What could I tell you about entrepreneurship in 60 minutes?

In My Humble Opinion
1

No, this isn’t an “ask the entrepreneur” thread with a one hour time limit. I’ve agreed to speak at a local community college’s entrepreneur week for 60-90 minutes to tell them whatever it is I want about entrepreneurship and starting a business. As a brief personal background, I started a consumer electronics company immediately after graduating from college and have been leading and growing it for the past 5 years.

Since then I’ve various speaking engagements a few times a year, all at least tangentially related to my business and to being a young business person. I’m definitely not a naturally excellent public speaker but I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it. The truth is, since I’m not naturally great at it I have to give a lot of thought to what I’d like to communicate and make sure I’ve got really interesting things lined up to say. When I can do that, people seem engaged and ask a lot of good questions.

In the past I’ve generally had to speak for 20ish minutes and the longest ever has been about 45 minutes on two occasions. So I’m a little intimidated by the length of time I have to work with now. I’m finding that just organizing my main points over that much time is difficult. Which is why I’m soliciting advice.

So it’s a very open ended question - If some young guy was talking to you about his experience starting a business what might you be interested in learning? It doesn’t matter to me if you’re curious about something whimsical like what you eat when you’re working 18 hour days or want excruciating detail about making an 83(b) election. If it doesn`t sound like something I could fit into my talk I just wont, so definitely no harm suggesting anything.

Incidentally - It’s a whole “entrepreneur week” and there are other speakers with significantly more experience and credibility, so I’m definitely planning my talk’s theme to be something like “how to start your business with virtually no experience or while very young and what added burdens and tribulations that brings”. (It’s a working title) But that’s the one thing I’m fairly uniquely qualified to talk about and most everyone I’ll be speaking too will relate to it, so I think it’s a good choice.

2

These are questions I would want to ask and have an answer to if I were in the audience (all pretty basic questions that I’d be interested in):
Why did you decide to work in that particular field rather than another?

Why become an entrepreneur over an employee for another company?

What are the benefits and drawbacks of being an entrepreneur vs an employee to another company?

How much time do you devote to business administration vs. your actual job duties related to electronics?

If your business dried up, do you think you could find another job with another company, or would you start another business?

Can you license your business so that if it goes bankrupt you do not personally go bankrupt too (so your house, retirement savings, car, etc are not used to pay off business debts)?

How do you build a client base?

How/why did you choose your location for your business (city/state)? Did you move to an area where there was demand for your service, or did you pick the location first and then try to find a service that was locally in demand?

Did you have fears about starting up a business by yourself at a young age? Did you feel you were leaving behind the ‘security’ of working for someone else (no health insurance, no unemployment compensation, etc)?

How does your tax structure differ than one from a waged employee? I know you have to pay full FICA taxes rather than just half. Do you get higher taxes or lower taxes than you’d see if you were a salaried employee?

How much seed money did you need to start?

Do you feel like you are being outcompeted and pushed out by big box retailers, or do you feel you can compete comfortably with larger companies?

3

Thank you. That’s very helpful.