t want her to be that adult child living in the basement because one day I’d like a craft room.

Is Old Fashion Business Fashionable?

This past weekend I had a meeting at a local outdoor mall and noticed the abundance of people either dining or shopping. It’s also a haven for young teens to gather and spend the afternoon perusing the latest trends. As I sat there at an outside table, I remarked how nice it was to see that this pastime hasn’t died, even in spite of the economy, and that the brick-and-mortar establishments still serve a purpose.

I’ve been noticing more stories lately about rising technology companies whether they’re digital, solar or medical. They are popular trends in the startup world. But, I also wonder how this new era of technology and the high use of the internet will change us as social beings.

My newspaper carrier was nice enough to toss me the local edition of the Arizona Republic on Monday, a day I normally don’t get the paper. In there was a story about a milkman in CA whose business is thriving.

Jim Pastor is a career milkman, having started in the biz after high school. Later he opened his own milk delivery business after contracting with a local dairy farmer. He delivers milk and other products (cheese, eggs, bread, butter) to over 4800 homes. He relies on word-of-mouth advertising from his customers who enjoy the convenient delivery and who are eager to support their local community.

So how is it that Jim’s business thrives in a world so focused on the digital age? What part of the human experience cannot be duplicated online? What are we, as consumers, willing to give up or accept in lieu of technology?

Redfining Customer Service or Defining It

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.

A Jobless Generation

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 than possible. After all, we’ve prospered as a nation; women’s lib had prevailed and technology was progressing. I was young and I had naive notions that my life would have fewer struggles than generations before me.

My generation, Gen X, has been rather removed from an extreme economic downturn like the one we are experiencing now. We’re older, in the midst of our careers and many of us are raising our own families. This is new to us and many don’t even know what to make of it.

Unemployment plays a large role, not just in terms of financial survival, but the havoc it wreaks on the psyche of those unable to land a job or those who are unemployed.

It’s easy for me to say, as a parent, that in the year 2018 when my own daughter embarks on a career things will be better. But according to Don Peck in the Atlantic, 10 million new jobs would need to be created just to bring the unemployment rate down to 5 percent today. “Even if the economy were to immediately begin producing 600,000 jobs a month—more than double the pace of the mid-to-late 1990s, when job growth was strong—it would take roughly two years to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in.” Peck writes.

Youth unemployment today remains high. It’s estimated that only 17 out of 100 teens are gainfully employed. Employment means far more than a earning a paycheck and having pocket cash. According to experts, the state of the economy and the time line when young people enter the workforce have lasting impacts, positive or negative, on professional mobility and attainment. A college degree is no longer an employment guarantee.

Many of us already know that the Gen Y generation (our kids) are different than generations before. They tend to be more micro-managed in their activities and need constant direction to complete tasks. They also tend to be less entrepreneurial than their forefathers. Couple this with gaining necessary skills later in life will have a profound affect not only in their careers, but in their personal lives as well. Those with a sense of self-entitlement will have the rudest awakening when reality sets in.

Jobs don’t just appear out of thin air. They’re created by existing companies and new firms. They’re created through the innovation of new products and through people who have learned to think outside of the box, can take a risk and start something new. Those who wait for opportunity to land at their doorstep will likely find an empty stoop.