Lesson Learned

The glitz and glam of being an entrepreneur can quickly turn to tears and screams into pillows as you watch what you perceived to be a well-planned and executed event sift through your hands like beach sand. Beach sand aside the Success Summit was a lesson I needed to learn in humility, teamwork and timing. 
Teamwork makes the dream work. Self-explanatory, right?   Having a knowledgeable and supportive team lays the foundation and sets the tone. However, I, the one woman perfectionist that I am didn’t enlist the support of any other like-minded individuals. It could have been that I planned this event halfway around the world or that I believed that the many meetings and conversations would suffice, but in the end I was wrong. Not having a team left me open to one point of view, mine. I didn’t have someone to help filter speakers and participants who were simply telling me what I wanted to hear or to bounce ideas off of. When organizing an event you need a team of dedicated individuals for checks and balances, to serve as a filter and to help share the workload. Going forward I will have a carefully selected team that not only shares my vision but comes with logical reasoning as well as creativity. 
Timing is EVERYTHING! I planned this event for the last weekend of the summer before school started. At the time I was planning to return to China and I truly only had two weekends to spare before my return flight, after discussing this with the host this weekend was decided upon. I am not a parent or a student so I didn’t consider all of the events surrounding students returning to school and the summer coming to a close. When I say events, I do mean events. There were two Back to School events scheduled during my carved out time, one in the morning and one in the afternoon on opposite sides of the county. In addition to my target audience of high school girls getting their hair and nails done and buying last minute clothing items, there were teenage boys getting haircuts and shopping as well. I didn’t take this into consideration and when gently reminded about this fact of teenage children I simply shrugged it off called it negativity and said this wasn’t for those students. If I would have heeded these words instead of disregarding students or even remembering what some of my priorities were as a student maybe there would have been a larger attendance from the students. 
Although I planned this event about eight months in advance when none of these things were on the books, had I had a team and considered all that the last weekend of school entails I’m sure we would have selected a different weekend. 
In the end I linked up with one of the Back to School events in the afternoon. I enjoyed watching the community come together and support the initiatives of the community as well as offer services. Being a part of this event confirmed that it takes teamwork, timing and understanding your target audience. I will take these lessons and a few others with me as I begin to organize my next event. The beauty in what is perceived as a personal failure is that there is always a lesson or two you can learn and that’s what success is really about, recognizing where change needs to occur and making the change.