Interview a business owner and analysis their story.
Over the years, students have found value in interviewing real entrepreneurs. The specific purpose of your interviews with an entrepreneur is to gain information and insight about the entrepreneur’s reasons, strategies, approaches, and motivations for starting and owning a business so as to help you sharpen your own ideas about who an entrepreneur is and what he or she does. The more general purpose is to give you practice in using the interviewing process as a way to gather information and impressions about an unfamiliar topic.
From a study of what you consider to be a successful entrepreneurial venture:
Describe: the basic story of the venture and the entrepreneur(s) who made it happen. Your narrative should include the entrepreneur’s background, the factors creating the opportunity, the obstacles faced, the process used to develop the business and achieve customer satisfaction, significant milestones, etc.
Evaluate/Analyze: the venture creation process, strategies employed and the results obtained: What really made the venture a success? By what criteria was the venture successful? Where did it fall short? What did you find particularly admirable or insightful about the entrepreneur’s actions? How could they have been improved upon?
Reflect: upon the broad ideas illustrated by the specific story. What general principles or rules of thumb did the story of this venture reinforce in your mind, lead you to modify, cause you to reject? What did you learn that will influence your career in the next five years?
