Guest Speaker - Shadrach White

Being revenue hawk involves many objectives. You need to understand what selling means since your business won’t go anywhere otherwise, you need to smile to create a welcoming culture that becomes infectious, you need to be able to make quiet time to let your mind relax, and you need to read other subjects other than matters relating to business so you can connect to others by being well-rounded. Those were the first points made to us by the Speaker of the day… Shadrach White.

He briefly went over some of the startup companies that led to his eventual 4^th company. One of these was called Sportswear and its purpose was to sell vintage basketball jerseys. His angel investor gave him $700,000 to get rolling, though he didn’t manage his finances well and it ended up with him owing a lot of money and paying it back for 6 to 7 years. He also built up a business called Olympia, though he didn’t have much to say about it.

Cloud PWR was his 4^th company and the purpose was to build it up to a $1 million company then make use of an exit event to make a large profit. He made it a point that you should never underestimate the power of a good attorney and not to cut corners since it may be expensive earlier on though pay off in the long-term. His company was responsible for Air Lift. It involved building applications for government institutions and services as well as making them simpler.

Lastly, he made sure to go over 4 ways to protect intellectual property – trade secret, copyright, trademark, and patents, 4 directions a company can go – close it, continue operations, sell/merge, or openly trade, and ways to fund a company – equity, debt, or other options such as grants, business plans, etc. The details behind these were all covered earlier on, though he organized them into a simpler format than the first time we saw them. He basically told us he was in entrepreneurship for the purpose of making money and it was alright if that was what we were aiming for. Creating companies for the purpose of exit events is just another form of business and some individuals just don’t want to spend their entire lives doing one thing or running one company and he assured us all that entrepreneurship didn’t mean dedicating your everything to one option, but dedicating your everything to any option.