As part of this semester’s I400 Entre­pre­neur­ship in Infor­mat­ics course, each stu­dent is required to keep a blog and this week’s topic is telling about a time you failed. Fail­ure is an appar­ent inevitabil­ity for every entre­pre­neur and while I’ve had my share of fail­ures along the way, I’ve cho­sen to share my story about a group of under­grads led by myself who tried to save their fra­ter­nity only to have all their hard work squashed by near-sighted alumni. The egg was on their face when they had to close down the house the fol­low­ing semester.

This is a longer story that I could prob­a­bly go on for thou­sands of words, so I’ll try to high­light the bul­let points and go into detail where need be.

Before I even joined, my fra­ter­nity was on the decline. They tried to reju­ve­nate the chap­ter by adding on to the house to make it a more appeal­ing place to live. The project was poorly man­aged and faced sev­eral unfore­seen set­backs. Alumni were des­per­ate for new mem­bers to pay dues that would go towards the project. Fast and loose recruit­ment lead to poor new mem­bers that weren’t inter­ested in help­ing improve their chap­ter and, even worse, were delin­quent bill pay­ers. Dras­tic times called for dras­tic mea­sures and a mashup of Wayne’s World and Ani­mal House ensued.

I had the oppor­tu­nity to book a Grammy-nominated artist to per­form at the house for Lit­tle 500. A major event of this kind would have improved our image on cam­pus and made us a more attrac­tive house to rush. I per­son­ally paid the deposit and began orga­niz­ing the event. Red tape was cut, approvals all around even from the dean of stu­dents, and only the alumni board needed to approve the con­cert before all was a go. Alumni scoffed at the artist solely based on lyri­cal con­tent (Afro­man — Because I Got High…). These out of touch alumni shot down the con­cert in front of par­ents and under­grads, crush­ing everyone’s spirit. A younger mem­ber of the alumni board walked off after the vote and resigned because of their lack of vision for the fra­ter­nity and wouldn’t be a part of a group ded­i­cated to ruin­ing the chapter.

Lit­tle 5 sucked. The con­struc­tion still wasn’t fin­ished. Sum­mer came and I began on another cru­sade to orga­nize an event to save the house, only this time with the back­ing of a new board mem­ber. I worked 40 hrs/wk for an intern­ship and at night I was busy plan­ning every logis­ti­cal detail for a fall concert:

  • choos­ing an agree­able artist
  • review­ing their rid­ers and plan­ning accomodations
  • stage and sound
  • tick­et­ing
  • pro­mo­tion
  • secu­rity
  • finances

I also made sure to do every­thing by the book so that the uni­ver­sity would approve our large event. It was a great learn­ing expe­ri­ence deal­ing with pro­fes­sion­als in var­i­ous fields. If you approach some­one like a broke col­lege kid, they treat you like one. When you start hav­ing some swag­ger like you have the pro­posed $50,000 — $75,000 for the pro­duc­tion on hand, peo­ple treat you dif­fer­ently. I talked to tal­ent agents, fire mar­shalls, secu­rity agen­cies, tick­et­ing com­pa­nies, rental com­pa­nies, and a host of oth­ers like I had planned a major event tons of times when in actu­al­ity it was my first try.

After weeks of con­ver­sa­tions with my new alum­nus part­ner, we had a solid busi­ness plan in place to not only make this con­cert a suc­cess this year, but for years to come. We planned to give close to $10,000 to the Boys and Girls Club (the fraternity’s national phil­an­thropy) while keep­ing enough to get the next show planned and orga­nized (i.e. Zeta’s Big Man On Cam­pus). To give an idea of the type of show we were look­ing to put on, our last deci­sion was whether to choose Jason Mraz or Wyclef Jean to perform.

Then, the momen­tum slowed as big­ger finan­cial prob­lems faced the chap­ter. My alum­nus part­ner, who I highly respect to this day, finally made the call to back out on the con­cert. After weeks of work­ing late night hours on top of my intern­ship, mak­ing phone calls across the coun­try, exchang­ing emails with who I imag­ined to be real life Ari Gold’s, meet­ing with Bloom­ing­ton and uni­ver­sity offi­cials, and putting together a bul­let­proof pro­posal, it was all for naught. 

Sure, we didn’t go in front of the board again to get a big thumbs down or go through with it to have no one show up, but in the end we failed in our mis­sion to save the chap­ter. After the fall semes­ter that we were propos­ing to have a show, the house was unof­fi­cially on the mar­ket to be rented out and the chap­ter was slow­ing dis­band­ing. By Lit­tle 5, a year after my orig­i­nal pro­posal, the house was in sham­bles and closed a month later. No action, no result.

To this day, I am thank­ful my alum­nus part­ner had the fore­sight to see his money and my effort weren’t enough to save the fail­ing chap­ter. I have no regrets for the time I invested in plan­ning the show and gained valu­able expe­ri­ence in event plan­ning and real world busi­ness practices. 

Between lis­ten­ing to Scott Jones and his guest entre­pre­neurs every week for my intern­ship and work­ing on that project, I was and still am very excited about the entre­pre­neur­ial path (doesn’t hurt my dad is an entre­pre­neur too). As if it was fate, Stand­out Blog­ger put out 10 entre­pre­neur­ial blogs you need to be fol­low­ing this year this week, so I wanted to include that. I also was fol­lowed on Twit­ter by @startupstudentthis week (prob­a­bly because I men­tioned the word ‘entre­pre­neur’ in a tweet) and thought I’d give them a shout out as well.

Before I close, I’m giv­ing myself a shame­less plug to my own blog.