Jenny and her Entrepreneurial Journey-Week 3

Hi, Jenny again. “Mrs. Davenport” of Mrs. Davenport’s Sweet Potato Pies. “Mrs. Davenport” of teacher lore, in this Back-to-School season where, this time, I am not facing yet another year welcoming students to my classroom, but facing a new fall where I am embarking as a business owner full-time with my husband. “Mrs. Davenport” as in fully that married woman in that timeless, ancient role of venturing out on behalf of a husband’s business. We’ve been doing this for 1,000s of years... This time I do it for my husband’s St. Louis Bistro BBQ. It could be for anything. Business is just another way to take care of family.

How goes it with our RMMFI Bootcamp? Well, this past week was all about operations, about prep, and about the realization that, past the marketing (or should I say deep under the marketing and, in reality, inseparable from it), our decisions about Operations and how to set up systems to get business done every day, day to day, with or without us there (eventually), may make or break us. The seminal quote was one that many of us had heard before – and will adopt as a mantra if we know what’s good for us - “Will you run your business or will your business run you?”

As we close in on a critical first marker set up to close the first third of the Bootcamp - “Retrospective #1” where we are expected to present 6 slides and pour our business vision and plan out to mentors and a select part of the RMMFI community – those Operations, that Marketing, that Vision and Plan are what is driving each one of us this week. We are each balancing real life, children, family, health, other jobs, other realities, as we bring this new “real life” to bear, and hopefully. As we step into the Retrospective and the next third of our RMMFI Boot Camp, those realities will start to sort themselves and merge, because we are each trying to change our lives through this experience, to experience new lives that change from an old paradigm of paycheck to paycheck that barely pulled us through, to a financial stability that will allow us not only to breathe, but to thrive, have pride, and balance real life more triumphantly.

This week is another major step.


AARP is proud to collaborate with Rocky Mountain MicroFinance to offer scholarships for those 50 plus to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities.