Today we’d like to introduce you to Charlie Gasmire.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Charlie. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I grew up in Plano and from an early age have always been in love with entrepreneurship. I spent my time as a kid working lemonade stands and building a profitable shoe shine business. While my friends were playing sports, I spent my weekends with a hunger for learning about business and generating profit. I attended Baylor University and studied finance and entrepreneurship where I started many online businesses, the most notable of which (Vendevor.com) was an e-commerce platform for small businesses that easily added shopping carts to their websites and social media pages. I graduated while working full-time on this business and continued on to get my MBA from Baylor as well.
While in graduate school, I entered Vendevor into Baylor’s 2013 New Venture Competition and ultimately took 1st place against many other companies from Harvard, MIT, and others, which led my company on a fundraising trail to scale the business. We raised $500k and were later acquired by Payscape in Fall 2015. Since then, I have worked in various mergers and acquisitions roles in the healthcare space but my love for entrepreneurship and the pursuit of helping start and grow companies has remained constant. As I have reflected back on my childhood pursuit of entrepreneurship, I have realized that there was a glaring lack of guidance or tools available to educate me on starting and growing a business. So, in 2018, I co-founded Boss Club (bossclub.co) which provides entrepreneurship kits that have everything needed for kids and teenagers to start and grow real businesses. Each Boss Club kit has all of the raw ingredients, packaging materials, and advertising handouts to grow real businesses such as homemade dog treats, luxury bath bombs, and gourmet cupcakes.
We also created a 40-page curriculum that comes with each kit that I wish I would have had at a young age to teach me how to successfully create and grow a profitable business. We have gotten early traction in our online store selling these entrepreneurship kits and are also building an entrepreneurship camp that will debut in Waco, Texas in Summer 2019. My past experience with Vendevor was so rewarding in helping other small businesses to grow through online sales, but now, I am even more inspired at Boss Club to educate and train the next great generation of entrepreneurs.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
There are no shortcuts in business. Each company I have started has taken a substantial amount of consistent effort and focus in order to accomplish our goals. When you love business, it is hard to separate your emotions that will vary based on the small wins or losses that happen that day, and so the great challenge for me has been to create an unwavering amount of dedication towards growing the business each day. I do my best to instill these lessons into the Boss Club curriculum and give kids and teenagers many tangible ways to begin growing their businesses even on a very small level. I have found that creating a business is the easy part and scaling that business to bigger than just friends or family is where the challenge begins. Sales, traction, and growth are everything.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Boss Club – what should we know?
Boss Club provides entrepreneurship kits that have everything needed for kids and teenagers to start and grow real businesses. Each business has all of the raw ingredients, packaging materials, and advertising handouts to start a business such as homemade dog treats, luxury bath bombs, or gourmet cupcakes. The core of each kit is our 40+ page curriculum written by accomplished entrepreneurs and educators that teach business basics to 6-14-year-olds in an approachable and engaging style. The most rewarding part of growing Boss Club is hearing testimonials of young children making hundreds of dollars from our kits and discovering a love for entrepreneurship that also teaches them creativity, initiative, and confidence.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and so creating anything of value takes consistent effort and patience, as well as an ability to pivot when things aren’t working. If there is one aspect of a business that I have found to be the most important, it is marketing. Building a business is not relatively hard, but building it to scale and finding a large number of customers to buy your product or service seems to be the key differentiator between a company and an expensive hobby.
Pricing:
- All of our business kits are currently priced at $39.99.
- “Refill kits” are priced starting at $20 (more inventory, packaging, and marketing materials)
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bossclub.co
- Email: charlie@bossclub.co
- Instagram: @bossclubco
- Facebook: @bossclubco
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrgkiOQBtLAwfmeTMOjwFfg
Image Credit:
Baylor University
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