Here is a little video I made to be used as part of a short presentation on small business advice and entrepreneurship given at a local community college.

To give some background, I was asked about my small business experience to be included in a local business presentation. I gave a few bullet points of advice, one of which was to “grow your business smartly”. Being the owner of several successful businesses, it is my personal business practice to abide by gradual growth. I am not a strong proponent of heavy risk or throwing a bunch of money into one idea. Instead I believe in putting small amounts of money into an idea, seeing small returns, and investing those back into the business to make larger returns and so on.

For example I did not put a large amount of my personal money into this drawing business. I started small selling a couple of drawings here and there, and taking those profits and using them to enhance my business through marketing, promotion and other avenues. Growth with small steps at a time…bit by bit to ensure profitability and success.

I was asked to provide a drawing to illustrate this point of “growing smartly”, and decided on the image of a flower with a graduation cap on (flower = growth, graduate = smart!). As an added bonus I recorded the process of me drawing the flower at my drawing desk to create a fun quick time-lapse animation video.