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7 Things to Do Before Becoming An Entrepreneur

So, you want to be an entrepreneur? Well, like most things in life, it’s not for everybody. There’s a quote that says, “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life the way most people won’t, so you can spend the rest of your life living the way most people can’t,” and for the most part that’s true.

Since entrepreneurship is not for the weak or the weary,  we give you seven things to consider before you decide to make the plunge.

Be Passionate About Your Product

For some, it may be easy to work a 9 to 5 job that you aren’t passionate about, but if you’re an entrepreneur launching a product or service, how do you expect consumers or investors to be excited about your product if you aren’t?

As your own boss, you become the chief salesperson and your enthusiasm has to make others believe in you. Another reason you must believe in your product or service is because entrepreneurship has many peaks and valleys and you’re going to need determination to get you through unpredictable times.

Cleanse Your Social Media Profiles

Prospective employees are often told to clean up their social media profiles, but entrepreneurs must do the same especially when they are taking meetings with potential investors.

Sometimes it’s not enough to dress the part, you also have to take into account that people will check your Linked In profile, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages. You have to be mindful of the photos you post since they could be misinterpreted.

Have a 12-Month Plan

If you’re not organized or don’t like to plan, then entrepreneurship may not be for you.

Be prepared to write your business plan more than once and it will need to be looked over by professionals and trusted colleagues. Your 12-month plan should include your personal and business budget.

In the calendar section of your business plan, you need to include vacation, medical appointments and important events.

Know Your Finances

Finances are a large part of being an entrepreneur and you’ll need to take care of any outstanding debt before pursuing your goals.

Downsizing and creating a monthly budget are effective ways to pay off debt. As an entrepreneur you may not get your first paycheck for months, so you will need to have 12 months of savings to pay your bills.

Know That You Can’t Stop At Just One Product

An entrepreneur is essentially an innovator, and as an innovator, you have to keep, well, innovating.

This basically means that after you launch a product or service, you have to keep up the momentum and stay ahead of the innovation curve. To consistently develop products means that you’ll have to spend money. Companies rarely, if ever, survive with just one product.

Be Good at Making Decisions

If you’re indecisive or can’t make decisions without the input of others, you might want to rethink becoming an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs are responsible for the successes and failures of their businesses. They have to make decisions about working from home or leasing office space, hiring employees, targeting high-end clients or selling to the masses, advertising, borrowing money, using savings and more.

The decisions become more complex after employees are hired and the company starts succeeding.

Maintain Balance 

Entrepreneurs don’t take days off and working nonstop often means neglecting your life outside of work, which can cause burnout and a subsequent decline in business.

While maintaining a personal life with family, friends and hobbies, you must also know how to limit distractions from entrepreneurial pursuits.

Balance is all about maintaining good health and mental welfare, while still working toward your goals.

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Entrepreneur Tristan Walker on Creating a Brand, Giving Back to Community

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Tristan Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker & Company Brands who launched his first product, Bevel, this past February. Bevel is a shaving system designed specifically for men with sensitive skin and coarse and curly hair. Walker honed his entrepreneurial skills as the director of business development at Foursquare, and then as entrepreneur-in-residence at Andressen & Horowitz. Along with creating his own brand and products, he’s also active in getting Black and Latino students involved in start-ups through his organization CODE2040.

Q: Where did the idea for Bevel come from?

Walker: Bevel started out from my own frustration of not being able to shave for 15 years. Every single way that I encountered facial hair removal sucked. I used the multi-blade razor on my face when I was 15. I woke up the following morning completely broken out. You go to a barbershop, a barber will use the same electric clippers he’s using on everyone else’s hair on your face, which when you think about it, is disgusting. He doesn’t clean it person to person. The last one, which is the worst of them all, I put a depilatory cream on my face.  It sits on your face for six minutes and has all these crazy chemicals in it and then you wipe it off. It burned my face. It did all types of damage to my skin. So, I thought there has to be a better way. We created Bevel out of that.

Q: Where do you hope to see Bevel in five years?

