Go away grammar police

I received a comment from my “The bigger they are the harder they fall” entry recently. It was from “Anonymous” and he/she said:

“I’d prefer it if you said ‘have to’ instead of ‘hafta’. It’s just childish and hurts credibility.”

I remember grammar and its role in blogs being a topic of debate from other blogs. Here are my thoughts.

First of all, I’m very happy that someone reads this blog and is inspired enough to post a comment on it. I hope this person is a regular reader and gets something out of this blog. But I kinda – sorry kind of – doubt it. This person chooses to pick on grammar instead of commenting on content. This person would have much more credibility in my mind if he/she said “Interesting insights on how small companies can compete with big ones. Oh by the way, I’d prefer it if you said…” The other thing that tells me this person isn’t a real reader is he (I’ll use “he” from now on) almost takes personal offense to it. He uses “I’d prefer it” instead of “The right way to use it is…” And calling it childish is another clue (yes, I know starting a sentence with “and” isn’t grammatically correct either).

I know my grammar. I probably know it better than 90% of the people in the US. I did well in English class. I know my subjects and predicates, pronouns and antecedents, and parallel structure. But there’s another part of English class that people forget: the “arts” side of English, like poems, prose, and different styles that don’t follow grammar rules. Remember Catcher in the Rye? Have at it grammar geeks. My blog, and I bet most blogs out there, don’t aspire to be New York Times articles. There’s more Catcher in the Rye type poetic license. So what do you hafta say about that? 

Go away grammar police

Tiny steps make major leaps

Pamela Slim from the Escape From Cubicle Nation recently posted a blog entry entitled Tiny steps make major leaps. The idea is very similar to a blog I posted a while back called One small step for man. Pamela compares trying to lose weight with trying to leave the cubicle world. Interesting read on Pam's take on a similar subject!

Tiny steps make major leaps

Entrepreneurship just isn't taught right

One of the hardest things I've had to deal with about entrepreneurship is that I just plain don't know how to do it. I've been taught to go to school, get good grades, work for a big company, get a good pension, and retire. My dad, who on the one hand tells me I need to work for myself because it sucks having a boss telling you what to do, also gets scared when I talk of the goal of becoming one full time (or taking a 3 month personal leave of absence to try it out). My schooling taught me how to take a derivative, F=ma, how to identify a subject and a predicate, and how to spell (how irrelevant does learning how to spell well feel now as I right click and fix my spelling error). All my friends (prior to finding out that some of them were closet entrepreneurs) worked in the corporate world.

My one entrepreneurship class taught me how to write a business plan... Basically a document to attempt to inspire someone to just give me money for my pie in the sky idea. I made BS financial projections, entered in gory details about how I plan on marketing on TV and radio, and all this "planning" stuff... In the military there's a quote: "No plan survives the battlefield."

I've always wanted to teach a class to students who are currently working to show them that entrepreneurship isn't about that. It's actually part of the reason for starting this blog. I've come across the blog of Bill Wales, an entrepreneurship professor at Skidmore College who GETS IT. Hopefully more classes will be taught like the way he's teaching it.

Entrepreneurship just isn't taught right

What is Corporatepreneurship

This blog has been going for about three months now... Figured it be a good time to reflect a bit on "Corporatepreneurship" and why we started this blog. We got the term "Corporatepreneur" by adding "corporate" and "entrepreneur." We all work at a very large, Fortune 50 company as our "day job" and are or aspire to be entrepreneurs at all other times.

So why are we both? Speaking for myself, there's a few reasons... From the corporation side, I don't know enough about entrepreneurship to make enough money to do it full time. I get a nice steady paycheck from my current job. I enjoy the camaraderie with my co-workers. I'm scared to leave my job to be an entrepreneur. All the role models, education, and messages I ever got was for the corporate world.

The fun part is from the entrepreneur side. Why? I'll never live up to my potential in the corporate world. I can make a much bigger difference as an entrepreneur. There are so many ideas I want to try that the corporate world will never try. I believe my strengths fit an entrepreneur very well. I can make a lot more money and reach my dreams as an entrepreneur.

There's a lot of unique pros and cons to this double life. Pros: You don't hafta worry about putting food on the table and paying the bills. You can learn a lot in the corporate world that you can reapply to the entrepreneur world. You can fund your own ventures.

Cons: By the time you get home from your 9-5, you're tired and all you feel like doing is sitting down and watching TV. Sometimes you hafta work longer hours and run out of time at night. You can't do any ventures that require you to be available during the day. You can't sink all of your passion into your venture because you've got a day job to worry about that's first priority. Your employer may get paranoid about you doing something on the side.

We've come up with a bunch of ways to live this double life. SEEFADs make you take time out to work on your stuff and allow you to feel the life of being a entrepreneur. We try to find business models that don't require constant involvement. I'm looking to take a personal leave of abscence, which kinda gives me the best of both worlds.

Hopefully this blog will touch people out there in the corporate world who've always had the itch, and show them that it is possible. We've also gotten great contributions from people who've done it and can share experiences. And maybe I'll be in the position where I'll hafta think up a new name for this blog someday...

What is Corporatepreneurship

Thank goodness for the Corporatepreneur Blog!

I hate to toot our own horn - but I am so thankful for the Corporatepreneur Blog! I know it's early in our run here and who knows where this is going, but thank goodness we have a home for intelligent and real advice about entrepreneurship.

