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Last week was a great one for speaking, as I got the opportunity to give a corporate talk in Times Square followed by two back-to-back talks for CT-based universities. The funny thing about telling aspiring entrepreneurs your story is that you have to spend time reflecting on your story. What a disappointing exercise that turned out to be for me!

We entrepreneurs have a habit of looking toward the future, barely acknowledging the present, and burying the past in a mound of "been there, done that, don't want to go back." When I looked back on my journey, I was shocked to see that we didn't really have a business plan, hardly had a plan of any kind, and barely ended up with a business at all! Over the course of GEM's existence, we pivoted the company four times...yes, four. And some of these weren't small pivots: The first was from figure-skating-television-show-development company to corporate-video-production company. Yeah. Hooray for the pivot!

What's most shocking to me is this: I took plenty of business courses. I knew when we started GEM how to assemble a business plan, assess the market, design a product or service to fill the gap, project revenues and expenses and more. Yet, I did none of those. As I say in my talk, we pretty much bounced around like we were in a pinball machine, leaning left or right to steer the ball into a slot that would score the most points. We steered based on gut instinct, intuition, a little bit of voodoo and an unwavering belief that we would succeed.

I had a well-meaning student come up to me before one of my talks and say, "someday I'd like to start a business doing..." I stopped her right there. Someday. Someday? "Someday," I told her, "is too late. Start now. Start now."

Successful entrepreneurs start something. They take the first step. They do it sooner rather than later, and then they follow their instincts until they finally coerce that pinball into hitting the big score. If you don't have a business plan, don't worry. Neither did I. Just begin, and try to enjoy the game.

Oh, and try not to beat yourself up over your mistakes. According to what those students told me afterwards, those make up the best parts of the story.

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