My Entrepreneurship Story

   Couple years ago, my family decided to make the move from Los Angeles to Miami, Florida. My father had just quit his well-paying job in Los Angeles and decided to move to Miami to start his own travel agency. At the time, I was still in high school and did not fully understand what it meant to be an entrepreneur and my older brother really questioned this huge change.

I remember vividly how motivated he was to start his own company. I would rarely see him sleep and he was always in his office doing paperwork, excel spreadsheets, and calling people constantly. In addition to that, he was rarely home because he had to travel around Florida to draw up the best routes for his agency. The first couple months went by and he was still in the process of making the websites, getting licensing, financing and all the small things to finally launch what he wanted. After about a year, he finally green lit his agency and decided to give it a go.

The first year and the next was pretty rough and did not have many looking out for his services. However, slowly but surely, in the third year, the company started picking up through word of mouth and through my father’s aggressive marketing/advertising overseas, it finally started to pick up.

Witnessing this first hand, and as I older, I began to realize how important it was for him in his early stage to plan everything out. When he first started planning it out, I really wanted him to spend more time with family but now I understood how important it was. The finances and paperwork are vital parts of a successful business and he knew that the company would not do well in the first couple years and so figured out how much he needed to have to stay afloat during the hard times.

Now, the company is well known in South Korea and is a major travel agency to use for travel to the Southeast region of the US. It is mainly catered to people from Asia and the customer base is growing every day. Through all this, I learned about perseverance and determination. I give my father tons of respect and I continue to learn from him everyday. 

    During my time in this class, I am hoping ENT3003 will introduce to me new concepts and ideas that I don’t know. I want to be as well rounded as I can be when I am ready to launch something of my own. This class feels like a good place to start.