From a hot dog cart in college to 2 B2B SaaS companies and then a passion pivot to coaching other founders…this is my story.

entrepreneur, start-up, inspiring, journey, success, challenges, perseverance, innovation, motivation, lessons, passion, failure, growth, advice, mentorship

Hey everyone, Kevin Dooley here with my founder's story. So I had entrepreneurship in my blood for as long as I can remember. I was always a curious kid, creative kid, always looking to kind of ways I could make money around the house, saving that money for different things that I liked. But the entrepreneurship really bubbled up in college, so I was headed over to my landlord's house actually to pay my rent. And as I walked down the driveway and approached a side door that I was about to ring the doorbell on, I noticed an old hot dog cart on the side of his garage. So kind of on the fly, in the spirit of the moment, I pitched to my landlord, hey how about I take that hot dog cart and clean it up and start selling some dogs down in this little village where my college was. And I used that to pay my rent, what do you think? And I had no idea if he was going to accept it or not, but he did. And so I launched a hot dog cart business called Steaming Weenies, sold hot dogs outside the bars, did it without the necessary health permits at first. But once I sorted all that stuff out, I was able to have a legitimate first business. And so that kind of springboarded me to doing a bunch of things. I did have a stint in corporate America doing an intrapreneur role where I had complete P&L responsibility for product line that not a lot of people knew much about. So they gave me full freedom to do what I wanted to do with it. And that kind of led me to leave in the corporate world and do my own thing with four or five more businesses after that. And I co-founded a couple of B2B SaaS companies, exited one in January of 2020, right before the pandemic hit. I was actually in an accelerator working on another software company when they locked the doors because of the pandemic. And like a lot of people, I did some deep thinking back then about what I wanted to do next. And I ended up pivoting away from another software company and to coaching and working with other founders. So it really feels like my superpower. It feels like what I was born to do. And if you can take something that you're super passionate about and bridge that to or connect that to something that a buyer sees value in, then you've got something really powerful, right? Like that's kind of the definition of impact. So that's what I did. That's my founder story. Hope you enjoyed it. Please reach out. I'd love to connect and talk more about it. Thank you so much.

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