Week 15: Final Reflection

This is honestly one of the most interesting courses I have ever been a part of in my educational career. I feel like this course was very hands on and allowed each student to get anything out of it that they wanted. We were given all of the tools to be successful and just had to get out there and go. I think my favorite thing that we did was asking our friends and family about our qualities. This exercise was really showed how your closest people feel compared to feelings about yourself. Some of the things that were a pain were the interviews of entrepreneurs. That required a lot of time and planning to get it done. I am really proud, though, to have been able to accomplish some of the customer interviews and get the great feedback. I really feel like I have started to feel the entrepreneurship mindset. This course allows you to do things that make you believe it is possible to do anything. I would say that planning is the most important thing to do well in this course, and that rolls over into anything you will do here at UF and in life.   

Week 15: Reading Reflection

Well this is the final reading reflection! I really enjoyed this article, just as I have most others we have read. I usually do not disagree with the author, and most often I do not have many questions, and it seems just about the same for this reading reflection. The information in the article is very important for any business and I am glad to have had the opportunity to see it. Once again, I enjoyed this reading just like most of all the others we had this semester.

Week 15: Venture Concept No. 2

My new venture is my very own financial advising firm. In this brief paper about my venture I will mention things such as opportunity, innovation, my venture concept, and finally I will mention on the three minor elements. These three minor elements are three questions: What are your most important resources? What is next for your venture? What is next for you? In the following few paragraphs I will touch on each of these points to describe my venture.

My financial advising firm will have a great amount of opportunity with the correct amount of advertising and good customer service. The main focus of clients for this business is going to be the middle class to upper class person in their low to mid 30’s and up. It is an obvious fact that everyone is one day going to get old so long as they live. My job is to help people reach financial goals. One of the very important financial goals most people must strive to achieve is retirement. Because of this idea that everyone gets old and people need assistance making good portfolio’s in order to have the best opportunity with the least amount of burden to reach these financial goals, this business is something that will be around for a very long time. Another great point is that in this particular era all of the baby boomers are reaching retirement age and are seeking financial assistance in order to be sure they will retire comfortably.

In addition, innovation in this industry is more or less just based on technologies to make doing the investments easier, or the types of investments themselves are always changing. They could also have some new methods to be more or less risky for a person. What I will be selling to the customer is my time and friendly service to give them my knowledge of the markets and what types of investments would be best suited for that person based on their unique situation. The way that I make money doing this is by charging either commission or some kind of fees upon giving my knowledge and managing their portfolio’s for them.

A very important question that comes up is why someone would even want to spend money on my service? To me, that is a very easy answer. I value someone who is not afraid to do what is right for helping the client at all times. If that involves me loosing that persons business to send them to another firm because I feel they have a better chance at helping them, it is something that I will proudly do. I am a strong believer that if you give unheard of customer service to one person, it will lead to an exponential amount of possible future clients from that one lost clients word of mouth saying how I really value taking care of my clients. Many people have told me that this is what all advisors are offering, but there is a difference between commercials to advertise great customer service and simply doing it and allowing the clients to spread the word for you. I am doing an internship this summer with Raymond James, and in my interview with a 50 year financial advisor there for the firm, he told me that probably a solid 90 percent of their client base comes from referrals rather than any other kinds of advertising. When it comes to giving your money to someone you have never met, it is much more assuring when a life-long friend, or anyone of significance to that person, is telling you that they have an incredible amount of faith that I will be able to take good care of them. Sure, this is a business like all others, and the goal is to make money. I believe that it is not impossible to do the right thing and follow your values all while still being able to make money simultaneously. It is also very important to have enough employees to be efficient while maintaining this family and personal connection with the clients. It is critical to not rush into a hire unless I feel that they are a reflection of my values, meaning, the employees values should line up in a positive way with my own and any other owner in the firm so we are all giving the same genuine customer care and support.

