Today we had the amazing opportunity of visiting the GEC (Guinness Enterprise Center). During the visit, it was jam packed full of information regarding what the GEC dollars as well as what their looking forward to in their upcoming pipeline. The GEC is a very impressive non-profit organization that is at the forefront of connecting businesses with business and assisting them in becoming successful here in Ireland. They work to bring international companies to Ireland, as well as push out local companies internationally.
The key thing that I took away from this is that businesses like the GEC are nearly essential to help these smaller startups and local companies flourish to big multinational corporations. The GEC is an amazing company, and it was very eye opening to see how they operate and really helped me to begin thinking more like an entrepreneur from a business perspective versus a personal perspective which is a desired skill to have going into the workforce.
On that note, there’s a lot that makes up an entrepreneurial mindset from a personal and business management perspective. Some of which are opportunity recognition, creativity, innovation, critical thinking, future orientation, initiatives, self-reliance, communication, flexibility, adaptability, collaboration, and most importantly becoming comfortable in risky situations.
Personally, I feel that I have many of these characteristics that make up an Entrepreneurial mindset. If you look through my LinkedIn and resume, you will see that from the hard manual labor jobs I was able to develop some of these harder to lean skills like adaptability, future orientation, collaboration, and being comfortable with risky situations. Although, even though I’ve began developing entrepreneurial skills this is an ever-evolving thing in which I know there’s tons of room for improvement in growth as with anyone or any organization.
Throughout the jobs that I’ve worked that are more professional like my finance internship last summer with UPMC, this has allowed me to further improve my skills that I learned from my blue-collar jobs. Along with that, it allowed me to develop a further entrepreneurial mindset in the sense of further future orientation. This helps to enable recognition of better opportunities and really understanding from a managerial perspective at a higher level, as even big businesses have to make risky decisions. This is very transparent and how important it is to need to have characteristics of an entrepreneur to successfully run the business.
The future photo and attached photo below are from our trip today to the GEC.
