Assignment 3A: My Entrepreneurship Journey

My exposure to entrepreneurship started in my early childhood. My mother was the first backyard entrepreneur that I got to see up close and personal.

 I grew up in 1970’s New England farm country. If you know anything about Yankee farmers, you know that they are self-sufficient and innovative. Out of necessity, these rural engineers solve problems on the fly, and on the cheap. I was young at a time when kids crept around under the radar, hoping to see or hear something useful, interesting, or incriminating. I observed that while these farmers were often developing new tools and techniques, it was for their own purposes, not with any intention to market or be mass-produced. They would proudly show a friend a refashioned plow arrangement but no patent was applied for, the knowledge was simply shared and utilized directly. My father, a blacksmith, supported our family by shoeing horses. I was accustomed to seeing him examine a piece of equipment, construction project, or artwork, and then pull an improved version out of his forge hours later. I was fortunate to get to witness ingenuity in ever day applications all around me.

It was my mother’s backyard chicken-killing operation that brought the spirit of entrepreneurship to life for me. As unpaid child labor, I watched her create an assembly-line style process for turning her client’s crates of live chickens into plucked, gutted, chilled, wrapped oven-ready roasters. She would round up as many of her five children as she could to “man” stations of the operation. Our little hands would guide the birds from the cones of death to the scalder, the plucker, the gutting table, and into the ice bath. The line was made more efficient as equipment was modified and her indentured workforce gained butchery skills. It was really a sight. As a seven-year-old, I loved it, not so much as a teen. I had no idea what a hipster my mother was, farm to table was a way of life for most people that we knew back then.

From that lifestyle, I carried into my adulthood an industrious, hands-dirty, roll-up-yer-sleeves, figure-it-out attitude. I went on to operate a racehorse training business with my husband that has sustained us for the last 25 years. I see us as small business-people though, not entrepreneurs. Like those New England farmers, we have to be inventive as we go, saving money and solving problems, but I feel that we lack the true sense of innovation and growth that is the mark of entrepreneurship.

I am already seeing how we operate our business differently as a result of taking this class. I intend to apply the entrepreneurship framework taught by Dr Pryor to our business strategy. I believe that businesses large and small can benefit by adopting these principals.