Why Nontrepreneurs Disdain Entrepreneurs

The Empowerment of Googling Stuff

When I started my first business in 2010 it was not a popular endeavor. Many of my friends and family simply saw me as a guy with a foolish idea to start an upscale smartphone repair shop in Central Alabama (wut?). I didn’t have any money or any experience whatsoever fixing electronics. What I did have was the following:

• No shortage of other harebrained business ideas
• A full-time University course load
• A wife, infant son and full-time job
• Lots of motivation and work ethic
• Extensive experience Googling things, like any other millennial

It all started in the summer of 2010 during my daily perusal of business articles. I came across a news article of some LSU students who started a smartphone repair shop in southern Louisiana. Within a year they had 3 locations and were growing like crazy. I simply told myself “If these guys can fix iPhones and grow like crazy, why can’t I?”

Keep in mind at this time I didn’t own an iPhone, nor a smartphone, nor had ever fixed one. I’m not a “tinkerer,” and I could care less about how things work. I simply love business, slightly more than I love pizza, which is a lot. After reading this, I continued to Google similar articles about similar new businesses in the smartphone repair industry. They were all growing like crazy. I came to the conclusion that this was the ground floor of a growing industry, and that a repair shop needed a population of ~100,000 to be as successful as I wished. As luck would have it, I lived in a city with a population of ~100,000 that did not yet have a repair shop.

Within a couple months I had scraped together $20,000 from excess student loans, credit cards and a good friend and I opened up shop in a high traffic retail spot. Here I was, an already debt-laden, overbooked new dad signing a lease committing me to $2,300/month payments for the next 5 years! I quit my job and kept my full-time course load and went to work.

It was then the murmurs came rumbling in. “What is he doing? Why would he risk the financial security of his family? Who fixes smartphones? I’ve never even heard of a business like this. Why would he pay that much in rent? Are there even enough iPhones in Alabama to support his business? Has he ever even fixed an iPhone? (I had only fixed one, ever) Who even gave him money to do this?”

I must admit, it was disheartening to hear these things. But looking back, those comments motivated me more than the support I received. The negativity started to fade after locations 2 and 3 opened up within the next 6 months.

The simple reason nontrepreneurs disdain entrepreneurs is this: Nontrepreneurs don’t know what you know, and if they did, they wouldn’t dare execute on that knowledge.

The naysayers didn’t know about this industry. They didn’t know that this would eventually grow into a multi-million dollar business. I didn’t know a thing about fixing phones the day I opened, but I did know business and I taught myself as I went. I started before I was ready, and I would never have done it any differently.

If you liked this article please hit “recommend” and read my other article with you’re at it! Thanks for reading!