So this post should have been scheduled earlier today…but it wasn’t typed. I (Ms. ME) should have done far more marketing for the entrepreneurship master class I just held. To be honest, I kind of phoned it in, right down to the replay of one of my earlier classes from this year (see e2E launch below).

But enough of what I did wrong…here’s what I did right.

I didn’t press play and walk away. I actually put myself back through my own class. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil anything here so you’ll be incentivized to sign up for the next free class happening on February 13th. What I will say is that it reminded me of the things that I need to be doing, even when I don’t feel like it to keep this and my other businesses going & growing. It reminded me why I took so many years to come back to this entrepreneur lifestyle and how rewarding and freeing it has already been this year.

Is that to say it hasn’t been nerve-racking at times? No, but it also depends on how I choose to look at it. The tedium of employment had driven me to a low point that I don’t want to revisit. So I have to accept the occasional thrill of “will she or won’t she” until my motivation returns to its past level when I juggled parenthood, college, and entrepreneurship. Or I can take my own advice from the master class…

At any rate here are a few tips on starting your own business (some are similar to my master class) that I’ll share from an ABC story back in 2011 that still has relevance:

• Know why you want to start a business
• Create a simple business plan
• Nail your target customer
• Go out and get customers

There are more tips in the article, seven to be exact. But as I and so many others are proof of, tips and knowledge are necessarily always enough without sufficient motivation or support. That’s part of the reason I created my course. So often while teaching teens and young adults how to start businesses, I’d hear from their adult guardians that they wish they not only had the knowledge but the support I provided my students.

So the key difference of this course in what I see as a series of at least three courses is the support group, for now located on Facebook, Entrepreneurs Creating Value. In my over a decade of working in education, I’ve truly come to appreciate that while the educator may direct the class, all of the instruction does not come from that educator. Goes back to that concept of ‘each one, teach one’ that I first heard in one of my college classes.

Of course at the end of the day everyone who enrolls in an online course is looking for the instructor’s feedback, which I provide on the schedule we’ve agreed upon based on our consultation prior to enrollment. However when it comes to tips 3 and 4 from above, I find the more people you have available to pick their brains the quicker you travel the path to identifying and reaching your target customer for your new business. Instead of bugging family and friends who may not fit that profile or worse yet may not want to support you in your escape for the employee lifestyle that they are too afraid to leave behind, crowd-sourcing the information you need in addition to individual research is a better path.

But what do you think? If you’re thinking about starting a business do you prefer one-on-one, having a group to bounce ideas off of, or both? Share below.