#92 – “Cracking The Studentpreneur Code With Julien Marchand”

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

00:00:14 – 00:00:22 – Introductions.

00:00:22 – 00:08:39 – All about Julien Marchand’s thesis about studentpreneurs.

00:08:39 – 00:11:06 – The final step, turning into an entrepreneur.

00:11:06 – 00:26:31 – The four profiles of studentpreneurs.

00:26:31 – 00:28:07 – The importance of having a co-founder.

00:28:07 – 00:30:56 – Formulating an idea for a successful business.

00:30:56 – 00:31:43 – The difference between serendipity and luck.

00:31:43 – 00:35:09 Helping studentpreneurs develop their skills.

00:35:09 – 00:36:16 – Whats next for Julien Marchand.

00:36:16 – 00:37:18 – How to reach out to Julien.

SUMMARY:  Stephen talks to Julien Marchand about the Studentpreneur Code.

[00:00:14] Stephen:  Hey guys, Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing on the Move.  And today I’ve got Julien with me.  How are you going?

Julien:  Great.  How are you doing?

[00:00:22] Stephen:  Yeah, awesome.  So, not too long ago, you and I were on a phone call and I know you’re doing a bit of an exposé, a little bit of a — what would you call it?  Is it a thesis?  Is it a — it’s been a long time in the works.  I’ll let you explain.  So, we had a chat —

Julien:  Yeah.

[00:00:38] Stephen:  — and this was about three, four years ago now.  And we were talking a little bit about studentpreneurs.  And you were kind of looking into that space of studentpreneurs, what they are, how they work.  And I brought you one because now, three, four years down the track, you’ve gone in and you’ve researched.  You’ve dug into it.  And I’d love to hear your thoughts and kind of what you found over this big period of time.  So, first question is, I guess, like, what were you looking at?  So, explain to the listeners what you’re actually looking at.

Julien:  All right.  So, four years ago, I left my business to go to uni in order to teach.  And in order to teach, you have to get your Ph.D. and you have to do a thesis.  And I’m like, “All right, what am I going to do it on?”  I’m like, “Ah, that’s obvious.  I’m going to do it on discovering entrepreneurs.”  And I started working on it.  And man, it was a nightmare.  It’s so big, so vast.  And then I did some interviews and I came across students who are entrepreneurs.  So, not students who plan to be entrepreneurs, or not drop out students who become entrepreneur like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.  And I found that was really, really interesting, the students that stayed in uni while doing their business because they’re sort of valuing their degree as a plan B, and doing their business.

So, I started digging into it and I realized that it was a growing phenomenon.  And we know some famous people like Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google or Steve Huffman from Reddit.  But no, he’s not as famous as Steve Jobs and the others.  There’s not much study around it, but I did find some numbers.  In the U.K., studies said that there were 80,000 student entrepreneurs, which is about 3.5 percent of all the uni students.  And collectively, they make 80 million Australian dollars.

So, I’m like, “Wow, that’s really, really interesting.”  That’s why I focused on them and that’s why I came across and interview you.

[00:02:51] Stephen:  Yeah.  That was so long ago.  My business changed so much.  We were just having a chat before our podcast started and I was like, “Oh, what did you even talk to me?  Like, what was my business?”  He’s like, “What are you doing now?”  I’m like, “Oh, I don’t even remember what I told you four years ago.  I don’t think I even had a website.  It probably all just started.”  And yeah, it was crazy.  It’s been a while.

Julien:  But that’s interesting because yeah, we all change businesses and we all have different ideas.  But the skills and the mindset remain the same.  And that’s what I focused the research on.  And this is hard to do because you can’t just go around and interview hundreds of student entrepreneurs with quick surveys and get statistics about it.  What I had to do was just like, dig deeper in the life of only 17 student entrepreneurs and I call them studentpreneur.  So from now on, I will use the word “studentpreneur”, just because when I talk about student entrepreneurs, most people believe they are students who are studying entrepreneurship, which just doesn’t make sense.

So, I dig deeper in your life as a studentpreneur and the life of 16 others.  And so what I found doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone, but it helps to understand who studentpreneurs are, and more importantly for me, is how we can design programs at university to support them.  We have programs to support student athletes for instance, right?  But we have nothing to support student entrepreneurs, right?  A lot of people think they have to drop out to become entrepreneurs, really.

