When you find you have a passion, how do you start a company?

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David Krauskopf is an entrepreneur experienced in starting, financing and growing several companies with direct experience in travel, hospitality, software, computer, and retail industries.   His specialties are in business planning, marketing (internet particularly) and financial management.  David was the general manager of Apple Computer in Russia from (1993-1999) and owned the exclusive representative for Apple Computer in Russia and the Ukraine.  He founded a printing and press room solutions company in Russia in 1996, and these combined companies in 2007 had over $300M in sales revenue.   David helped start and was on the advisory board of Travelpost.com that was acquired by Sidestep in 2007.  In 2000, David developed and now owns Hamanasi Adventure Resort (<a>www.hamanasi.com</a> ), a high-end boutique resort in Belize, Central America.  This resort has 70 employees, high operating margins and is currently ranked number one in Belize and Central America by the hotel review web site TripAdvisor.com.  Mr. Krauskopf lives in Northern Virginia, is an angel investor with New Vantage Group (<a>www.newvantagegroup.com</a>) , David is a volunteer SCORE (<a>www.score.org</a>) business counselor partnering with the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority and for two years has been an Assistant Wrestling coach at Langley High School.  David holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management (2005) and a B.S. degree in Management from Miami University. 

When you find you have a passion, how do you start a company?

This video explains the basics of starting your own business.

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This series: 37,059 views

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Host: When you find you have a passion, how do you start a company?

David Krauskopf: If you look around what you see is that a lot of businesses are started in this way. You have a hobby or a subject matter you just really love and you have a passion about that and then what's you realize is that other people can benefit from this passion or subject matter and I want to pass that on to other people. Sometimes people start doing it part time and then they realize now it's the time I can actually create entire business around that.

A couple of examples I can give you. We have a client who has a background in performing arts and when her children became school age, she went out and looked in the local area for how she can get them involved in that and she was dissatisfied with what was available and she had decided she would start working to organize that herself and she quickly learned that her friends all felt the same and so that she start organizing this for her friends. The next thing, she realizes she has this component and passion for it and ability to organize performing arts lessons for school age kids and now she has a six year old, very successful company providing that to local community.

Another example would be is that a lot of the internet sites that you see that are oriented around a subject or community now or actually just started by individuals. They have a passion for the subject matter. They go out and do research and they put their knowledge and other people's knowledge into this repository for information for other people to go and access it and amazingly enough many of these internet sites then grow to be very large and the people realize that hey, I actually can build the business around this. I can sell advertising on my subject to passion or I can sell products on my subject to passion. So that's something if you have an interest or passion for a subject matter, you can look at building a business around it.

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