Finally, there are the three minor elements. The first is what I believe to be my most important resource, or what makes my company a better choice than any other in the industry. As I just mentioned in the point above this, my customer service is going to be some of the best and most genuine every seen by a company. If you do something good for someone else, not only does it make you feel good, but it will more often than not allow your company to gain long term trust and maintain clients for a long time. Since in this industry you get paid based on percentages and numbers, if you are able to maintain a long term relationship with a client, or get them to want to give you more money to invest than they otherwise would have, you are still leading the game in the amount of money made. Next is the opportunity that I will tackle next, and I believe that trying to get people to start looking into their financial futures earlier in life (prior to their mid-30’s) could be very beneficial to both the company, and most importantly, the client him/herself. The final point in the three minor elements is what is next for me, and where I would be in the next five years with this venture. I see myself with a growing client base and becoming one of the top financial services firms in the United States. Once I am able to gain the experience needed to become a credible financial advisor, I plan on either taking my own firm to the top, or bringing Raymond James with me as a continued leader operating my own Raymond James firms.

Given my comments from this previous exercise, I was not really able to change anything about the content of my venture idea. The only thing really that was brought up was exactly how I would differentiate myself from all of the other established firms out there. I guess since they have been around a long time already, in order for me to gain the credibility I might have to work for someone for many years to have that experience education that cannot be taught. In reality, that is almost the only way to get into this industry is through climbing up the ladder of experience, therefore, that is what I venture to do. I really appreciate the positive feedback that I received originally form venture one. People really believe that I am going somewhere with this because of passion for other people, and I would have to say that they are correct. It is hard to explain passion in words because at the end of the day, actions are what truly show the passion. 

 

Week 14: Google Gold

During this semester, it was a challenge to get my blog page to the top of the Google search. There was one point where I was at the top, however. I believe it was one of the first couple week’s posts shortly after we heard the tips in the lecture. The key works I tried to use were things like the name of the blog, my name, and even words that I think might be searched in Google. Social media did not affect my blog very much. It may be because I did not focus enough on it, or it just didn’t work out. I think that of my most viewed posts, it would have to be the video interviews that made it on YouTube.  Trying to make the blog the number one page in Google was a fun, and interesting challenge. It is definitely not easy when 500 plus other people are trying to do the same thing within our class.

Week 13: Reading Reflection

This was a very interesting chapter from the textbook and I enjoyed reading it. I think that valuation is extremely important for anyone starting, or continuing a business. One question that I have for the author of the text is why an entrepreneur should perform a complete due diligence. I feel like that would be inefficient to check every single aspect of the venture. I guess that I could also say that I was surprised when I read that. Fortunately, I was not confused about anything in this chapter except why we would use due diligence. As always, I feel that the chapter was written very well and  I followed it easily, and there was nothing that I really disagreed with. I really enjoyed this chapter and its significant importance to being a successful entrepreneur.

Week 13: Celebrating Failure

Just this semester I did have a time where something did not work for me multiple times, as Thomas Edison would have said. This occasion for me was during a time where I was trying to communicate with a Raymond James advisor about me coming into their office and doing any kind of work for them that they would allow me to do for no pay. My intentions were to be around them and ask questions so that I could take a few hours out of the week to learn about the area of work that I desire to do upon graduating. There is no way to learn how to be prepared for this kind of career unless you have experience, therefore, that is what I was doing. Unfortunately, after many email attempts, we could not come up with time for me to introduce myself and come into their office.

I learned from this that people are very busy, and sometimes things really just do not work out. I know that I must keep trying even if it is with other local firms around Gainesville.

In my opinion, failure is a part of life. In sports many professional athletes will say that people don't see how good you really are by seeing you excel at something, but rather the ability to bounce back when things aren't going well. I know that this stretches far beyond the scopes of sports and well into the real world. I feel like this task showed me that hundreds of other students were able to make it through the pain of failure and the awkward interviews and the whole nine yards, so I could definitely say that this course has made me feel a little better with taking a risk.

  

Week 13: My Exit Strategy

1) I think that a good exit strategy for me would be to stay with the financial advising firm until I am experienced enough to be self sustaining, and then move on and expand my own firm around the state and continue expanding branches to reach more people than just locals.

2) I decided that this would be a good exit strategy because I know that this is something that I am passionate about, and I want to be able to impact as many people with my financial service as I can in the time that I am working. It is important to me to be able to train new advisors to support my values in helping many clients in many different locations as I mentioned.

3) I believe that this decision clearly reflects that I value my clients and how I want to make a positive impact on them through my service. I really enjoy my venture and I hope to be able to do it for as long as I can reaching as many people as I can as well.