I was working on another mundane consulting project, doing nothing more productive than rearranging a power point document for the eleventh hundred times, when I decided I had enough. This was not work that was challenging me, these were not the type of people I could learn from, and this is not how I wanted to spend my time. I know this doesn’t sound PC, but as I recount the story of how I became an entrepreneur and built an internet recruitment site for non-internet users, I am going to be as real as possible.
So anyway, back to the story. I was working on a strategy project for a pretty large firm. I can’t get into too many details on what we were doing, but you can trust me in that it pretty boring stuff. We were staying in the office until 11-12 at night for no good reason other than the senior manager had some sort of complex, whereby he thought that the longer he could keep us in the office the more likely he was to be promoted. So there we were reworking the same exact slide. Changing the colors, adjusting the font, spending hour upon hour on the details, and only spending a couple of minutes and a few guesses on the actual numbers and recommendations. I wanted to challenge myself, learn, be exposed to new concepts, isn’t that why I decided to do consulting?
That night I had an epiphany: I was going to leave my job and start a business. I was going to abandon the consulting world and venture out on my own. I always had the entrepreneurial bug, and I was going to live the dream. Problem was, although I had an idea of the space I wanted to be in, I really didn’t have a clear cut vision of what I was going to build.
Being originally from Mexico, speaking a fluent Spanish, and having a pretty good understanding of the US Hispanic culture I decided my business would revolve around the fastest growing demographic in the United States. That was my starting point and from there I decided on the name Emerging Demographics Inc. and our company mission: “to level the cultural, technological and linguistic barriers that impeded Hispanic progress through innovative and profitable ventures.” That was the entire idea and from there I took the giant leap of faith that I could take a concept and a direction and develop a business around it.
- Next week, how the idea became a business…the first few months.
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