![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/113866_f915a613c42c44e3b1eb4526146e453e~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1920,h_1022,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/113866_f915a613c42c44e3b1eb4526146e453e~mv2.jpg)
Entrepreneur Interview Project 2
Project Overview
Introduction
An entrepreneur is profession a lot of young people dream of and being an entrepreneur is one of the most exciting and popular things to do. Becoming a successful entrepreneur doesn't occur coincidentally or by possibility. It is a long procedure that includes different methodologies, attributes and nature of person who needs to become a successful entrepreneur. In addition, it is not as easy as there are many who tried but failed and failed because of surrender. Surrender is not one of the qualities of a successful entrepreneur. Sadly, not every person can be fruitful in this field. One principle reason as per the 'quality' approach for one to fail is because of the absence of some features and characteristics that must be available in the entrepreneur. "What does entrepreneur means? This question always wonder the mind of individuals and most of the people has a wrong understand and concept of entrepreneur. Most of us believe that entrepreneur means money but this is wrong. Being an entrepreneur means to come up with ideas. Good or bad, the flow of ideas never stops. Moreover, to love to learn new things. You don't surrender easily. You confront extreme difficulties however continue onward. An entrepreneur must not be afraid of hard work, he must strive to achieve what he wants and set goals, Big or small, goals must fill his life. Moreover, An entrepreneur has to discover challenges in all that he do and search out chances to challenge himself. To become a business entrepreneur you must enjoy persistence and success.
Entrepreneur Background
As we are a group member and taking an innovation and entrepreneurship course we had to select a successful entrepreneur and do an interview with him regarding his profession.
We had chosen Luis Felipe Arango a managing partner in Whitehall & CO Management Consulting Company. We summarized from Luis Felipe answers that he is a person who accept to take the risk of being an entrepreneur and he is an individually motivated by person as he believes in making a positive change that lead him to be a motivated. As a result of this he started his own business couple of months after his first full time job which is considered an early step to take for someone that didn’t have lots of experience before he starts.
Moving Forward on to Mr. Felipe’s background we asked him about his secondary school education experience and from his reply we understood that his secondary school was very restricted and the math and languages was tough to him during that stage, he also told us the skill he would recommend from someone to learn from school, the skill that we concluded was to focus more into what we want or need or will be using later on in the future and as an example of this he said that if you’re going to be a doctor you should focus more into the biology and science but if you have several things to do or think about in the future math would be in the top priorities to focus on because basically math is used everywhere in most fields.
We also understood that what learn at school is important but we won’t be using all of it later on, and not everything will be valued from it in the future, also we should focus on knowing what’s our learning type and to know what is our way to observe the knowledge which will allows us to get the valuable information to our mind.
Mr. Felipe saw that he got the valuable and professional experience to build his own enterprise (Whitehall & co) so at that point he spot the opportunity to make his own business and thought that: “why not? If these people can do it why can I not do it!” Further more we knew about his life just prior starting his enterprise and we understood from him that it was a really intense one as he was getting to know everything and learning the Arabic language and getting the right qualifications to start his own road, he used his savings and got some partners help to start up his business and building, having his own business was planned in his mind before starting it but it came sooner than what he expected.
Company Mission:
To work together with their clients to explore the possibilities of making their clients the best of class in their field.
The Early & Later Stage of Mr. Felipe
As an early stage of the company we understood that the company was still in it’s early stages so when we asked about the profit we knew that They're in the year of expansion where all the money they get is considered as a revenue where they invest it to get new staff members, as they are a consulting firm so they’re biggest assets are the people they work with, so getting more trustworthy people to his company is better than getting more computers or better offices. We also understood from Mr. Felipe answers that he didn’t get his motivation from out side, actually he said that Everyone has told him that it would not work specially who has a fixed job as they were telling him how probably it wouldn’t work and that the economy is not in his best shapes and how everything will be rough on him. But going on to what he learnt from this start-up experience we figured that he’s actually a motivated individual to learn new things and what he learnt is how he should spend his time and what is important and what is not. Moving forward to the strength of our entrepreneur enterprise, we knew that their strength was that they try to cluster how Dubai is made out of in their population on skills and mind sets and put it in a small cluster and serve exactly those enterprises in Dubai, so they understand better than other countries who are coming from America of from Europe to the Dubai market because his company was founded here as they have a very valuable partnership with a local partners who also teach them who also teach them what to expect from the business that is going in this country.
Moving on to the later stage of our entrepreneur the skills that were necessary for the success of our entrepreneur’s enterprise we knew that the most important skill needed is to be resilient because in every road of being an entrepreneur there is always a time where nothing work as planned something always happen and we should not be defeated just because an obstacle came on the way we have to be Resilient to maintain our business and perform our mission and to reach our goal. Also we should have a very refined people skill to know who can we trust to do what we need and who should we trust to work with us and to be reliable and at the end we should always make a mind set that our business is part of our life and make it integrated to it to get the result of making the best outcome of the enterprise. We knew also that our entrepreneur has always been working to fulfill his work as he didn’t measure the time that he works at more or less before and he just use the time as it should be spent to work on. Although we knew from from our interviewee that they did not meet their initial goal yet we went through knowing his future plans for his company and we knew that the governments are taking actions to make great businesses, competitions and fulfill the professional needs so our entrepreneur enterprise is helping to make that vision of the country he’s working in.
Personal observation
There has been a significant advancement and development in the field of businesses over the past few decades. Not surprisingly that being an entrepreneur has become increasingly common in today’s life. Although it’s not an easy job to be working at, Mr. Felipe has his own opinions relating to his personal life.
Mr. Felipe’s personal life have changed so clearly since he lost his feeling of time. Also, when he realized what he can do and what he can’t do daily and how to measure that because of Whitehall & co enterprise. Therefore, back to his life experience Mr. Felipe thinks that all the following: skills, knowledge and attitude are important in all entrepreneur’s careers but he is tread on heels skills plus knowledge the most and, he thinks that attitude is divided by both as an equation.
Moreover, he said that If a person had a clear vision with good employees who are following his plan and mission, that would be the most satisfying and rewarding for any entrepreneur. As result of what he learned according to Whitehall & co experience. First, never forget that the time you spend before being a business owner is essential because It makes you the person who you are now and who you will become in the future with all the success and achievements. Next, always follow your dreams without worrying if it going to work or not.
Furthermore, Mr. Felipe’s advice to all the inspiring entrepreneurs, is to consider that inspiration is not enough, people should be thirsty, hungry and acquainted about everything related to their businesses and future.
In addition to that Mr. Felipe spoke about one of the biggest entrepreneurs of his time, his name is Richard Branson he said, whenever that person has a call and someone tell him that what he is going to say is a secret he closes the line immediately! Because when you’re having a business you don’t have to care about yourself only but the only thing you should care about is having a team that you can trust and overcome all the difficulties with them.
What we learnt
By doing an interview with an entrepreneur “Luis Felipe Arango” we learned and gained a lot of experience that qualifies us as to become one of the entrepreneurs in the future. Through the work of this interview we learnt various skills. We learnt that the necessary skills needed to become a successful entrepreneur is to be resilience to face the obstacle. Moreover, whoever want to become an entrepreneur must be motivated by himself and not influenced by the passive people around him to reach his goal easily. We learnt also that the entrepreneur must trust his abilities to face all the challenges.
As a conclusion, being an entrepreneur is a very hard challenging position with new experiences every day. What we have learned from Whitehall & co and Mr. Felipe personally, is to keep going forward with no worries about what the future is hiding for us especially if we were working correctly form the begging.