Entrepreneurs speak to students about their small businesses
Bradley Taylor, a computing company owner turned farmer, visited Georgia Southern University to answer questions from Dr. Chris Welter’s entrepreneur class about being an entrepreneur and owning a small business. Chris Graham, an audio mastering engineer, also spoke to students via Skype.
Graham, who started out as a record producer, decided in 2007 to take a different entrepreneurial route and began his own audio mastering company. With this, he knew he would be able to make more money, run his business remotely, as well as spend more time with his family. Graham built a website and started advertising on Google and other websites to help push his business and get the word out to musicians.
“There a ton of small businesses that are [advertising on Google] because you can own a very small niche on Google,” Graham said.
Taylor raises endangered goats, sheep, pigs, and cows. He also runs a subsidiary food distribution business. Taylor still runs his cloud computing company which focuses on application management and hosting services for software services and web applications.
“Around a year and a half ago, I decided I wanted to do something else with my life instead of being behind a computer for 12 hours a day, or 16, or 20 some days and decided to start a farm,” Taylor said.
During the class, Welter opened up the floor for discussion. The following are questions asked by students that encouraged the most discussion among the entrepreneurs.
Bradley Taylor
Q: What actually caused you to go from owning a software company to being a farmer?
A: A free puppy. Taylor had gotten involved with bird dogs and had taken his dog to a trainer. His dog wasn’t competitive and the trainer offered him a puppy. From there, Taylor purchased a horse, a new truck, a horse trailer and eventually decided to buy a farm.
Q: Did you take out any grants when you first started your business?
A: Taylor did not take any grants when he started his farm. The programs aren’t necessarily bad but Taylor said he isn’t going to take advantage of them when he’s capable of paying for the business himself.
Chris Graham
Q: How long had you been tinkering around with music before you decided to make money off it? And at what age did you start tinkering with music.
A: Graham, starting around age 13, spent around a decade tinkering with music.
Q: Have you ever downloaded music illegally?
A: Graham shook his head yes, but then explained that once he got into the music industry understood how much money that took away from the artists and encourages others to not download music illegally.
The following is a link to Chris Graham’s audio mastering website: http://www.chrisgrahammastering.com/
Posted in Guest Speakers, Teaching and Learning