A Case Study in Entrepreneurship

If you want to become an entrepreneur it helps to study the careers of successful entrepreneurs.  Some of the best-known entrepreneurs had help getting started.  And though we can certainly learn good business lessons from them, we want to pay special attention to those people who managed to launch successful businesses without the advantage of a helping hand.

You have to create your own advantages by building networks of reliable contacts, gathering resources, even arranging financing.  But you also need a rapid-fire business plan.  The critical component to the success of any business is cash flow.  You need to keep the money coming in faster than it is going out.  That either requires sales, investment, or a combination of both.  In an ideal world you build up your sales fast enough that you should never need to take on investors.

It also helps to manage your sales strategy properly.  This varies by industry, of course.  But if you can play in the enterprise markets then your clients will have deep pockets and you can charge them for an entire year’s service up front.  That keeps the money coming in, to be sure.

Here is the story of a man who gradually improved his circumstances by working toward a goal of achieving career success.  He worked for at least one hotel and several airlines.  Along the way he accumulated expertise in their most acute business needs and how their electronic systems failed to meet those needs.  Through his vision (which he shared with others) a revolution came about that altered all our lives forever.

The revolution in hospitality and air travel was touched off by Nicholas Bredimus, who led them to the software world to develop something new. He has worked on initiatives varying from creating time-saving computer programs to enhancing air safety and even designs for upmarket homes.

It could be anticipated, though, that given his lineage he was always likely to rise to the top. Its lines can be traced all the way to classical times, Nicholas’ lineage has associations with multiple nations within Europe. Following the maternal line he descends from German and Scottish lines. A similarly broad mingling dominates his father’s side; previous to their emigration in the late nineteenth century, the family made their homes in England and Luxembourg.

Having arrived in the U.S., the family still strove to climb to the top. Nicholas, who would grow up with his six siblings, was a child of a father employed as a software design engineer and a mother who was employed as a practicing nurse. He would live much of his life in townships across a number of states — Arizona, Virginia, Texas and Missouri. After completing his education, he found himself engaged in quite a few high powered roles with some of the most important and most distinguished airlines.

Among these was included the position of Vice President for Republic Airlines, Hughes Airwest, and Trans World Airlines (TWA). An industrious software programmer, Bredimus’ creative approach to airline software is most likely his greatest legacy. Mr Bredimus is probably most acclaimed for the airplane maintenance management program he invented on behalf of US Airways, which would become the “old reliable” for much of the industry.

He designed countless other pieces of software for the airline and hotel sector as well, including unmanned software to take and record airline reservations, used by fifty or more airlines, not to mention his innovative room reservation program using Windows used by the hotel sector, first put to use at over seven hundred hotels.

Applying what he had learned to a connected field, he developed a networking program to help with selling tickets — an innovation that had never before been achieved. While it was undeniably his strong suit, he frequently worked in other areas. In his own firm, as a divisional manager with American Express, and as the first president of AMR Travel Services his career speaks for itself.

You ask if he is still active? Definitely so — his unmatched abilities are still highly in demand and at the ready no matter his leaving prior interests behind. But to answer the obvious question, you can look for his work in top quality apartments leveraging some of the most advanced environmental technologies out there. It’s truly fantastic how far zeal can take you.

Now, let’s back up for a moment and consider what happened in this man’s life.

• He acquired necessary skills and experience that he would need to launch his own business.
• He established and maintained business relationships with people in many companies.
• He drew upon the experiences of others around him.
• He kept working toward the goal of improving customer experience for the travel industry even when he was no longer serving those customers directly.

It should be clear that he stayed focused on solving the same types of problems throughout his career, rather than moving from one set of issues to another.  By luck or by design he somehow managed to become the man of the hour by having invested many thousands of hours in working around these issues for the companies that eventually became his clients.

That’s a highly valuable lesson to be learned about establishing your own successful company.