Part of being a leader is challenging people, and this is something that like overcoming my fear of no, I need to work on. I have to stop thinking that people will get mad at me for challenging them, and start viewing it as a way to help them grow. Although this is something I need to work on, it is also tightly intertwined with what I’d consider to be one of my strengths as a student, and that’s that I care. Even though the success of our business doesn’t depend solely on me as the director of culture, when something goes wrong I tend to feel responsible for it because I care. The reason why it’s hard for me to challenge others, or to say no, is because I care about the business and the people that make up part of it.
The largest lesson I’ve learned in terms of entrepreneurship has been the importance of proper management and long-term planning in a business's productivity. For a long time, Pedro and I were simply planning what had to be done on a daily basis. Although we had a vision as to what we wanted to accomplish by the end of the year, we hadn’t established any short, mid term, or long term milestones that were going to allow us to accomplish that vision, and as a result, we weren’t maximizing our productive capacity.
I’ve also learned a lot about the different ways a business can be structured and the effect that these different structures have on a team's productivity. We’ve gone from having different departments, with one leader within each department, to having specific roles for each person. This has brought forward a much greater sense of responsibility and accountability within each person in the IA, and as a result, our productivity as a team has skyrocketed!
On a finishing note, it’s crazy cool to think that while at the beginning of the semester Blendz was simply a vision we had, today it’s the first student initiated and managed business on campus. We still have a long way to go, and a lot of work to get done, but we have a pretty kick a*** awesome team to do it!