[00:04:31] Stephen:  Yeah, it’s an interesting one because — you already know this, but for the people out there going through — even through my school, I remember, the options are so limited in terms of what you can do to actually support yourself.  So, digging deeper, I mean you’ve already gone through this, but what were some of the stages that you saw in the journey of studentpreneurs?

Julien:  So, there are three stages on that journey.  And that’s really a journey to become an entrepreneur because one of the problem is, studentpreneurs don’t see themselves as entrepreneurs.  And it’s because most of the time, they don’t know what an entrepreneur is, and because when you were in high school or primary school, even university, you don’t know what entrepreneur is and you think it’s too daunting.  But the secret is, if we help them go through the stages of becoming entrepreneurs, the quicker they go, the quicker they’ll become entrepreneurs and the quicker the business will be.

So the first stage is a stage of realizing that you are a hobbyist.  So it’s basically your personal interest.  Do you remember what was your hobby that we talked about?

[00:05:50] Stephen:  Yeah, I remember.  I think we were talking about like, trading cards and things like that through school.  That was kind of my thing, like, trading Pokemon cards or whatever it was.

Julien:  Yeah.  But the thing is, when you talked about trading cards, it was not like you know, as a child talking about trading cards; you were talking like, being competitive; you wanted to get more cards and you want to find the quickest way to get there.  You know, like those —

[00:06:14] Stephen:  It’s like all these traits of business that you don’t realize they’re there, which is exactly what you’re talking about, like, competitive deal making.  It’s like that adrenalin of being in business, like, business of trading cards, but without even knowing it.  Like, you’re just doing it for fun.  But the fun part wasn’t I love Pokemon, the fun part was doing the actual trading.

Julien:  Exactly, exactly.  You’ve got it on that.  And so a lot of people will just stay there and they’ll stay in the hobbyist stage.  But what is key for all of them is to make it to the maker stage, which is when you want to make money or you love the process of making money, or you want to make a product or a service, right?  And that is really, really hard to do, especially for non-business students.  Like, I had a student, Christian, when the first iPhone arrived, like he was studying engineering and he liked to tinker with stuff.  And he bought an iPhone and he started taking it apart as every good engineering student do, right?  And he started fixing it.  And then he started fixing his friends’ iPhones.  He was doing this at uni, in the learning area.

And then he realized that he could actually make money from it, and actually really good money.  And you have to get to that stage to realize that, hey, this is not just a hobby.

[00:07:45] Stephen:  That’s it.  It’s like that light bulb moment, like you come off from the hobby, straight to becoming a maker.  And that’s when you get that light bulb moment.

Julien:  The thing is, when you grow up in primary school or high school and university, we never teach you that you’re going to reach that level, right?  We teach you to get a good grade, to get to the internship, to get to the good job.

[00:08:05] Stephen:  There never is a light bulb moment.  It’s always just following that journey.  So, yeah, it’s true.  Like, you’re not aware of it and you can’t do what you’re not aware of.  If you’re not tracking it, there’s no way to actually say, “Okay, I’m working toward something”, or, “I’m looking for something that just clicks.”  But when you’re on that, like — you know, like you say, if you go through a corporate ladder or if you go through whatever, just step up, step up.

Julien:  That’s right.  And if you don’t go through that stage of acknowledging that you want to make money, you will never accept to be an entrepreneur basically.  And that’s the final stage of the journey.

[00:08:39] Stephen:  So the final step, turning to an entrepreneur, they realize that they’re a business person, that’s it.

Julien:  Exactly.  That’s right.  When they introduce themselves and say, “Hey, I’m the co-founder of blah, blah, blah”, or, “I’m a business person.”  And that’s when they embrace their identity as an entrepreneur.

[00:08:58] Stephen:  Yeah.  Cool.  I think that’s really neat.  I love that hobbyist make entrepreneur phase.  It’s so cool.  When you uncover it and you map it out like that, it makes so much sense.  When I was reading — like, you sent me the — is it a thesis?  Is that what you actually put together?  Is it called a thesis?

Julien:  Yeah, it’s a thesis.

