My passion for business and entrepreneurship comes from my love of reading. I started reading books written by the cast of Shark Tank, and then books written by the Forbes 400. I currently work with How to be Your Own Stockbroker by Charles Schwab. I was fascinated by how these business moguls started their ventures, and as a result, I became motivated enough to start something for myself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay I decided to start a local test prep agency. This idea was attractive because there were virtually no startup costs and it seemed easy to commercialize and scale. I teamed up with a friend and we came up with the name Top1Tutoring. We started by creating a website, top1tutoring.com, and a flyer. In retrospect, it was ridiculous how far ahead of ourselves we were during this time. One of us had a calculator and the other crunched some numbers so we could calculate the theoretical amount of income. So, one of us would exclaim something like, “Wow, if we got x number of students and charged them an amount of dollars, we would make z amount of money!” We needed reality to hit us. We were blind. If there's one lesson I've learned it's that everything that seems easy is usually the exact opposite. The first challenge we faced was finding a location for our classes. I quickly realized that there were many restrictions on public institutions, as our school district already had an existing test prep program, and libraries were generally only rented to nonprofit groups. After contacting literally every church within a ten mile radius, we finally found one that had a time slot for our classes. Looking back, the little things we were stressed about, like wondering if our website was "professional" or if our course location was "easy to navigate," couldn't have been more trivial. I had forgotten the big challenge, which was actually building a clientele. Once I understood this, my friend and I immediately began to find an effective way to market. It turns out that “filling a classroom” was easier said than done. We started by placing flyers in people's windshields and mailboxes. When we didn't receive any phone calls after handing out about a thousand flyers, it was clear we were doing something wrong. We realized that we would never get customers without some form of direct social commitment. We finally accepted the fact that we couldn't cheat our way to a classroom full of students by simply handing out flyers or cold-emailing parents our local listings. And so we stopped doing all of that, and started really putting our face out there, like talking to parents one-on-one and hosting mini-workshops that demonstrated the kinds of test prep classes we would do. We started attending adult basketball games just so we could have the opportunity to have one-on-one conversations about their children's studies. We began to understand the importance of forming personal connections. Three months later, we had our first class. My friend and I always thought that if we ever made money, money would be the best reward. In fact, the best reward is the bright smiles that high-level colleagues receive when they find out that they can leave their dreaded minimum wage job and become. (2018)..