Intro to Max Incubation
Today is Saturday, we are in the middle of tax season 2024, and I'm a Certified Public Accountant in public practice, meaning I own a CPA Firm. Though it's high season, it's never too busy or too late to share some valuable tips with fellow entrepreneurs.
My friends call me Max and I'm super passionate about Entrepreneurship. Consequently, my Social Media avatar is "Max L'Entrepreneur".
Each one of my business projects is named with the word Max at the beginning, and like a typical entrepreneur, I am a serial visionary with business ideas popping up at any minute, and I register business entities quite frequently.
As a CPA, financial consultant and investment adviser, I have hundreds of business owners that rely on my financial academic knowledge, technical training, and professional experience to plan for, organize, incubate, operate and eventually capitalize on their business success.
Business owners are indeed an interesting and diverse group. They typically begin their journey of entrepreneurship flying solo (self-employed), eventually they find partners to share their vision and burdens, and overcome challenges together, and finally build a team of loyal followers that commit to their vision and execute the strategic mission of the entire business operation.
Are business owners and entrepreneurs the same?
This is a simple question with a very complex and intricate answer, and within these pages of Max Incubation you shall discover the answer by consumption of inteligible bits.
The first clue, towards the discovery of entrepreneurship, is the evaluation of the individual. Entrepreneurs come in every way, form, color, culture, nationality and flavor.
Yet, they share many traits, similar philosophies, values and habits. If you would gather seasoned entrepreneurs from all over the world, and place them in a physical or virtual space, with no topic, agenda or introduction, I'm sure they would find common ground, share contact information, solve complex problems and even do business in a matter of minutes.
Since I was a little boy, I have always been awed by the legends of leaders of all time. Leadership is one of my favorite reading and learning topics.
Among leaders, entrepreneurs I have found the most interesting, because they gather in their persona the leadership traits of an army commander like Hannibal or Napoleon, the devotion and commitment to innovation of a scientist such as Edison, Newton, the inspirational and servant leadership of a religious minister such as Calvin, Osteen, and the charisma and ability to explain and motivate others to realize their vision like a Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
These and many other traits and qualities are fundamental key attributes, that once placed in the right environment, proper circumstances, matched with the right opportunity and challenges, can yield unlimited results.
Early on, during their childhood, throughout their teenage years and later on, once they arrive to adulthood, entrepreneurs exhibit behaviors, adopt habits and embody attitudes which their initial social environment might find strange, obnoxious and even borderline sociopathic.
Recently, science has arrived at the conclusions that rather than having a negative effect, individuals within the spectra of autism, dyslexia and other unique mental qualities, can achieve higher level of performance.
Some of these individuals can be found not only in technological, scientific and medical research fields, but also in the higher echelons on entrepreneurship.
Just to mention a couple , JD Rockefeller and Thomas Alva Edison were individuals whose first teachers considered them to be dim-witted or seriously handicapped in their academic performance.
An entrepreneur might find a college academic lecture to be boring and impractical, unless the speaker is someone he can admire and respect. They are born and further develop instincts that may alert them of a high concentration of BS in others.
This causes them to feel discouraged while undertaking traditional methods of education, and drop out at different intervals from their formal education.
Entrepreneurs favor vocational education, trade schools, and business apprenticeships. Thus, JD Rockefeller found himself in commercial trade school (bookkeeping, commercial law and penmanship), applied for, obtained and gathered experienced as a bookkeeper in a merchant trading business, and eventually launched his own business with a young friend.
Also, an entrepreneur might invest unlimited hours of self-study, pay unreasonable consulting and seminar fees, trying to discover new life principles and mantras to live by, practical solutions to specific challenges and even take personal, professional and financial risks to develop a new system, formula or device.
Nowadays, entrepreneurship is in vogue, it is fashionable to call oneself and entrepreneur, because people in general associate the term with positive outcomes such as financial freedom, economic power, social influence and success.
When I emigrated from Cuba to the United States on December 19, 1997, at twenty one years old, it was difficult if not impossible to locate a formal academic program in Colleges and Universities whose main pursuit and major was Entrepreneurship.
Today, entrepreneurship programs cover a wider spectrum, with a greater concentration on graduate business studies. We are yet to see a massive vocational and entry level college efforts to attract future business leaders.
This void is typically filled by many self-styled gurus and influencers with no formal academic education, technical training and business executive experience which distort the truths about real entrepreneurship.
Learning about entrepreneurship with the goal of achieving real mastery and success, requires real aptitude, attitude and altitude.
Entrepreneurs are not con artists, they disdain in their daily lives all pretense and noveau rich habits. They would rather reinvest their profits in meaningul strategies and real plans than in perks of apparent success.
Entrepreneurship, seen as a discipline, requires a combination of a conceptual understanding, a shift in philosophies, an attitude of constant transformation and adaptation that would leave the majority of human beings exhausted.
My loving mom always starts every late night phone call with: "Son, don't work so hard, someday you might kill yourself from so much mental and physical effort!".
Ironically, she is one of the main reasons why I became an entrepreneur. Her work ethic, financial expertise and social persona, along with my father's engineering academic and technical training, his pursuit of knowledge and innovative outlook towards life, are active ingredients of who I am...a Financial Entrepreneur!