[00:09:16] Stephen:  Yeah.  So, when I was going through the thesis, and this thing is like a base of a thesis, like, I was reading through it, I was just like, salivating.  I loved it.  It’s such good content.  And like, I was reading through, I was like, “That was me.  That’s me.  That’s me.  I did that.  I remember that.”  And all the other people you interviewed as well making all these points, and then when you sum it up, it makes so much sense.  It just clicks to me.  Another person as well — I’m sorry to interrupt.

Julien:  I think it clicks to you because in your guts, you knew about it.

[00:09:42] Stephen:  But like, you clarified it, you know.  Until you’ve got someone telling you from another perspective, looking at it, being like, “Oh, this is cool,” and then you pulled me apart with all the questions and then summarize it, then it makes sense to me.  I think as entrepreneurs, a lot of us don’t look at it from a third perspective, like, we don’t have someone there to actually look at it and be like, “Well, hang on a minute.”  You’ve actually followed this path and we crossed that between all these other people.  You’re following a similar path.  And that was really cool.

Julien:  Yeah.  Well, when I was doing the interview, at the end, every single time the studentpreneurs go, “Oh my god, this makes so much sense now.”  Just because we had that conversation.

[00:10:19] Stephen:  It’s like a personality test.  If you created the studentpreneur personality test, you ask all these questions, “Are you a studentpreneur?”  I bet you, at the end of it — and you had, “This is what you are, you’re a studentpreneur, this”, or whatever, everyone would be like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy.  You just found all this cool stuff out about me and I didn’t even know it.”

Julien:  That’s what I was actually going forward, was to go for a questionnaire or a survey to find out of a studentpreneur.  But I couldn’t find something that specific.  I think I can work on it, but what I found was that there was four different profile of studentpreneurs.  And if we had those profiles, then we can identify them because they have got some common features, right?

[00:11:06] Stephen:  So, it’s one of the four profiles.

Julien:  So, we’ve got the creatives.  So, they’re the one who start their passions for creating things.  They’re the ones who start at the very beginning of the hobbyist stage.  You know, when you’re a creator, you know who you are basically.  So I guess that was an obvious one.  but then I found a totally surprising one, the student athletes.  So, they were student athletes before starting a business, right?  It surprised me, it makes a lot of sense because they can transfer a lot of the traits they developed as athletes.  They are focused, they have dedication, they have sacrifices, they love competition.

[00:11:54] Stephen:  Yeah.  That is huge.  Like, one of the guys — I’m sure most of the podcasters know about Russell Brunson, so I work with him and he’s the owner of ClickFunnels that I do content for.  He used to be into wrestling.  He’s the state level of wrestling, and couldn’t make it professionally, ended up going into digital marketing.  Now, he’s making millions and millions in digital marketing, running a software company and info products and whatever.  And it just shows you like, you see that trait over and over and over again, like how many surfers, how many wrestlers, soccer, tennis, whatever.  Like, Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes was a massive handball player before he got into The School of Greatness, another podcaster.  Even John Lee Dumas, he was in the Army; not exactly a sport, but it’s pretty comparative where you’re in something high competition, something which had a lot of motivation, a lot of pressure and then you end up into entrepreneurship.

Julien:  And you said it, it’s when they realize they can’t make it pro and on they go, “What the –”

[00:12:57] Stephen:  They realize that one too as well.  You might have all the assets there, but you’re thinking, well, now, how much money is involved.  They might even look at the bigger picture and think, “I can do this, but if I do it for the next five years and get injured, well then, what am I going to do?”  So, they try to think ahead and then make that decision.  Then you got to look for another option.

Julien:  Yeah.  Well, injuries comes in and that’s what often takes them away from the journey.  But I remember, one of the studentpreneur, he was in judo and he was at the national level.  He was in The Netherlands and starting to compete in all Europe.  And after high school, he went for it and he realized he just didn’t have the level for it.  And on the side, he was making some eBay business to live.  And he was like, “This entrepreneurship thing, it’s so easy compared to world championship.”

