How To Inspire Others To Be More Entrepreneurial

If you've been following me for any amount of time, you know I'm super passionate about entrepreneurship. In this video I share my personal story of how I evangelized entrepreneurship to my two older brothers.

If you ever want to sell someone on entrepreneurship and get them out of the employee mindset, watch this video :)

Not a full blog post on this one, because I'm spending time with the family, but some quick shownotes ;)

• My brothers were very risk-averse. They wanted a save job at a large company with good benefits. They wanted the comfort of a 9 to 5 job.
• I never wanted (and never had) a real job. My head always was filled with entrepreneurial ideas, I always wanted more freedom, a wider background of experiences, more choices.
• I always was eager to convert my brothers to entrepreneurship.
• A few years into my own entrepreneurial journey I met a guy who had a simple-enough entrepreneurial idea: it was a rent-a-DVD vending machine. (Basically a disruptor to the traditional movie renting business model... before the age of Netflix...)
• The simplicity was key:
• You didn't need to have much money to get into this business.
• Managing staff was very simple.
• You didn't need to attend the business all the time.
• It was sweet from a cashflow perspective, because people would PREPAY for their cards, and then each time they rented a DVD it got deducted from their balance.
• I pitched my brothers this idea as a little side-extra income they could do while still keeping their regular, save, full-time jobs. They liked the idea of us three brothers doing something cool together that would make some extra-cash.
• I basically made the idea of getting into entrepreneurship easy to swallow: little risk, little time, little effort.
• So we opened our first location, and we made a lot more money than we expected. When my brothers looked at the numbers, it was an eye-opener for them. They got hooked on entrepreneurship.
• Instead of just spending the extra-money we made, I pitched my brothers the idea to re-invest the profits to open a second store. They agreed, and a short time later our second store opened.
• That store outperformed the first location by 5x!
• That really sparked the imagination of my brothers. Now they got the idea of opening a chain.
• My brothers discovered the joy and excitement of entrepreneurship: creating your own brand, developing your own business model, to serve your own customers, hiring employees and being able to choose the people you want to work with. They loved being their own boss.
• Now they're full-fledged, full-time entrepreneurs since five or six years. (I recorded this video in one of their stores!)
• They too had their highs and lows during their entrepreneurial journey. It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. But they've learned so much and grown so much, they could never imagine going back to being employed by someone else. They would never want to go back to a 9-to-5 job, because they're too excited about doing business, being creative and pursuing partnerships, identifying new opportunities...
• The point is not that everyone should be an entrepreneur. I don't think entrepreneurship is right for everybody. But I do believe everybody should have the freedom to chose, and in order to make a really good choice, they need to be exposed to different experiences.
• Don't just buy into the story that what you've chosen is the best thing to do, and you never have to experience anything else.
• If you don't try other options, you can't know what they're like.
• Think about options. Think about choices, and seek out experiences.
• If you want to inspire others to give entrepreneurship a chance... make it easy for them in little steps.

Have you ever been in a situation where someone you cared about just didn't get entrepreneurship?