Sometimes, having an idea comes with large hurdles. Sometimes, they are a little too large to just take them on your run. Sometimes, you need help to jump them.
That was certainly the case for Gaby, when she turned her dream of opening an escape room back in Guatemala into her reality. It’s always nice to start a story with the happy end and she is certainly still living hers. With that stated, there were some difficulties she had to deal with along the way.
Before we go into the specifics, let me chip in a little ad in favour of our protagonist. Gaby’s passion for escape rooms goes beyond her entrepreneurial activities. You can find her stance on team building in her blog post about the top 3 reasons why team-building is a great investment. Find the link below.
And, of couse, she shares with us why escape rooms are a particularly brilliant team-building activity.
I mentioned some difficulties along the way, remember? For Gaby, things became slightly uncomfortable when she started out on the financial side of her venture. She had no previous experience in finance and found it difficult to create a financial plan. And then she did what you should tattoo on your inner eye; she reached out for help. She was teaching at a university at the time and asked a professor for help. That was a smart move. He gave her a model to fill in and even helped her complete the information. That was it, she had a financial plan. For him, this was probably a minor favour. To her, it made a huge task easily achievable.
This is a beautiful example for what is sometimes called the power of asking. It is easy to just think you got lucky if you find people who help you. My truth is somewhat more ironic than that. Everybody has people around them who are happy to help. But they don’t dare ask. They think it just annoys others or their questions are stupid – even worse, they are too proud to admit they don’t know everything. If I may add a bold statement, I think not asking the stupid question is what is stupid. Oftentimes, the people in the same room with us could solve most of our problems quite easily. Not one of them but all of them together.
Of course, what we need help with is not always minor or ‘just a stupid question’. Like in Gaby’s case, sometimes we have major tasks ahead of us and lack experience in a particular field. This is especially true for people with cool ideas who are reaching for their dreams. And in those cases we need help from the outside. The more generic term would be resourcefulness. We just need to get everything done somehow, including the things outside our area of expertise. Gaby wasn’t too proud or scared to ask for help when she needed it and now she is an entrepreneur, which is pretty cool 😉
Source header image: https://www.escaperoomsnederland.nl/rooms/escape-room-twente-diepenheim/