[00:13:54] Stephen:  Well, and that’s the thing, a lot of these people that go for the sport route or the athlete route need to make money to survive.  And that’s how I think a lot of it starts.  You need some sort of instigation.  If you can’t survive, you don’t get paid that well, if you’re like an amateur athlete.  And then you’re also thinking, “What can I do to make some quick money?”  And I think that’s how a lot of people start of as.  They go through and they’re like, “All right, what if I just try this while I’m doing this?”  And then eventually, when they can’t do the main thing, they fall back onto their secondary, make money fast idea.

Julien:  And they use to have like, a double identity; they are students and they are athletes.  They like it.  They like the fact that they are different.  So, they need to find that other identity when they lose it.  Can you imagine if incubator programs at uni could find those people?  It’s easy to find those people, right?  You’d just find them.  And you just put them into incubators, the same time as they do the sport and geez!

[00:14:51] Stephen:  You’ll make such an impact on lives.  So, what’s the next one?  We had two more, didn’t we?

Julien:  Yeah.  So, a very normal one are the family studentpreneur.  So, basically, one of the parents is an entrepreneur and they grew up in their environment and just normal lives, you know.

[00:15:12] Stephen:  Yeah.  What was it, Gary Vaynerchuk family, I think are in the wine thing and then he ended up growing it up, so that’s that.

Julien:  Yeah, it’s just a natural one because at the dinner table, what do they talk about?

[00:15:23] Stephen:  Yeah.  You’re surrounded by it.

Julien:  Business.  One of the studentpreneurs that I was interviewing was working off his parents’ own — an auction house.  By the age of eight, he knew exactly the price of anything.

[00:15:42] Stephen:  Because he just knew everything; knew all about it.  He was just immersed with it.

Julien:  That’s right.  He’ll buy something on one Saturday from someone on the auction and he knew that the next week, he could sell three times the price because he had that skill of valuating a product.  And what he does know, he evaluates websites and he purchases a website, like it’s just putting a value on things.

[00:16:05] Stephen:  Yeah.  He’s perfected that little skill and then now takes it bigger.

Julien:  Exactly.  And then the fourth profile, they arrive much later; they don’t start in primary school or high school, they really start at uni and they have to have the motivation to make money and they want to become an entrepreneur.  It’s kind of also one of these entrepreneurs but they actually do start it.  So, this one, they’re easy to target as well at university.  But if we could target the creatives, the student athletes, the family studentpreneurs as well and we all put them in one or two incubators, like I said, a program, can you imagine the type of mastermind you will get?

[00:16:47] Stephen:  It would be crazy.  It would be insane.  Like, you’d have such mix of entrepreneurs there.  That’s awesome.  And then we moved on, like, I know you’re telling me, supporting entrepreneurs as well — of studentpreneurs.  That was the next thing.

Julien:  Yeah.  So, after finding that journey and those four profiles, I found three ways to support studentpreneurs, construct the identity of entrepreneurs.  And when I say, “I found,” I really found it.  It’s by interviewing you and other.  Like, I just got it from you.  And one of the big things is to positively validate what the studentpreneurs do.  And how do we do this?  Like they go to hackatons, startup weekend, or they win a big contract, or they are accepted in an incubator or a program.  I think you’ve done the awards — which award?  I don’t remember.

[00:17:50] Stephen:  I can’t remember.  Maybe.

Julien:  But basically, it’s a moment where other people look at the studentpreneurs and they see them as entrepreneurs and they say that they are doing something right.

[00:18:02] Stephen:  Yeah.  Well, actually maybe I’ve mentioned, I can’t remember, but there’s one when I was like, 16, I was in the high school and there was a national achiever’s program or something like that.  It might be the one I was talking about.  It was an IT-related one.  So, I applied for it, got it, ended up spending three weeks Monash University as one of their IT interns or something like that.  And you know, even just little things like that, it just kind of all adds up.  People recognize what you’re doing and then it just kind of builds up and gain momentum.

Julien:  Yeah.  And it just makes you feel better and it makes you feel that you’re doing something right.

[00:18:36] Stephen:  It gives you confidence.  It allows you to do your next business or next venture.

Julien:  Exactly, because otherwise we get a lot of setback when we start businesses.  So, when you’re young and you get a lot of setbacks, it’s hard.  So, we need to build that confidence.  Another one, I think, that is really, really important is that we, as the people around them, so it could be the parents, it could be the friends or the incubators, to help them realize that they want to make money and it’s okay.

