New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

We were visiting a church recently where we have many dear friends and I was visiting with a super-smart young 18-year old.  When I asked him what his future plans were, he shifted the burden of the answer to me by asking me for ideas, since he was not sure what he wanted to do with his future.  Many young men are in the same boat: having had little exposure to the work world, they don't fully understand all of the potential opportunities, industries and career fields.  They do understand the mounting pressure of the desire to get married and start a family and the looming burden of their need to provide for that future family, but in many cases, they have no idea where to begin their journey.  I've been there myself.

Standing near us was a man that has his own family-run specialty medical supply distribution business and knowing that he has employed young male Christian interns in the past, I came up with this on-the-spot suggestion for this young man: create your own entrepreneurial curriculum over the next year by visiting with or working with as many like-minded entrepreneurs as you can to get a sense for their life, their work day, their industry, their business model, their customers, etc.

I suggested that he goes about it as follows:

1. Put together a list of like-minded entrepreneurial men that he knows or has heard about and review it with his father and prioritize the list (see our Network page and search on "seeking interns to mentor" for a listing of some men.)
2. Contact those men and offer to come to work for them for free for a period of time (even if it is as simply to invite them to lunch, visit their office and follow them around for one day or spend only a week with them.)  The offer to actually work for them for free in exchange for learning about their business is a priceless exchange: it is very cheap tuition for the student and a great deal of fun for the teacher.
3. Pick up your own expenses by traveling to them and offer to be their personal assistant for the period of time you've agreed upon.  If all works out as many of these situations do, you can find local men and still live at home or for out of town visits, perhaps they will invite you to spend time in their homes during your visit, another priceless lesson as you can observe their home life as well.  The interns that I've worked with have all said that spending a great deal of time in my home was one of the most beneficial parts of the program as it gave them a much deeper perspective of my life as an entrepreneur (not to mention my wife's cooking.)
4. Not willing to strike out on your own on this entrepreneurial tour?  Grab a brother or a like-minded friend to share the journey and to act as an accountability partner.  Two may be harder to place in such a program, but I found that by pairing up my interns, the many benefits outweighed any drawbacks.
5. Spend a period of time putting together your own personal MBA in entrepreneurship by sampling as many areas of the country, industries, business models and customer sets as possible to round out your education.  This will equip a you with a much deeper appreciation for different types of opportunities and who knows, along the way, you just might come up with a new idea or craft an entrepreneurial joint venture with one of those entrepreneurs.
6. Sound like too much effort?  Then start with just a lunch tour: call up some local men and ask them if you can stop by their office and bring them lunch so you can visit with them in their office over lunch (be sure and take their lunch order to get the food they want.)  Between the phone calls, interruptions and lunch conversation, you can still pick up a tremendous amount of perspective in just one or two hours inside the context of him sitting in his office inside his business.