Lifestyle Businesses and Eskimos
Some lifestyle entrepreneurs, paradoxically, claim to have little interest in business but view the tools of business as merely skills they need to survive economically while living their chosen nonconventional lifestyle. Sharon, one of my business school classmates, was a former VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) volunteer who worked with Eskimos in northern Alaska. She felt these Eskimos were slowly but surely being forced to abandon their way of life because they lacked the business skills needed to trade and otherwise survive in a world that was unconcerned with their culture. Her whole purpose in gaining an MBA degree was to return to Alaska so she could teach business skills to these Eskimos as survival skills to protect their culture and enable them to successfully coexist in a world dominated by a free market economy.
Most people who seek MBA degrees intend and expect to work for big companies and climb traditional career ladders; a few intend to start their own companies, and a few others plan to take over family businesses.
The tools of business are powerful, but they need not be the exclusive property of businesspeople any more than computers are the exclusive province of computer programmers. I intend to show how powerful business tools can be harnessed and used by anyone who wants to pursue a field of interest and a purposefully chosen lifestyle. True, most of the people who understand and use these tools do so to build traditional businesses that assume 12-hour days and a business-centered life where what they do all day is less relevant than the financial return it produces. But these same tools can help you pursue your dreams, even if those dreams are not to start the next IBM but to live life f lexibly on your own terms doing the work you want to do.
Finally, I show how you can market your services no matter how unusual they may be. Practitioners in many fields are frustrated because they can’t find enough clients or find themselves working in a field other than the one for which they are trained.
This is a shame, because it is easier today than ever before to successfully market unusual skills and products. It’s a matter of taking advantage of the tools of business and the modern technology that is readily available and affordable.