I was doing some research for a new blog post when this headline grabbed my attention "New Business Website Offers Support for Entrepreneurs". And I thought - sounds great! So I clicked on the article and then went to the site they referenced, and it came across to me as nothing but a "get rich quick / work from home" scam! (I feel that we need a cool acronym for the GRQ/WFM scam sites).

Here's a screen shot from a portion of that web page (not even 1/2 a page down):


This doesn't look like a site designed to help entrepreneurs - it looks like an attempt for someone to get rich quick by duping people attempting to get rich quick into scams. Don't fall for it! Hopefully by know you know that we believe entrepreneurship is a longer-term process about building something of value.

Though as much as I was again pissed off by this website, I can't say I was too surprised. One of the main reasons we started this blog was because we couldn't find anything out there quite like this. We wanted a place for intellectual minds to converse about entrepreneurship and we wanted a blog that WE were interested in following daily as well! (hence the entrepreneurial feeds to the right of the page as well as a new dilbert cartoon at the very bottom of the page everyday). We are going to continue to work hard to make THIS the place for entrepreneurs or wannabe-entrepreneurs. So feel free to comment with any improvements you'd like to see.

Maybe my entrepreneurial advice from all of this is if you keep looking and can't find something out there that you want - you must go and create it because there probably are plenty of others out there like you who would want the exact same thing.

Thank goodness for the Corporatepreneur Blog!

5 Steps to Entrepreneurship

This site is really about “Where do I start?” Most of us probably have had moments in our job where we wanted to start our own business. We might have a great idea. We might be frustrated at work. We might feel like we can do better if we only had a chance. But the steady paycheck and security are hard to leave. So how do you have the best of both worlds? That’s what corporatepreneurship is all about!

We’ve identified five steps to “having your cake and eating it too” entrepreneurship:

1. The burning desire
2. Baby steps
3. Corporatepreneur
4. Entrepreneur
5. Financial freedom

Most people consider entrepreneurship to be risky. The classical way of thinking about entrepreneurship was this:

1. The burning desire
2. Baby steps
3. Corporatepreneur
2. Entrepreneur
3. Financial freedom

So you get an idea, quit our job, and sink a ton of money into it and chase your dreams. Holy cow that is risky! By adding the “baby steps” and “corporatepreneur” steps, you reduce your risk a ton. And you can increase your motivation to actually get things started!

Keep checking back on this site… better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed! Our hopes are to show people in the corporate world how you can do your own thing. And if you’re not in the corporate world, you can learn a thing or two also… mainly in the “baby steps” category. We’ll face head on things like “I don’t have time” “I don’t know where to begin” “It’ll require way too many resources” “I don’t have enough money” and other stuff like fear, procrastination, motivation, and inspiration. Of course they’ll be “useful” stuff like how to outsource stuff you don’t feel like doing for $4/hr, how stupidly easy it is to get paid by Amazon or Ebay, and why you should take the idea of a business plan and shove it.

5 Steps to Entrepreneurship

About Us

What is the Corporatepreneur?
This is a blog about the dream of starting your own business and becoming your own boss. It really started years ago when a group of us would regularly meet (monthly or so) and share tips and tricks about becoming entrepreneurs. We called it the "meeting of the minds" and we would give updates on the progress of our businesses and lament about having to continue to work in the corporate world while starting to see the light of freedom that entrepreneurship offers.

Someone once told me that all of the corporate profits reported to Wall Street by these Fortune 500 companies are just "excess productivity that the employees are not compensated for." After I thought about that for a little bit - it really began to bother me. Basically all of my hard work was making someone else at the top of the ladder rich.

I can't completely bash the corporate world because it provides some stability and predictability, though much less than it used to. In my short 8 years "working for the man" I have seen enough evidence that the security offered by these companies is merely a mirage in the sand. I have seen talented people who gave their entire lives to a company let go because they could be replaced by much less expensive new-hires. I've seen employees and friends fired close to retirement, or given packages in order to retire years before planned. And now - as this blog begins in earnest, the economic situations are leading to an increased tightening or elimination of employee benefits including 401k matches.

But I don't have to go on and on telling you all of the reasons why it makes sense to start your own business. If you are reading this then you, like the rest of us, know where you want to go with your life but are looking for help along the way. That's what the Corporatepreneur is here for. There is a long and awkward period between when you realize you are worth more than what your employer thinks - but you have yet to make it on your own as a business owner.

So please become part of our community, post your thoughts and insights, and help us help each other. We really don't know where this blog is headed - it is more of a labor of love as all of us who started it have our own side businesses to attend to as well. Some are in their infancy, others are long defunct, but it's those few and precious ideas that start to take off that keep us working every day to try and make it on our own.

And now you are in luck! You can watch the process from our experience as well as share yours. In the past 8 years of doing this we have made more money than we ever thought and we have stayed in corporate jobs longer than we imagined even when we make as much or more on the side! (When is it a good time to cut your income in half!?!)... But more to come on that.

For now please take a look around this blog and if you see something of value - please send it to your friends or others you know who might be dreaming about becoming their own boss!

About Us

Tell Other Entrepreneurs About Us

If you find this blog helpful and know someone esle who might be interested in starting their own busiess - send them a link! It's the highest compliment you can pay us!

http://corporatepreneur.blogspot.com/

Thank You!

Tell Other Entrepreneurs About Us