Rhody Trader

JD at Get Rich Slowly posted  The Pros and Cons of Self-Employment recently and it got me thinking about my own experiences as an entrepreneur. It started in earnest back when I was coaching collegiate volleyball. That was a great job for many reasons, one of which was having a high flexible schedule allowing me to do some interesting things.  I’ve kept it up in different ways since then.

I guess you could say I started with launching a club volleyball program, though while that was certainly a business from the perspective of management and marketing and all that, it was never something intended to make money. The first real money making venture was the development of a training aid which came to be called the Precision Passer. Basically, it’s a target which hangs on the volleyball net (as you can see in the picture) that players use to catch the the ball in their ball-handling drills. They’ve been sold all over the US and to a few other countries as well.

Going through the process of developing and then marketing the Precision Passer was a great learning experience. There was prototyping to be done and a patent to file when it was ready. There was production to arrange and fund. There was a marketing strategy to develop and a fulfillment processes to put in place. In some ways there was success. In other ways there was failure.

Although the products are considerably different, the lessons I learned building the Precision Passer business, and running the volleyball club program, helped a lot when my book came out. Of course Wiley deals with the production and distribution of The Essentials of Trading, but a great deal of the marketing and promotion has fallen to the team of  me, myself, and I.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I will continue in an entrepreneurial manner for many years to come, if for no other reason than because I have varied interests and like having side projects. The one thing I would say about it, though, is that running a business is much more involved and complex than most folks ever thing about ahead of time. As one book I read said quite well, most people who quit their jobs to start a business find themselves with a job that’s much bigger than the one they’ve left.

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