Entrepreneurship isn’t the motto of every successful entrepreneur. Not every entrepreneur dreams and plans of heading big shot ventures. Sometimes they are just searching for ways to cover their bills. Sometimes they are mere humans who are monopolized with a problem affecting them and the masses as well, and they are profoundly motivated to come up with a solution. Eureka, a new entrepreneur is born. Well, this breed of homo sapiens are the accidental entrepreneurs.
Accidental entrepreneurs are neither looking for massive financial success nor are they interested in entrepreneurship. They are solely driven by their perseverance to solve a problem might be personal or a common problem experienced by the masses. However, their tenacity often results in some ballistic entrepreneurs and some budding and promising ventures. There’s a lot these entrepreneurs can offer. So let’s read about a few inspiring tales of accidental entrepreneurs and learn from their journeys.
Patrick Hull
Patrick Hull like any other college student, at the age of 19 took classes on subjects he loved at Virginia Tech. Like every other teenager he too, had his own career preference. He had a taste for real estate development, at least he thought so! Hull, was a natural in the field of critical path method (CPM) scheduling. His professors noticed his exceptional gift and would recommend his name whenever business with specific requirement of CPM skills would roll in. Soon, requests for logistic consulting kept pouring in. Viola! Hull had become a consultant and he didn’t even realize it. His entrepreneurial journey began at such a tender age. He has improved and revolutionized the transportation industry by forming GetLoaded.com which focuses on a freight-matching service for long-haul truckers. Today, he’s the CEO of Phull Holdings, an investment firm with interest in more than 30 companies which includes fields like real-estate, technology, energy, transportation, etc. He is a classic example of an accidental entrepreneur.
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Vaishali Sinha
Vaishali Sinha, founder and CEO of iCharity and director at ReNew Power, never dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. She had worked for more than 16 years buying, selling and raising money for big shot international companies in various investment banks. In 2010, Vaishali along with her husband started her very own boutique investment bank, Savant. At Savant, she was seeking for funding for a client who wanted to build a social enterprise. The money would be raised by collecting items belonging to celebrities and auctioning them. She then realised this was her life calling not advising about business. This led to the development of iCharity.com, which is an information platform that collects money from donors at a click. iCharity has listed 25 NGOs. This website serves as an online portal at a negligible fee, for donors to give money for specific causes. Donors are later provided with a certificate after their donation has been used for the cause. In a very simple way iCharity has been helpful in bringing transparency in charity donations.
Katie Richardson
Puj was founded by Ben and Katie Richardson with the sole aim of simplifying parenthood via great product designs. In 2007 she was at a store along with her 6 months old son who was riding a home-made carrier. The store owner approached Katie about her brilliant carrier and enquired where she got it from. She was astonished to hear Katie made it herself. On spot, she placed an order for ten such carriers. The ten carriers she sewed for that boutique were sold out in no time. Next she got a bigger order for 100 such carriers which went viral. Soon, her carriers, baby shoes and blankets attracted the masses. And Katie with her husband’s encouragement realized her gift, her talent. Since then Puj has been growing around Katie’s innovation. Katie, herself a mother of four, develops products according to her own needs, working from her home itself. Puj has grown quite rapidly. It had a turnover of $1 million revenue just in the first year of business. Katie in the true sense is an accidental entrepreneur and it took her almost a decade to proudly accept the fact that she’s an entrepreneur.
Melissa Kieling
Well, from a broke mom with $13 in her account to a multi-millionaire, Melissa Kieling is the new inspiration, not just for single moms but women in general. She is the co-founder and CEO of PackIt. After a divorce in 2008 Melissa, a mother of three was broke and desperate. She was suddenly a single mom with no career experience since for years she had been a stay-at-home mom to raise her kids. In this desperate moment of necessity she came up with an innovative lunch bag idea. She was inspired for this idea from, listening to her children complain that their blueberries got warm and mushy, despite using insulated lunchboxes. She researched gel cooling technology and became a gel expert. For the first prototype she tore down her shower curtain, and begged her drycleaner to sew because she couldn’t. She showcased her first sample to her friends and managed to bag $200,000 as an initial investment. Gradually, her small idea became a big venture and today her PackIt is worth $16 millions.
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Sharif and Violet Alexandre
Founders of RunSafe, which is a safety focused mobile fitness app. Now, Violet was an expert in sales and marketing and Sharif was a consultant to software companies. They were a regular couple working in the corporate sector. Until, one day in 2014, Violet set out for a run along with her baby boy fastened into a baby stroller. Unfortunately, she slipped and attached by the safety strap her baby too was dragged with her towards an icy stream. However, she managed to stop the crash just in time. After surviving the descent she texted her husband to inform him about the incident and that she was heading back to home. Meanwhile, Sharif was terrified he called her when she didn’t receive he lost his nerve. This incident was the turning point for the couple’s life. When Violet reached home, they thought about a way to ensure that this kind of miscommunication would never happen again. This is when they came up with RunSafe, which would not only keep a track of the speed and distance run by the user. It would also have a unique feature a panic button, which would send an alert to the user’s emergency contact and provide the exact location of the user. Now, they are expanding RunSafe into a larger platform, Fabriq, which will act as an interface that will allow various tracking apps to share the same emergency protocol.
