After decades of assisting businesses of all shapes and sizes with their marketing efforts I must confess I still have a soft spot for the entrepreneur – specifically, the start-up. There is simply a thrill and energy in young, entrepreneurial enterprise that time, after time, after time, puts a huge smile on my face.  I love getting caught up in their passion, their excitement, their creativity and their dreams and I will always do everything I can to help entrepreneurs bring their visions to life.

Unfortunately, while long on passion, the one thing that entrepreneurs often lack is resources.  Most often they are limited financially; but many times it’s a lack of available time, family support, proper planning, informed perspective (professional guidance) or just plain old business savvy.  So with so many potential obstacles it is critical that entrepreneurs are RESOURCEFUL.

Plain and simple – successful entrepreneurs must be persistent and RESOURCEFUL.  Some how, some way they must figure out how to work through, or around, the challenges that will undoubtedly come their way.

So the word for today is RESOURCEFUL.  And that brings me to one of my favorite stories; a fantastic example of entrepreneurial RESOURCEFULNESS.

Once upon a time we were approached by a young, but very successful chef.  This young man possessed a wonderful resume that included several of DC’s better known restaurants.  He obviously had the culinary talent – and now he had a dream; he wanted to build a catering company to rival the best in the city.

His initial problem was he had no commercial facility from which he could work and no money to rent one.  So what is a chef to do when he has no available kitchen?

Well, here’s what this young man did:  after knocking on a number of possible doors he finally came upon a suburban racquet club that had a cafe – along with a full, larger than life, commercial kitchen.  At the time the cafe was, shall we say, woefully underperforming.  The cafe provided patrons with some prepackaged snacks along with drink vending machines and during lunch you could enjoy a hot dog.  Get the picture?

My client struck a deal with club management; he would take over operations of the cafe and turn it into something special for the club members to enjoy and in return he would simultaneously utilize the commercial kitchen for his catering enterprise.

Within weeks the transformation of the cafe was almost fairy tale like.  The racquet club became the place to go for lunch if you were any where near the place!  The new cafe was serving up delicious and healthy meals that rivaled spa cuisine at it’s finest!  Then he added themed dinners (seafood night, prime rib night, Mexican night etc.) and actually started making money at the cafe (something management had never dreamed of) all the while building his own catering business just as he planned.

Over the years I have seen hundreds of entrepreneurs creatively work through, and around, all sorts of challenges.  Today I tip my hat to their RESOURCEFULNESS and encourage all of us to develop more of that same creative thinking capacity.