[00:19:10] Stephen:  I a hundred percent agree with that one.  I’m going to say, luckily in my family, that was all cool.  I was always encouraged to do that, which is a good thing.  But I know a lot of other entrepreneurs, it was not mentioned or you follow the route that the parents went through, or don’t look for going too far out of your comfort zone.

Julien:  That’s right.  That’s exactly right.  And now you have to make it because as I said in the journey, it’s key.  You have to go through that  stage where you realize you want to make money and that’s fine because that’s how you’re going to keep the drive as well.  And then the third way to support them is to help them understand that they are different from other students, and that they should cultivate the difference, that it’s a good thing.  Like, there’s the example of Marion.  So, she’s a French studentpreneur and after high school, she got crazy scores, so she got accepted in a prestigious business school, like, number one.  And she went to visit there, and she saw the environment, the classes, the people there and she nearly threw up.  She goes, “This is going to kill my creativity.  I just can’t stay here.”  And you can imagine, like, she was with her parents.  Her parents were very happy.  And she just realized she was different.  She had a different mindset.  And she said she had a negotiation with her parents.

[00:20:46] Stephen:  Those negotiations are always difficult, from experience.

Julien:  Yeah.  So, she started to get here, which she never finished, by the way.

[00:20:55] Stephen:  Still going to this day.

Julien:  Yeah, she went back to study as part-time.  And she went to become a model in Paris, as you do.  But it’s that thing of understanding that you’re different from the other students.  You’re not the kid who’s going to be in law school.  You’re not the kid who’s going to be a doctor or an engineer.  You’re the kid that likes to do stuff on the side and it’s good.  And that is so important for them.

[00:21:21] Stephen:  Yeah, absolutely.  I think that’s really important.  I think just finding the right spot you’re in, I mean, it’s awesome.  And then, so moving on, so you had another section as well in what you’re looking at, didn’t you?  So, that was elements in how studentpreneurs pursue opportunities with the resources they’ve got available to them.

Julien:  Yeah, and how much resources did you have when you started your first business at uni, remember?

[00:21:45] Stephen:  I think I just had — you know, whatever.  I was working part-time.  So at the time, I was doing — it’s whatever you’ve got.  And as a uni student, you don’t have much at all.  My first real business, like, when I came out of high school and I started with an iPhone app, we have just whatever was in our bank accounts at the time and then whatever we could scrape together with part-time work.  So, I think at the end, I was quite lucky because I was doing tennis coaching and then I went on to do some part-time work for social media for a company.  And that was like, $20 an hour.  So, $20 an hour was really good for me.  And I was pumped.  I was like, “Dude, this is awesome.”  All the money I was saving, I was making — if I was working a lot, sometimes I’d be making like $2,000 a month, and I was working very hard.  I try to put it altogether.  When you try to work a lot of hours to try to get that money together and you want to put it all towards another project, it’s hard.

Julien:  What you had though, in that business of starting an iPhone app is you wanted to learn how to build an iPhone app, right?  So, you pulled over everything in how to build an app.  And that’s what is important, is the skills that you have.  So, that’s really important to start a business.  But having the willingness to learn the skills, and not everyone has this.

[00:23:04] Stephen:  You can’t be taught that, I don’t think.  It’s too difficult.

Julien:  No, you cannot.

[00:23:09] Stephen:  You either want to learn it or you don’t.  Or if you’re interested of trying to learn something about it — and that’s something, for me, I know a lot of listeners out there will definitely get this, you’re motivated to learn new projects, new tools, new systems, new platforms, all of that kind of thing.  You can’t build an iPhone app if you don’t know anything about iPhones or anything about apps.  I might not have learned the codes specifically, but I know what it takes to actually build the app.  I know that I need this part, this part, this part.

Julien:  That’s exactly right.  And I think it’s also all the people that are listening to the podcast, if they’re listening to a podcast, it’s because they want to learn something.  And you’re right, you cannot teach that capability or that trait, but you can foster it.  I mean, if we pull all contents and if we make it easy for people to have access to information and those people wants to learn, then nothing is going to stop them basically.

