BUS 435 Week 1 Discussion 1

Cameron Lamarche, currently in the Air Force, plans to retire after 20 years of service. He has worked in security forces and is now a personnelist. He has been stationed at five different bases, including one overseas. He has deployed to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. In his free time, he enjoys working on cars, playing guitar, and playing disc golf. He is currently pursuing a degree in entrepreneurship and wants to explore all aspects of business. In his entrepreneurial self-assessment, he found that his scores were slightly below average in motivation, aptitude, and attitude. He attributes this to his tendency to follow rules and conform to expectations. He recognizes the need to take risks and step out of his comfort zone. He envisions starting a themed restaurant or food truck business that offers a unique experience for customers. He values community involvement and wants to create a lively and exciting atmosphere. Hello, everyone. My name is Cameron Lamarche. I'm currently in the Air Force. I've been in for a total of 13 years, plan on retiring at 20. I'm currently a personnelist, which is the equivalent to human resources in the civilian world. For the first six years of my career, I was security forces, which was military police. I voluntarily retrained at my six-year mark, trying to get a better work-life balance and something that was more, excuse me, applicable to the outside world as far as what I wanted to do for jobs once I retire. I wasn't really planning on doing security or any type of police and law enforcement work. I've currently been stationed at five different bases. One overseas location, which was my first one, which was in Okinawa, Japan. I've also been stationed in Nebraska and Montana. I did a three-year stint at Indiana University as one of the cadres to support the Air Force ROTC over there. And now I'm currently working at a Space Force base in Colorado, which is a unique experience seeing this type of things, especially considering that the Space Force is barely in its infancy with only being around for five years. I've also deployed twice, one in each career field. I deployed to Saudi Arabia as security forces, and I have deployed to Afghanistan as personnel. I'm currently married with one child, who's my son, which is seven. And some of the things I like to do in my free time as hobbies is working on cars. I'm a guitar player and playing music. And disc golf is something I like to do to get out into the outdoors and stuff like that. So currently in this class, this is my third to last class to complete my degree in entrepreneurship. I initially wanted to pursue entrepreneurship because I didn't want to just focus on just the business side, which may sound counterintuitive, but the basis for why I did that was I wanted to see all facets of it. I wanted to see the creation, the business plan, to the management side, which a lot of degrees are focused on, to taking those risks and doing those entrepreneurial type of thinking exercises and innovation. And that was one of the reasons that I looked towards doing this degree since the beginning. So moving on to my entrepreneurial self-assessment, I was kind of surprised by this, but at the same time, I kind of expected it to be this way. Pretty much every single one of my results is just a hair under what is considered the average mean of entrepreneurs. So for example, of the first few, motivation's average score is 62, mine was 50. For aptitude, the average score is 67, excuse me, mine was 61. And for attitude, the average score was 37 and mine was 30. And the trend pretty much continues through everything else as it breaks down into those smaller subcategories, with some being extremely close, which, like self-confidence and enthusiasm, I scored a 12, which when the average is 13. So I think I kind of know the reason for this, a lot of it, is I've always been somewhat of a rule follower, and especially being in the military, having to conform to regulations and all sorts of policy that the military has in place for things, I kind of don't like to stray out of that, I wouldn't say comfort zone, but kind of like the expectation and the way we operate. And that's something I need to work on, especially when considering if I'm going to pursue something entrepreneurial when I retire, I need to be willing to take those risks and, you know, get out of my comfort zone and not be afraid of failing and taking failures if they do, if I encounter them and learning from them and turning them into something more positive. So that is something definitely I will work on these last few classes to build my confidence in and also over the years that I have left in the military before I were to get out and pursue something like that. And speaking of what I would like to do as a career or an entrepreneurial venture after, I thought about kind of like the niche, like restaurant, food truck type business thing. In my past classes, like introduction to entrepreneurship, I took the idea of making like a themed pizza restaurant and building that from, you know, planning stages up and through the whole like process of what it would look like at the end of the course, kind of like a rock and roll themed type of restaurant where you have like themed food and events. And instead of just being a restaurant, it's more of an experience, basically. That's what I was looking to do because I've been to places like that in my military career and I always enjoyed those more than just your typical grab food and eat and get out or not even want to eat there because, you know, it's kind of a bland, dry environment. So I want to make something, you know, that's community focused and gets people wanting to be there, wanting to be involved and excited to go to. So that was me about my career, my potential entrepreneurship assessment, and then for my venture that I plan on hopefully once I retire from my Air Force career. I look forward to working with everybody and thank you for taking time to listen to this.