#216 - Entrepreneur Jeremy Delk Author of "Without a Plan"

Born and raised in a small town and from a blue collar household, his parents worked for the post office. However, Jeremy always held much bigger dreams. He longed to experience the world outside his small hometown of Bardstown, Kentucky.He jumped into entrepreneurial ventures with the naivety of a child and the tenacity of a tycoon. He started the day trading at the age of sixteen, learning and failing with each trade. It is this process of adapting through failures that is paramount to his success in business.After high school, he attended college in Rhode Island under a business & marketing scholarship. However, he spent most of his class time using his palm pilot to day trade. By the age of 19, he earned 30K to 50K a day as a day trader from the desk of his college classroom. He felt invincible!As quickly as the money came, it vanished just as fast. After amassing almost 2 million in his early twenties as a day trader, it took him only four days to lose it all! The tech bubble has a way of making people go broke quickly.To make ends meet, he began renting apartments, earning commissions on the sales. As luck would have it, one of the people was a newly relocated executive at Fidelity in Boston.His knowledge and skill as a day trader would help him land a job as one of the youngest brokers at Fidelity trading institutional equities in Boston and later in New York. He was earning great money, but it didn’t fulfill the entrepreneurial spark within him, so he decided to go out on his own.Delk Enterprises has grown from making $6,000 in its first year in business to a diversified VC fund that has built and exited investments in both private and public transactions. Today, more than 20 years later, Delk Enterprises has holdings in biotech & healthcare, consumer brands, technology, building materials, and real estate development.Jeremy now focuses on investing in and advising entrepreneurs through speaking. His upcoming book shares his reality of the Good, Bad, and UGLY of entrepreneurship. It serves as a not-so-subtle reminder of fundamental principles he’s learned through his journey: while great times don’t last forever, neither do the truly bad ones.www.jeremydelk.comwww.livelifedriven.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-answer-is-yes--2903418/support.