Entrepreneurs...A New Trend?

Recently, our advanced communication skills class teamed up with http://www.look-look.com, a California based trend-setting company. Our project was to identify a new trend on the Southern Methodist University campus: Entrepreneurs.

From firsthand experience, starting your own business requires a lot of cash flow. My sister recently launched a denim line, Fortune Denim, and if it was not for the help of my mom in regards to money, she would not have been able to start her business. Therefore, SMU students have an advantage over other schools because our campus of 11,000 students located in the wealthy Highland Park area have many students that come from families with above average wealth.

As I was browsing through the Internet I came across a site that affirms my statement that SMU is full of rich kids. http://www.urbandictionary.com allows you to type in your school’s name and it shows you what people think of it. I typed in SMU and here are some of the things I came up with: “Southern Methodist University... a place where the women are perfect, the cars are gleaming new, the boys are frat and the money flows like the David Yurman during rush week,” and “A private school in Dallas filled with snobby, rich kids who base their life on their material possessions and obsess over attire and transportation....That girl is so SMU, she drives a BMW, is carrying a Prada purse, and only got in because her dad paid for that building.”

Look-Look asked our class to give feed back on these three questions:

1)How and where have you seen New Entrepreneurs in your world?

Being a senior at SMU I have had many encounters with “New Entrepreneurs.” Some of them have been quite recent.

One of my good friends and former SMU student, Laura Bush, opened up her first boutique shop L. Bartlett in West Village upon graduating from SMU last May. You can visit her store’s website at http://www.lbartlett.com and receive a coupon for $25.00 off.

I recently also met another SMU student at Fashion Industry Gallery in downtown, Dallas. She had a booth set up at the show and her jewelry really caught my eye. Lindsey Marie makes her own line of fashion jewelry using mainly pearls and natural stones. You can visit her website at http://www.lindseymarie.com




I also have seen my sister’s struggles and successes in launching her own denim line. We have talked about it in depth and she has always said that without my mom’s monetary help she would not have been able to succeed in today’s dog-eat-dog society. You can check out her jeans at http://www.fortunedenim.com

2) Do you see a shift toward a certain type of attitude toward work?

I see more of a lazy attitude among students today. I see a group of people that do not want to be controlled or told what to do by someone in authority. At SMU many students’ parents own businesses or they are at the top of a corporation. I think that many students want to follow their parent’s success stories and go into business themselves because they have seen how successful their parents are. I think that SMU students have it a lot easier than most people in society because we have parents that are able to fund our endeavors.

Everyone in my family is an entrepreneur and one day upon graduating from graduate school I hope to start my own business and follow in the footsteps of my family.
According to Fortune magazine, a group of 1,000 college students were polled and 63.5% of them wanted to start their own business following graduation.

3)How do you think this will change business in the future, if at all?

I don’t believe if this so-called "trend" will necessarily change business in the future. Young entrepreneurs have been around for a long time. I have not seen a strong surge in entrepreneurship lately so I really would not regard it as a trend.

I think we learn enough skill sets during school that make us extremely capable of running our own business. We are definitely more in-tune to technological advances than our parents and therefore able to efficiently globalize and run a company.

With our economy somewhat in a slump right now, I think there will be much less of a desire for entrepreneurs because ultimately their key to success is cash flow.

Just like our last class speaker, Katherine Smith said, “You mush have money to start your own business.”