The Accidental Entrepreneur, The Survivor Edition

PART IThe Surprise Entrepreneur

When you ask successful businesspeople how they got started, they may tell you about the little businesses they started in primary school — the ingenious corner lemonade stand, the school chocolate-bar sales or the lawn-mowing service employing other 12-year-olds. The types of businesses that led these overachievers to climb that first rung on the ladder to success. Sales charts, forecasts and ROI (return on investment) calculations lined the walls of these kids’ bedrooms like posters of Andy Gibb lined mine. The entrepreneurial spirit seems to be part of their DNA.

My story is drastically different. You could say that my entrepreneurial spirit was … umm — dormant. Okay, it was non-existent. To be honest, if you’d asked me what an entrepreneur was in primary school, I may have thought it had something to do with food and would have had no idea how to spell it. (Actually, I still struggle with spelling that word.) It was 20 years after primary school that foreign entrepreneurial DNA somehow began to morph my behaviour.

During the 20 years pre-DNA takeover, I travelled around the United States, Europe, and parts of Asia and Australia. I had 30 jobs, got fired from some, moved on to others, made money, lost more, met the wrong man, had a beautiful baby boy and met my soulmate. What I didn’t realise at the time was all the lessons and tools I was picking up with each triumph and pitfall. Each piece of my journey was enabling me to have the strength ...