Yesterday, a few Sauder Alumni came to section 101 to talk to us about their experiences as entrepreneurs in the business world. The alumni were Paul Gill (founder of the Naked Coconut), Jennifer Martin (founder of SIP Soda) and Paul Davidescu (founder of Tangoo), and they each had plenty to respond to and talk about when faced with questions from the class. Linking it back to the lecture on Entrepreneurship that we had a couple of weeks ago, I think it is worthwhile to identify some of the key skills that 3 of these alumni have in their possession and how they’ve used the skills to turn their businesses into successful ones.

Paul Gill definitely has the important trait of creativity (Entrepreneur). The incredible idea to launch a coconut-based soy sauce product was an excellent choice when addressing the consumer market – there were few of this type of product and they were being poorly distributed according to Gill. The release of such a product in Canada and Vancouver in particular (with a large Asian population) was also a smart move in terms of expanding a business. Overall, it is safe to say that Gill definitely excelled in identifying his target market and what they wanted.

Jennifer clearly showed her will to succeed through persuasion, with her herself stating that she sought the advice of multiple chefs and figures in the food industry in order to get a better grasp on her product. This is crucial, as whilst launching any new product into the market, one should first look to experts in that particular field in order to get some constructive and legitimate feedback, as well as looking into other factors such as market trends, points of difference (and parity) as well as customer tastes and preferences (currently many consumers are in favour of a healthier, ‘freer’ lifestyle).

Paul Davidescu certainly combined the idea he had with the growing trend of technology, opting to create an interactive website as well as an application for the Apple app store, allowing for consumers to easily connect to Tangoo. This is an important thing to note from Davidescu – he not only used technology to market his product, but he based functionality on a user-friendly program which was easy to use (through the demo). This also ties into a separate topic which has always been of interest to me – the relevance of programming and computing in any type of business today.

However, an important thing to note is that all 3 Sauder Alumni started these businesses themselves – an interesting method to evaluate their success would be taking a look a the ‘what ifs’ if they had collaborated with a partner or a few more people whilst creating their business. I personally believe that it is more beneficial as two or more people can bring more ideas to the table, and can use each others’ experience to create a successful enterprise.