[00:24:02] Stephen:  Yeah, a hundred percent.

Julien:  So, that’s what I put under entrepreneurial human capital.  And the next one that is key in order to pursue an opportunity with limited resources is to build relationship, or that’s your social capital.

[00:24:22] Stephen:  Huge.

Julien:  So, yeah, right?  I mean, we all know it, right?  But I dig into it, so now working is massive.  Nothing happens without working.  We all know about it.  But the two key things that studentpreneurs get through the networking is their mentor.  And they hugely value mentors because they really help them to get to the next stage.  And that’s how they found their co-founders.  So, they go to events or they organize events themselves or they have a friend that introduces them to someone else and they find their co-founder.  Or they go to — very simply, they go to class and work on a project with someone.

And so, that’s how we can help them develop their working.  When I was in the U.S., I was doing my MBA in New York and my mentor said, “What do you want to learn?”  I’m like, “Well, I’ve heard that Americans are really good at networking, so, can you teach me networking?”  And she did.  She did teach me networking.  She did give me little examples, how to do this, and I went to events and I did what she told me to do.  And I learned something that in friends we don’t learn.  Even in Australia, there’s no courses around networking.  You just start swimming or otherwise, you sink, right?  That’s it.

[00:25:43] Stephen:  A hundred percent.  Networking is huge.  Like, you’ll never meet a lonely billionaire.  They’ll always have a network around them.  It’s just key.  And I wrote that in an end of year blog post review.  I wrote this and it’s like, your network is your net worth, or your net worth is your network.  Either way, it’s everything.  So, it’s literally more valuable almost than the money and the cash flow you make in your business because say that business dies, the people are still around you.  The money might not be there, but leveraging other people’s expertise, asking for a favor, working with them, helping build their business, getting equity, like all these different things, it’s just people.  It’s a people business.

Julien:  Yeah.  And just starting with the co-founders, you know, when you’re at uni and you don’t know what you’re doing, I think your co-founder helps you so much in getting over it.

[00:26:31] Stephen:  I had a co-founder with the app as well.

Julien:  Yeah.  You did, yeah, exactly.

[00:26:33] Stephen:  I had one that was just a friend from school and I approached him, I’m like, “Hey, look, what do you think of this app?”  He’s like, “Yeah, cool.  I like it.”  I’m like, “Sweet!  Let’s do it.”  And neither of us knew how to build an app.  We just knew that there was a problem in the market, it needed to be fixed, and away we went.  Now, I don’t have a founder in any of my businesses, it’s just me, but I’m a lot further along the path than I was back then.  I still might have a co-founder in future businesses, but now, it just shows you need someone by your side, whether it’s a founder or people or whatever, you know, just support.

Julien:  Yes, correct.  A mentor or a co-founder, yeah.  And then the other aspect of how do studentpreneurs start their business with no resources is decision-making and link to how to make their own luck.  So, I’m going to use two terms that are really important.  And I had a hard time in academia to put those terms in, but I really believe in them.  It’s sense making and serendipity.  So, sense making is a capability to make sense of not only the opportunity, but what is around you.  That’s when you get your aha moment.  That’s the definition of sense making.

So for instance, I had a student who was selling stuff on eBay and he was working on a bull shop with his uncle and he witnessed a lot of customers asking for wine racks.

[00:28:07] Stephen:  As you do?  Yeah.

Julien:  But they couldn’t find any wine rack.  So, he goes, “Aha!”  And he go and sourced wine racks in China and imported them.  Turnover first year, $1 million, and this year, $3 million, on the wine racks.

[00:28:28] Stephen:  Wine racks.  It’s literally applied for everything.

Julien:  Exactly.  But he knew about eBay.  He knew about selling online and he had that experience in the bull shop and he made sense of it.  And then you’re going to go, “Oh yeah, but that’s being lucky.”  And that’s where serendipity comes in.  And serendipity is not just luck.  It actually is a capability to act on luck.  So, that previous student, he was lucky that he was working in a shop, but he had the skill as well to do it.  And I had another studentpreneur, his story is pretty amazing.  He’s the one who was a judo champion.  He was selling lasers on eBay just to pay for his judo training.  And one day he was playing with them at his home in The Netherlands, you know, like you do because you got your laser pointers.  And he pointed them at geese outside because apparently, in The Netherlands, they’re like pigeons, they’re like everywhere.  And they flew away.

