Very Short Interview With Entrepreneur Part 2

When I did my first interview it was with Robert Norton. He is a friend and business acquaintance of my step father. Robert has owned and run his own business which does independent claims adjusting for over 10 years now.

The 3 questions that I asked him were:
                1) What does it mean to you to be an entrepreneur?
                2) What do you think that I should learn from my entrepreneurship course?
                3) What is something that you wish you had learned in school before setting out as an                                entrepreneur?

Looking back from where I stand now, that initial interview has some pretty good advice in it. In one way or another, he had covered a few key concepts from this class like creating a venture concept, identifying an opportunity and even social networking. I feel that after going through this class I understand the points he was trying to get across a lot better.

This time around

This time when I called Robert I asked three different questions.

1) What was your motivation for leaving the larger corporations to start your own independent service?
- It was a lot of things, I wanted independence to work on my time and I have a family so I'm always trying to do the absolute most for them. I realized there was an opportunity to do insurance referee work independently and the money was there so the rest is history.

2)What are some sacrifices you had to make to be successful?
- I had to spend a lot of time working well past when someone with a 9-5 would stop. For the first few years I worked till almost 9pm every night, even weekends cause I had to build clientele and a reputation, which meant taking more clients than I could handle most of the time. Even now when I have a large claim it requires more of my time than usual.

3) What would you like to see your business turn into?
- Well, right now it's just me and I do a lot of large claims with a couple other independent guys. The only thing that can change in a business like this is you level of clientele. I do claims on houses worth a few million dollars right now but there's still room to move up to higher end homes and hotels.

I don't know if he had a sense of me progressing in this journey but the interview was more comfortable and felt much more casual than the first time around. I feel like he wasn't trying to give me professional answers but just honest ones.