John Dimmer

John Dimmer was a longtime friend of to instructor so it was interesting to see what kind of people he hangs out with. He was involved with the Free Range Media, Freezone and Lariat Software with Andrew Fry, or our instructor. He later then retired and started a business with his dad. So he has a massive experience in entrepreneurial ventures and successful ones at that.

Some interesting things that I learned from him are carving out areas where your business dominates, a bit about angel investors and crowd sourcing.

Starting from the last topic as I was the most excited to check that out, crowd sourcing is the bomb.com right at this moment. Websites like gofundme.com and indiegogo.com are being used as platforms to crowd fund things like business ventures to charities. So that got me a nice place that if I do decide to start a business use if I need the funding.

Next he gave us a personal look at angel investors as he is one himself. That was very interesting to me because receiving the information from the person who is actually in the business himself is more beneficial than reading 100 books that cover the theory about the business. His highlights were the amount that angels were generally able to fund, the amount that they wanted to know they can get back and lastly the importance of an exit strategy to the angel investors.

And more on a personal level he told us about his strategy that he used to carve out the NW corner that he dominates with his sales of AirStream trailers and a few potential exit strategies.

He is definitely someone you would want on an advisory board for your business, his knowledge and experience are hard to overlook.