The person I interviewed is named Robert Norton. Robert is a friend and business acquaintance of my step father. Robert has done claims adjusting and appraising for corporate insurance companies for more than ten years, which has built a strong knowledge base in the field. For the past ten years though, Robert has been doing independent adjusting, which is sometimes referred to as being an umpire. He is fulfilling a mass need for claims adjusting and damage appraisal done by a third independent party so that the consumer doesn't get an unfair appraisal by the company with which they have the policy. He is an entrepreneur because he not only owns and operates his own business successfully, but he had identified a need for a product/service and decided to leave a corporate structure to fulfill the need of the potential clients he foresaw. I asked Robert three short questions in our interviewed which he answered as follows.
What does it mean to you to be an entrepreneur?
-"What being an entrepreneur means to me is that you have a unique opportunity to present a product or service to your clients. In my case, it's a service that eventually renders a product in the form of a check for the client. Being an entrepreneur also give you a chance to focus on results instead of a single task. Part of being an entrepreneur is to see the results you are working towards and working towards the future results, as opposed to just being a worker and focusing on an individual task and having a majority of you responsibility being to just show up and conduct small tasks from 9-5. Being an entrepreneur means you don't have a schedule and that you have to put in the work when the inspiration and motivation hits you."
What do you think that I should learn in my entrepreneurship course?
-"Hopefully, you will learn how to distinguish between a hobby and a business. Too many people treat their endeavors as a hobby and not a business and doing so can lead to unnecessary failure. It would important to learn how to nurture an idea and mold it into an opportunity. If it's treated as a personal hobby and not a business then there is little chance for growth. By this I mean that as an entrepreneur you need to learn how not to work "in" your business, but learn how to work "for" your business as a whole."
What is something that you wish you had learned in school before setting out as an entrepreneur?
-"I think one of the most important things that I wish I had learned in school was social protocol in meeting and networking events. Not in the sense of which fork to use at dinner, but as in how to approach a potential client at a social event. I was in a coed business fraternity but unfortunately we didn't focus on the social aspect of things in this context as much. I had a lot to learn with this when I was in the corporate structure."
I think that I was surprised by how open and willing Robert was to share his insight and knowledge. He seemed very passionate about how he approaches his days. I also found it interesting that his answers, though slightly different, kind of fall in line with the mentality of what is being talked about in this class. Though he is not an inventor or the first in his field, he is fulfilling the needs of many people and works on his own schedule. He seemed to have a lot of insight and I look forward to interviewing him again in the future.
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