Walker: Bevel is the flagship brand under Walker & Company, so hopefully, Bevel is still a very, very large brand that people continue to love. Hopefully, it’s one of a few brands that Walker & Company has. We want hundreds of thousands of people using this product. Quite frankly, the thing that kind of inspires me most.

Q: You were director of business development at Foursquare. What did you learn from working at that company that you apply to your product, Bevel?

Walker: I really learned the importance of brands and authenticity. The reason why I think Foursquare was so successful was that every employee lived the brand, every employee was the brand, and it just made it easier for users and customers to really get it and want to be a part of it. When I think about Bevel and the Walker Company, I think the thing that we do well is we show off that authenticity. We’re not faking it. This is us. I think we’ll continue to do that with every brand we launch.

Q: How did your time as entrepreneur-in-residence at Andressen & Horowitz prepare you to launch Walker & Company Brands?

Walker: One thing that they taught me was to be the one thing that you feel like you’re the best person in the world to do, then you have a really good advantage. What I realized is, as it pertained to Bevel, no one understood the problem the way I did because I had to deal with it everyday of my life. Being able to disrupt health and beauty with technology focused on a demographic group that I’m a part of made me feel like I was one of the best folks in the world to try it.

Q: What other products can we expect from Walker & Company Brands?

Walker: We’re really focused on making things that solve health and beauty problems for people of color. Bevel helps with the razor-bump irritation issue with its design, etc. I think about things like vitamin D deficiency, natural hair transitioning and hyperpigmentation. We want to build brands that solve those problems in a very big way and I think we’ll do it.

Q: Tell us what you’re doing with CODE2040.

Walker: CODE2040 is a not-for-profit organization I helped found 2 ½ years ago. Our flagship program is the Fellows Program and the goal of it is to get the highest-performing Black and Latino engineering undergraduates internships in Silicon Valley, and then we provide them with all the tools they need to be very successful. The reasons behind starting it is, number one, I didn’t want folks to realize that Silicon Valley existed way too late. I realized it existed at 24 and that’s way too late, in my opinion. Secondly, I really have this fascination around how can we make the biggest consumer demographic (Blacks and Latinos) in the world the best producing demographic in the world? I think that’s one of the greatest opportunities of my lifetime.

Q: What advice would you give to someone wanting to enter the worlds of entrepreneurship and technology?

Walker: The first thing I would say is to just get a drive. You’ve just got to do it. Some of the best advice I got on that came from [director-producer] Tyler Perry. I had the good fortune to interview him a couple times with Walkers and Phoners and he said one thing to the group that stuck with me for a long time. He said it wasn’t until he realized that the trials you go through and the blessings you receive are the exact same thing and that freed him up to become a great entrepreneur. That stuck with me because your trials are just blessings and those lessons are blessings. Once you think about that, you start to become fearless in a sense. Think about it from the perspective of entrepreneurship being hard. The hard parts are just trials and your blessings.

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Minority Report: Young Black Entrepreneurs Create The First Robot Bartender

Sci-fi television and films usually seem to foreshadow technology innovations by many years. It is 2014, and even though there has been a slew of  innovative products, we’re far from flying cars like those in Back To The Future or The Jetsons. What we do have now, is a robotic bartender. A group of young Black men from Atlanta have created a device called the “Monsieur” that allows users to have their drinks automatically mixed.

As reported by mashable.com:

“It might sound unusual for a robot bartender to whip up cocktails in the kitchen as you come home from work, but a new concept called the Monsieur could make this the new norm.

“Here’s how it works: You load the alcohol of your choice (and mixers such as orange juice and cranberry juice) into the back of the system. It will then create a customized menu based on whatever you put in. Choices for mixed drinks then appear on the touchscreen. After selecting the one you want, you can select if you want the drink strong, medium or light.”

The Monsieur team is led by co-founders Barry Givens, Eric Williams and CTO Mario Taylor, who are all graduates of Atlanta’s Georgia Tech. They also have the wildly successful Dr. Paul Judge, on their board and as an investor.

