Schoeniger Gary G. - Who Owns the Ice House? Eight Life Lessons From an Unlikely Entrepreneur

by Clifton L. Taulbert and Gary Schoeniger

Copyright 2010 by Clifton L. Taulbert and Gary G. Schoeniger.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. First Edition.

ELI Press, LLC
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ISBN 978-0-9713059-1-5
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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the universe; your playing small doesnt serve the world. Theres nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people wont feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of all thats within us. Its not just in some of us, its in everyone.

And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A s an entrepreneur, mentor and life-long advocate for entrepreneurship, I have long searched for meaningful education programs for entrepreneurs. Specifically, I sought something that could convey the essence of an entrepreneurial mindset and the limitless opportunities it could provide. More importantly, I wanted to knowfrom successful entrepreneursthe beliefs behind the behavior that led them to achieve the success they now enjoyed.

In my capacity as director of entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation, I have the good fortune to travel the world; being exposed to every manner of entrepreneur support groups and the programs they offer. From Brazil to Bangladesh, I have seen first hand, that entrepreneurship has become quite popular and the secret of our American entrepreneurial spirit is not so secret anymore as countries around the world are awakening to the benefits of an entrepreneurial driven economy.

Yet, while entrepreneurship programs have begun to emerge on college campuses and in small business development centers across the country and around the world, the traditional academic, institutional approach has met with limited success. Many rely on a textbook-classroom format that tends to focus on the mechanical aspects of entrepreneurship such as business planning, cash flow projections and market research while overlooking the underlying beliefs and assumptions that enable entrepreneurs to succeed. Others are limited by the lack of relevant curricula or experienced instructors who understand and are able to articulate the true essence of entrepreneurship and what it really takes to start and grow a successful business. Moreover, there is no formulaic approach to entrepreneurship and attempts to do so have repeatedly proven to fail. While many programs provide basic technical information, they often lack the real-world insight and practical skills that only experienced entrepreneurs can provide.

Therein was my motivation to find and fund an education program that was derived from first-hand experience, extracted from the tacit knowledge of those who have overcome hardship and adversity through entrepreneurship. I was searching for a program that could not only inform but one that could inspire the next generation of individuals pursuing their dream of building a better life for themselves and others. And so it was that I discovered the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative. Little did I know, they happened to be in my own backyard.

Dont you live in Mentor, Ohio? began a conversation with the Kauffman Foundations VP of Communications, Wendy Guillies.

Wendy went on to explain that one of our news-feed clipping services had picked up a short article about an entrepreneurship training program being offered by a company called the Entrepreneurial Learning InitiativeELI for shortand they were based in, of all places, Mentor, Ohio, my hometown.

Turns out, ELI had been founded and was operating less than 3 miles from my home, a slight embarrassment for me to admit as I had never heard of them.

ELI founder and co-author of this book, Gary Schoeniger, enjoys retelling the story of my first call to him as rather suspicious. Who are you and what are you doing in my backyard? he likes to credit me as sayingwith a smile. Whereas I know that he has an embellished recollection of that first exchange, I have to concede that I was more than a bit curious about their activities in the community I had been entrepreneurially serving for many years.

Gary was polite, if not forthcoming with details of their activity, so naturally I asked for a meeting to learn more about what they were all about. It was at our first meeting that I was relieved to find out that I didnt know about them because they were, for all practical purposes, a start-up themselves, having recently released their first public course; Mindset: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial IQ.

The course is an online video curriculum featuring entrepreneurs from a diverse background of ethnicity, gender, age, and means. From a woman who transformed her hobby into a thriving business after losing her job, to serial inventors and some of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time, Mindset was like no other entrepreneurship education program I had ever evaluated. What made it unique was the unfiltered sharing of experiences from actual entrepreneurs that, in their own words, describe what they went through and what they endured or overcame to get to their current station in life. They share with the student all the things I wish someone had told me before I took that first journey down the entrepreneurial rabbit hole.

For the first time, I could see someone taking THIS course and being better prepared for all the things they dont teach you in the nuts-and-bolts courses. Beyond the mere sharing of the experiences, Gary and his partner Mike Sutyak had extracted, in consumable bites, the tacit knowledge that drove these successful entrepreneursthe beliefs and assumptions behind their behavior.

As my own entrepreneurial endeavors were colored by many good and difficult experiences, I was confident that they had decoded the entrepreneurial DNA in a way that anyone, from diverse backgrounds, could learn and, more importantly, launch more confidently knowing that challenges lay ahead but nothing was insurmountable.

It was in my own taking of the Mindset Course that I was first introduced to co-author, Clifton Taulbert. In the course, Clifton refers to the inspiration he received from his Uncle Cleve; He was different in his community because he actually took money to the bank.