[00:29:33] Stephen:  Clever idea.

Julien:  Okay.  So he goes, “Ah, okay.”  So now, he built a multi-million dollar business that sells solution to keep birds away.  And it’s a safe solution.  It’s approved by WWF.  And Sydney Airport is one of his customers, for instance.

[00:29:53] Stephen:  That’s really cool.  Like, just to keep birds away, enters into a multi-million dollar business.

Julien:  Exactly.  So, all rigs and all platforms.

[00:30:05] Stephen:  Crazy!

Julien:  But like, this guy, he was not an engineer.  He was a judo athlete.

[00:30:13] Stephen:  If someone told me, “All right, we’re going to get this idea, Stephen,” and we’d sit down and listen to this idea, “We’re going to get rids of birds.  See those birds over there?  We’re going to get rid of them without harming anyone, without harming the birds and we’re going to make millions of dollars off it, hundreds of millions even.  We’re going to sell it to the French.  We’re going to sell it to the Australians.  We’re going to sell it to the U.S.”  It’s so crazy, but it’s so cool as well.  It just shows you how much potential there is out there.

Julien:  And it’s because it did a lot of things that I found.  Like, he was a student athlete that just worked like crazy.  And then he got into networking —

[00:30:50] Stephen:  And he works like crazy in networking.  He hustles and the trait stay with him.  So, yeah.

Julien:  That’s right.

[00:30:56] Stephen:  And between that and serendipity, the luck aspect part of it, I’m sure, it’s not just lucky, but it comes to him.  Is that serendipity?  Is it luck?  Who knows?

Julien:  Well, that’s it.  So, luck is luck, but serendipity is actually making happen and acting on it.  And that, you can develop.  That, you can learn.  Because how do you learn it?  You expose yourself to more people.  You put yourself in a mastermind —

[00:31:23] Stephen:  More opportunities, that’s it.

Julien:  Yes.  You put yourself in a mastermind group.  You go into a competition.  He went to the global student entrepreneur competition and he was voted number one.  So, he won that competition and he met so many people internationally through this.  I mean, it’s all linked.

[00:31:43] Stephen:  But it’s, you know, you get one competition and one person hears about you, tells a friend, you win it.  And then all these ambassadors see you and all these people see you, owners of corporations, whatever.  It’s crazy.  It is crazy.  It’s so exciting.

Julien:  It’s exciting because we can help the studentpreneurs to develop their skills.  We can help them — for fostering the skill, maybe they don’t have it like learning skills or network — you can’t really learn how to learn skills, but you can learn how to network.  You can learn how to make sense of things and you can learn about serendipity if you put everything together.  So, that’s what I think it’s great about my research is that it can actually be implemented in the real world, not just be tucked away in a library.

[00:32:32] Stephen:  It’s huge.  That’s why I was like, when you first emailed me, I can make a blog post about this, like, how can we share this stuff.  I think this podcast is one of my favorites now because it just highlights all the things.  I know all the listeners are going to be thinking back, “Oh man, remember when I was in high school or junior high –” or whatever you have in the country you live in and you made this one change, and just look back at your journey.  Look at how you got to where you are.  Even just write some notes and then compare it to what we talked about in this podcast and you’ll start seeing similarities.

Julien:  And if people think about what they did in high school, primary school and university and they share it, I would love to get the story because I’m all about sharing stories.  That’s why I run a podcast called StudentPreneur, where I can share all the stories.  All the students can listen to other people who did it.  And that’s what helps a lot, is to have those examples of other students who did it, and not just weird people.

Stephen:  Yeah.  It’s real, you know.  People think that this is just all theory, but this is all taken from real experience, real stories.  And that’s what’s so exciting, I think.  It’s happening everyday.  We just don’t know it.  And now that you’ve shed light on it, everyone is going to start hearing about it and being more aware.

