Have you ever had a monumental task to achieve and felt lost? I was like that a few days ago stressed out over how I’m going to learn marketing and sales.
I didn’t know how I would accomplish my portfolio project so I called my friend Ivan and told him my situation. It turns out his aunt Laura owns a few businesses and has many years of experience in sales and marketing and offered to get me in contact with her.
So I called Laura and we had such an amazing conversation that helped me not feel lost anymore. I explained to her about Praxis and the T-shirt business portfolio project that I’ll be working on and I asked her how would I start my own business? She first asked if this was just for my project or if I wanted to continue this long-term, to which I replied I wanted to turn this into an actual long-term business. She recommended obtaining a business license and filling out the other legal paperwork through LegalZoom but warned that those state licenses would set me back $500-$600. The other option she suggested was start with Shopify or sell through Facebook and Instagram since it’s cheaper for my budget. She also recommended printing my shirts through Vistaprint or something similar but only if I don’t have too many orders. Otherwise if I grow and get tons of orders then I’ll definitely need a business license in order to purchase shirts from wholesale. Laura also gave an important piece of advice: Wholesalers are not allowed to sell to people without a business license because of state requirements.
I asked Laura a few more questions about where she learned sales and marketing. She went to college and took classes in marketing but throughout the years she quickly realized that all the classes she took became irrelevant. A few years after she graduated everything in marketing and sales changed with new technology. All the knowledge she learned in college was outdated, along with her degree.
So she was left with learning everything on her own and she found out the only way was to immerse herself by getting sales and marketing jobs and adapting to new technology.
Everything had changed from the time she landed her first marketing job to today, and the way she described marketing back then sounded more labor intensive. There was an emphasis on photography because all the ads were done through print like magazines, newspapers, and posters. Email marketing wasn’t as sophisticated back then so you had to spend more time trying to target the right audience through print. It wasn’t as easy or fast as creating a few Facebook ads and posting it within a few minutes.
So if the degree is obsolete then how else did you learn sales and marketing? I asked. Everything Laura had learned was through hours of YouTube videos and listening to podcasts like the Flea Style podcast. I can definitely attest to learning a ton about Austrian economics and philosophy through podcasts.
The most interesting part about this conversation was how unnecessary degrees have become. Of course there’s some professions that do require but for most people it’s not necessary anymore. Laura is proof of this and everything Praxis talked about isn’t anecdotal. People have found out on their own that degrees don’t translate to success. Even Laura had mentioned that her friend has a master’s but had no idea how to do the job.
At the end of our conversation Laura talked about how amazed she was at technology and how times have changed. When she was my age in the late 90s it was unthinkable for someone that young to start a successful business. It use to be that you would have to work your way up for many years, but now with the disruption of social media, phones, computers, and software, starting a business is much easier.
This was such an enjoyable conversation and my only regret was not recording. Despite the fact that she never heard about Praxis she supports the idea that degrees are largely unnecessary because college cannot keep up with the changes in technology, and all of her personal experiences has led to this conclusion. I feel more confident now in my ability to achieve this project and I have a better direction in how to learn sales and marketing.