“Overnight Success”
Written by Arthur Willson, #WakeEntrepreneur and Summer Intern
Many people waste time searching endlessly for magic shortcuts to entrepreneurial success and fulfillment when the only real path is staring them right in the face: real entrepreneurs start real businesses that employ real people who provide real products and services to real customers. As Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb, said: “Our ‘overnight’ success took 1,000 days.” Usually, by the time you’ve heard of a startup, they’ve been around for a while and a tremendous amount of hard work has been poured into their success. That is one of the things I have gained an appreciation for over the course of my internship with Till. In our digital age, web presence is largely taken for granted and when I joined Till, we didn’t have one. Well, we did… but this was the site.
One of the company’s major accomplishments that I was heavily involved with was the revamp of that site. After entertaining bids from many development shops, our team ultimately decided that we could do it in-house and allocate that capital elsewhere. This process taught me that there is really no excuse for not knowing how to do something, you have Google and YouTube. Through two weeks of grinding, our new website is up and I hope you think it looks better. 
There is no way any course of study can fully prepare you for the challenges you will face in a startup, but my business degree at Wake, entrepreneurially spun by my entrepreneurship minor, have given me core competencies to be successful. I use organizational behavior, quantitative analysis, and finance concepts daily at Till.
Ask any businessperson which is more important, their product or how it’s sold, and you’re likely to get a long explanation on why product takes the cake any day of the week. They are not wrong. You don’t have a business if there is nothing to sell. But, as we enter an era of hyper-competition, how we sell has become at least as important, if not more important than the product itself. There is barely any industry that isn’t exploding with products and/or services. I’ve learned how to sell in an entrepreneurial environment and the art of relational selling. I highly recommend checking out The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from 0 to 100 Million. It’s pretty hard to create significant value when you don’t have any technical skills, but I have learned that there is very little I can’t do after a Google search or two.
After my internship, I’ll stay on part-time throughout my senior year managing our customer relationship management (CRM) platform. I am very excited about the opportunity to continue to be a part of Till’s success and to continue my learning beyond the scope of my eight-week internship. Apart from Till, I’ll be returning to Wake for one last ride and would love to talk to anyone about ideas/ ventures they are working on. Contact information below.
Keep husslin!
