U n l e a s h Y o u r E n t r e p r e n e u r i a l P o w e r by Michael E. Gordon My father was the cofounder of a meat processing and distribution company, and his concept of training me in the family business was to start me at the bottom. The very bottom! I want you to learn the business from the ground up, he told me. For starters, Dad put me in charge of the companys hamburger operation. It was a one-person business: me. I had a 500-square-foot work area, equipped with a boning bench, a meat grinder, a patty maker, storage shelves, packaging materials, pallets, gloves, telephone, radio, desk, and miscellaneous knives and supplies (no computer in those days). Each morning, I would belly up to the boning bench with knife in hand. I would take a slab of beef, debone the meat, and trim off the fat. The next step was to cram raw chunks into the hopper. Once inside, the meat was chopped between metal grinding blades, and out came raw ground beef. In the second operation, another machine shaped the bulk ground beef into perfect patties that were then packaged by a third machine. The input was chunks of meat plus my labor, the process was mechanical chopping and molding, and the output was packaged ground beef patties. But something really important happened in this simple process: I added value for customers!

If it werent for my labor and the machines, customers would have to buy the raw beef and chop it themselves, or buy a grinder and form the patties by hand. It doesnt seem like much value, but billions of pounds of ground beef are sold annually in the world. So customers were willing to pay a bit extra for the small value I added. Since I am producing a product and adding value, does that mean I am an entrepreneur? Day after boring day, my operation produced ground hamburger patties, amounting to about 200,000 pounds per year. One day I had an idea: What if I produced specialty hamburger patties? I could envision a line of different types and flavors: healthy organic meat from range-fed, steroid-free cows; smoky burgers with bits of smoked bacon added during the grinding operation; Tex- Mex burgers with added salsa and other seasonings; Hawaiian burgers, veggie burgers, turkey burgers . . . (this was in my youth, decades before the existence of prepackaged veggie, healthy, and turkey burgers). I came up with an idea, and I am thinking how to add unique value. Am I an entrepreneur now? I actually began to create and eat my prototypes in my spare time. Some of my concoctions were really tasty! Others were unpalatable. Weeks later, when I had developed confidence in my new idea, I asked for a meeting with my father. I brought my successful experiments and a cooking grill to demonstrate my concept. My father sampled the proposed new product line and became enthusiastic. What happened next was truly exhilarating. For the next two hours, the questions were flying: What kinds of approval do we need from health agencies? How should we price the new product line? Who should we sell toconsumers, distributors, restaurants, supermarkets? Should we sell locally, regionally, nationally, globally? Who will run this business? Should we set this up as a separate business unit and create a branded identity? Do we have competition now or in the future? How can we know if there is an opportunity here? How much money do we need to launch this venture? How much money can the company make in the course of a year? What about other resourcespeople, space, equipment, infrastructure? The meeting ended on a high note, with my father asking me to write something up about this idea. (In those days, I knew nothing about the importance of writing a business plan or an executive summary.)

After studying the competition and the potential market, I came to believe that this was a real opportunity to make money. Over the next few weeks, I began to write a summary of what needed to be done. My starting point was a detailed list of assumptions, based on questions my father had asked in our meeting. I even calculated our projected financial growth over the next several years. I asked for another meeting and presented my thoughts to my father. He was even more interested. He made a decision to pursue this venture inside the existing company and asked me to run this department, with its own profit-and-loss accounting. So here I was at age 17 with the mandate to build a new hamburger business unit inside the meat company. Since my idea appears to be a real opportunity, and I am to be in charge of this business, am I an entrepreneur now? Though I faced many challenges, my focus was on getting the new business unit going and making money. My strategy was to create a branded line of hamburger patties (Gordons Great Guernseyburgers, Healthy Heiferburgers, Smokey the Bearger, and others) and sell to customers under our brand name, at a premium price. I would sell directly to retail consumers, to distributors, restaurants, and food markets, to everyone except other meat markets. I knew that if I were successful, competitors would smell the profits and try to horn in on my business. Because I could not prevent that from happening, I would have to rely on my brand recognition to build sales and profits quickly. But I did not want future competitors to see the momentum we were gaining before we were well along with our branding efforts. Now am I an entrepreneur? Looking back, I realize that the entrepreneurial spirit was within me, and I was beginning to live the entrepreneurial process. I had developed an idea and, through discussions with more experienced hands, confirmed that it represented a real opportunity for our company. I had even come up with a strategy: to develop a product line of unique hamburgersburgers that were different from what everyone else was selling. My prototype taste tests were a rudimentary form of market research, and that research told me that customers would value the difference they found in our products. My written summary of the proposed business, including financial projections, brought my idea to a level of practical concreteness.

Was I an entrepreneur at that point? No. I was an almost-entrepreneur: a young man with ideas and plans but with no skin in the game. Like countless other commercial dreamers, I didnt take that bold step of implementing my strategy. I went off to college to pursue my passion for science, and the wouldbe Great Gordon Burger Empire was forgotten. There was no champion to take up the cause. Many years would pass before I could truthfully say, Now, I am an entrepreneur.

Question 1:

Please read the whole text and briefly explain its concept in few lines in your language, tell what is it about, and write the summarization of each title separately?