5 - Creating Your Team

Summary

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation. It is better be alone than in bad company.

George Washington

Entrepreneur’s Diary

I was getting pretty close to starting my fish business; I was concluding some final negotiations to secure the capital I needed to implement the business plan strategy (I needed $500,000). As you get involved in this entrepreneurship arena, you’ll quickly discover that there is a lot of parallel processing going on. You will need to juggle several activities concurrently in order to pull this business launch off successfully. My situation was that I knew I was going to need a general manager (GM) about the same day I broke ground on the fish production building. So, about three months before I thought I needed my GM, I initiated a concerted effort to find a competent GM, who would be my first paid employee. I spread the word through my contact list and a national online site for aquaculture. I also received a call from Dr. Tom Fields, a colleague at a private fish farm near Saratoga Springs, New York, with whom we (Cornell University) had done business with over the years.