Akron Life May 2022

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F R O M T H E P U B L I S H E R

[ Publisher | Colin Baker | cbaker@bakermediagroup.com ]

Within Reach

Witnessing entrepreneurship made it attainable.

I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. There was only a brief time when I saw my dad work for some one else, so it wasn’t a far leap for me to think that starting or owning a business was possible. On the other side of my family, my grandfa ther was an early franchiser of McDonald’s. He was a manager of a Western Tire store in Rockford, Illinois, and was saving to buy his own tire store when he heard from a friend about a successful hamburger store in Wisconsin called McDonald’s. His friend had said the hamburgers were so popular and the owners were making so much money that they brought home cash in paper bags because they didn’t have time to count it. After some research, my grand father decided to scrap the idea of owning a tire store and took a huge risk to open a McDonald’s. They offered him a location in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and he moved his family across the country in 1959. The rest is history — and McDonald’s was a pretty good gamble, if you ask me. My dad, Don Baker Jr., on the other hand, was always starting and creating new busi nesses, including Akron Life . Some of them worked and some of them failed, but he never gave up. He was still pitching new business ideas until he died. You could say he was a serial starter-upper. He loved get ting businesses off the ground and often became bored with them after that. I think because of my background, I never really thought much about the risk of starting or running a business. My first business was selling bubble gum at school, and later my brother and I passed gutter cleaning flyers throughout the

neighborhood. Thank God we didn’t get any business because the company consisted of my brother as the manager and 10-year-old me as the gutter worker, and having a kid on the roof would not be advisable. Later we used those skills to look for sponsors for our go-kart racing team. We would create elaborate marketing proposals and call heads of companies. That taught me a lot about rejection, but I never gave up. I recently read “Entrepreneurial Leap” by Gino Wickman in which he said thousands of entrepreneurs he worked with could be described with the same six characteris tics: visionary, passionate, problem-solver, driven, risk-taker and responsible. I have most of these. I do find that passion for a project can come and go, but my real passion is business. I love starting and run ning businesses. I love the idea-to-delivery

process. Some ideas work and some fail. I try to learn from my failures and keep going. What really drives and motivates me is possibility. I always felt that I will take possibility over safety and certainty any day. Endless possibilities are intoxicating, and they push me forward every day. Entrepreneurship is difficult to con quer because it’s not just about the idea. It’s about the person behind it. Entrepreneurship is more than just a job; it’s a lifestyle that many people dream of having. We have highlighted several in The 330 who are living that dream on pg. 24. Maybe they will inspire you to take a leap on an idea or business you have dreamed about. Seeing entrepreneurship lived out made it possible in my life.

[ Publisher Colin Baker is a retired racing driver and gearhead. ] Comments? Email them to Kelly Petryszyn [kpetryszyn@bakermediagroup.com].

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