Entrepreneurship At Its Core: See a Need, Serve It.

This week on Clarity Compressed I sat down with someone who’s the embodiment of a career entrepreneur. Jim Fitzpatrick has been in the automotive world for over 20 years, owning and managing a dealership, then starting an advertising agency with his son, founding the CBT Automotive Network, and most recently the Atlanta Small Business Network.

We covered a lot of ground, getting deep into the automotive industry. You should tune in or watch if that’s what you’re interested in. In this post, I want to dig in a bit about entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship has been a common theme throughout Jim’s career. I’m not talking about it in the sense of valuing your time like money or constantly trying to make business connections.

I’m talking about entrepreneurship in the sense of seeing a problem, looking at your resources and passions, and then addressing it.

Time and time again, this has been how I’ve proceeded in my life.

This doesn’t just mean how I started Image Auto & Rim Doctor over 15 years ago on a wing and a prayer. I mean finding creative solutions to addressing problems that you see, whether or not there’s a business case. if you make a good enough solution, often business will follow.

Take Congruent, an agency that’s my main focus right now. Congruent started over five years ago, not as a business but as a solution for a problem we had at Image Auto. We needed to keep everybody aligned with the mission, vision, and values of the company even though they were spread out all across the northeast region. I saw a growing problem in the company, and dug in to find a solution to address it. This resulted, years down the line, in a successful marketing agency.

This approach to entrepreneurship -- actually making changes to solve problems instead of just complaining or throwing your voice into the ‘conversation -- ties back to last week’s episode. You get to choose how you feel and act. You might not have control over the outcomes, but your personal choice lets you control you. Your response to challenges.

Jim found a lot of great solutions for problems he saw, first in automotive and now into the universe of small businesses (98% of the ENTIRE business economy is made of businesses between 1 and 500 employees) in Atlanta and the world. As someone who founded a company with his son and works everyday with his wife, he is also a real example of how family business can work. He gives us some pointers on that very topic. If you want to hear more about true entrepreneurship, tune in to the podcast.