Today’s guest blog is written by Cara Transtrom, a  lively and adventurous spirit that I met while working at TorquePowered.com.  Cara maintains a very humorous blog on life called Caramia, where she uses personal experience to make observations about life, love, and everything in between.  Her blog is one of my all-time favorites, and I’m honored she took the time to write a few blogs for Fellowstream. Here’s her first on entrepreneurship. Her teamwork blog will up later this week.

Entrepreneurship and teamwork. These are inexhaustible topics, and there’s a reason that numerous books have been written about both subjects. For today’s post, I’m simply going to tell you my favorite tale of entrepreneurship, and then I’m going to reflect on a few of the specific ways communication can skyrocket (or destroy) successful teamwork in a later blog.

I used to babysit for a little 3-year-old named Marlie. Bright, precocious, engaging, delightful, and strong-willed, he was already taking on the whole world at 3, and it was all the rest of us could do to keep up with his lively curiosity and his constant whole-hearted explorations.

One day his mother Anne, laughing so hard she could scarcely stand up, told me of his latest shenanigan, er, business venture. It went something like this:

“A few days ago Marlie and I went shopping, and since it’s the Christmas season, the Salvation Army bell-ringers were out in full force. Marlie was fascinated by them. He stopped and stared and looked and then looked some more, watching the bells ringing, folks stopping and dropping their donations in the red bucket, and finally the bell-ringer thanking them for their donation.

“A couple days later Marlie and I went to the post office to grab our daily mail, and I stepped around the corner of the hall for just a few seconds to get to our P.O. box, leaving Marlie a few feet behind me around the corner (no one else was in the building with us). Moments later, I heard the tinkle of a bell. I blew it off and quickly continued glancing through the contents of our mail. But when I kept hearing it, I turned and dashed around the corner to find Marlie.

“This is the scene that met my eyes: my 3-year-old son was standing right inside the entrance to the post office, holding a toy bucket in one hand and a miniature bell in the other, and every time someone came through that door, he vigorously rang his little bell and held out his small bucket to the passersby!

“I got him out of there as fast as I could, and once I had regained control of myself so I could question him without breaking down in gales of laughter, I asked him, ‘Why were you ringing your bell and holding your bucket in the Post Office?’ He looked up at me with those big brown eyes, and he said, ‘Because I wanted money!'”

Yup, this is my all-time favorite story of entrepreneurship. A 3-year-old identified a need and provided a way to fill that need. And even though Marlie couldn’t yet pronounce the word “entrepreneurship,” let alone explain the definition found in all the MBA textbooks, he was already proving himself to be an entrepreneur extraordinaire at the tender age of 3.

Cara grew up as one of eight children. Born in the northern Midwest, she’s had a wide range of work experiences – from teaching English in the Czech Republic to performing various musical styles onstage to working in start-up tech companies – and lots in-between. A chocolate and coffee lover, she is married to Benjamin, adores her beagle/pug rescue dog Pugsley and currently resides in Washington, D.C., where she works as a freelance writer and a teacher.