According to their website:

“The Monsieur comes with 12 themed packages with 25 preset cocktails each. You can select from a tiki bar theme, a sports bar theme, an Irish pub, or a non-alcoholic theme. On average, the machine can make 150 cocktails before it needs refilling.”

The Monsieur team is also working on a home version of the robotic bartender as well.

According to gizmag.com:

“The company is developing an in-home version of its business model Monsieur bartender using crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Weighing 50 lb (22.6 kg), Monsieur is a black box measuring 22 x 18 x 21 in (55.8 x 45.7 x 53.3 cm) with a touchscreen and a dispensing slot with a suitably festive blue neon glow. Inside the basic model is room for eight 30-oz (0.8-l) containers along peristaltic pumps, and processors that handle orders and monitor container levels. Clean up takes about two minutes”

It’s always great to see young Black professionals doing big things in the technology industry, and hopefully the Monsieur will become a mass market product.

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More Than Fun & Games: The True Power of #BlackTwitter

With well over 600 million active users, it was always apparent that Twitter would become a powerful social vehicle, but in recent years it has been a niche community inside the social media giant that has unveiled itself as being unbelievably and undeniably powerful.

Every now and then you may see the hashtag — #BlackTwitter — but most of the time you will find yourself unknowingly stumbling upon Black Twitter’s hilarious antics or growing social movements.

Black Twitter is the name that was given to the community within Twitter that has always held Black popular culture, news and controversies at the center of its timeline.

While it initially became famous for outrageous jokes and sparking worldwide trending topics in a matter of minutes, it has recently become the latest and perhaps one of the most effective tools for social justice and racial equality.

Black Twitter’s list of accomplishments includes the cancellation of a book deal for a juror in the George Zimmerman case; Reebok’s rejection of rapper Rick Ross’ endorsement deal after his infamous date rape lyrics; and more recently,  promoter Damon Feldman’s withdrawal of a George Zimmerman celebrity boxing match.

The community has managed to use clever hashtags to gain support from other Twitter users across the globe to achieve commendable goals, all through the use of 140 characters and countless numbers of retweets.

“It’s kind of like the Black table in the lunchroom, sort of, where people of like interests and experiences and ways of talking and communication, lump together and talk among themselves,” said Tracy Clayton, a blogger and editor at BuzzFeed.

In fact, if anyone knows the power of Black Twitter, it’s BuzzFeed.

During Zimmerman’s trial, Black Twitter began sending out its own BuzzFeed-type lists with the hashtag #BlackBuzzFeed, which put BuzzFeed’s social media to shame.

“Black Twitter made this the No. 2 hashtag worldwide,” BuzzFeed later tweeted about the #BlackBuzzFeed hashtag. “Our wig has thoroughly been snatched. *Bows down.*”

Even the NAACP realized the momentum and power behind Black Twitter and made the community a part of its strategies.

The NAACP used hashtags like #TooMuchDoubt to gain support for halting the execution of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis, and the #OscarGrant hashtag trended nation wide, leading to support for the film “Fruitvale Station.” The film documented the life of the young Black man who was unjustly killed by a police officer.

“We realized more than anyone that we had to go in that direction and we’ve done it,” NAACP interim President Lorraine Miller said of the organization’s social media use.

Perhaps the real magic behind Black Twitter is the combination of fighting for justice and captivating comedy.

Black Twitter gains attention through humor, while also bringing attention to major issues.

For example, when celebrity chef Paula Deen admitted to using racial slurs in the past, Black Twitter created the hashtag #PaulasBestDishes, which began trending nationwide.

The hashtag earned tons of laughs with imaginary recipes like “Massa-Roni and Cheese,” “We Shall Over-Crumb Cake,” “Three-Fifths Compromise Cheesecake,” “Coon on the Cob” and “Swing Low, Sweet Cherry Pie.”

At the same time it garnered attention to Deen’s remarks, created a national discussion via Twitter about the use of the N-word and led to the cancellation of several of Deen’s endorsement deals.

In short, Black Twitter has stepped to the forefront as the lead watchdog when it comes to racial injustice and other controversial issues.