Julien:  That’s right.  And I’m going to do it myself.  Like, I’m going to work for uni and if I get my ways, I’m going to teach but also around an incubator program and I’m going to target these profiles that I talked about.  I’m going to help them nurture their skills and hopefully, I’m going to have people coming out of those incubators, scoring major deals in their business.  And then if I can duplicate the models everywhere, geez!  Oh my god, we can actually teach entrepreneurship.

[00:34:28] Stephen:  I know, right?  And every time I heard about teaching entrepreneurship, I’m like, “Man, I don’t know about this teaching entrepreneurship,” but I think what’s important is fostering entrepreneurship.

Julien:  Correct, correct.

[00:34:37] Stephen:  And when you foster it, like the way you’re talking about, it’s just huge.  Like, you just start seeing the results.  Yeah, it’s huge.  It’s going to be exciting.

Julien:  Well, you know, I get to interviews in university and they go, “So, what can you teach?”  I’m like, “Okay, I can teach this, this, this.  Boring.”  And they go, “So, is there any course that you could come up with?”  “Oh, I’ve got this amazing course.  So, it’s over 12 weeks.”  And then they give money upfront and then they develop an idea.  And every week, I review them.  “Oh, sorry, that’s the next area of our program.”

[00:35:09] Stephen:  Yeah.  There you go.  So, what’s next for you?  What’s the next step now?

Julien:  Yeah.  So the next step is — so I’m looking to publish this thesis.  So, I’ve published 50 percent of it.  I’ve got two more to publish, but the process is a killer.

[00:35:33] Stephen:  It’s academics.

Julien:  It’s a business model or fabrication and I can email very quickly.  For entrepreneurs, it drives me crazy.  So, the author writes for free.  The reviewers review for free.  The editor edit for free.  And the publisher charges thousands of dollars to use the libraries to sell access to the journals.

[00:35:57] Stephen:  Crazy, crazy.

Julien:  It’s crazy.  But that is the academic side and what I want to do is get my position in one uni and help the studentpreneurs just realize their potential.  I think that’s all we do, is just realize their potential.

[00:36:16] Stephen:  Yeah, absolutely.  Now, I think a lot of listeners today definitely realize their journey and their potential and hopefully share this podcast of it because I know that the more people that hear it, the more people that get this message, the more people out there are going to get bigger and better.  So guys, if you want to reach out, where can people reach you if they do want to jump on your podcast, if they think they’re a good fit?

Julien:  Yeah.  So to reach me directly, it’s julien.marchand@gmail.com or you can just look StudentPreneur Podcast in two words and you’ll find me there as well.  So yeah, reach me if you want to share your stories.  Share the podcast if you want young entrepreneurs to learn more about the process.  And also reach me if you do manage an incubator or a program with young people and you want more tips from my research.  I’ll be happy to share.

[00:37:18] Stephen:  Awesome!  Fantastic.  Well, thank you so much for coming on.  I really appreciate it.  And I look forward to hearing another update in the not too distant future.

Julien:  Thank you very much.  All right.  Take it easy.

[00:37:30] Stephen:  Awesome.

Julien:  Okay.

[00:37:32] Stephen:  How did you find that?  I think it went really well.

Julien:  Good.  Yeah, that was good.  You put a lot of examples that you knew.  That was good because it’s hard to digest the entire thing.

[00:37:42] Stephen:  Yeah.  I think people are going to love that.  All right, I’m going be sending that straight over to editing and hopefully get it up as early as possible.  I’ll send you a message once it all goes live.

Julien:  Okay.  Cool.  And probably, what I’ll do, I’ll probably reuse my episode into my podcast.

[00:37:56] Stephen:  Perfect.  No problem.

Julien:  Cool!  All right, well, thank you very much.

[00:38:01] Stephen:  Keep me posted on any other exciting highlights that come out.

Julien:  You will, you will.  I think this is a good exercise.  I think it’s a good way to talk about it.

[00:38:12] Stephen:  I love it.  I’m going to be sharing it as well.  So, don’t worry, I’ll be sharing it.  When I’m speaking and stuff, I’d be mentioning your podcast.  So, see if we can get you some more listeners.  It should be awesome.

Julien:  Thank you for your time.  Thank you very much.

[00:38:23] Stephen:  I’ll talk to you soon.

Julien:  See you.

[00:38:25] Stephen:  Bye.

Julien:  Bye.