Recently my football coach sent me information about your grant to attend the Next Generation Summit in New York City. Being honest! I'm going to be genuinely honest. I almost made the mistake of keeping this email extremely formal. That would have been a personal mistake. I feel if I treated this with a purely formal perspective I would leave out vital information that provides you insights on who I am as a person. I don't want to receive a grant for being someone I'm not. I want you to feel like you can personally connect with me and understand who I am. There's a time and a place for a formal letter, but I don't believe that I would be doing the right thing if I were to use formalities here. I believe all entrepreneurs should look past formalities and into the depths of a person' wants, motivations, and needs. By the time I finish this email I hope you know more about who I really am. I want you to know that I will be as genuine as I possibly can in this email. After all, entrepreneurship involves taking a different and unique perspective on things. My name is Zachary Horton and I am a young entrepreneur...
At first I didn't call it entrepreneurship. I simply called it fun. As early as 4th grade I was taking a different vantage point than almost any other kid. I began going to garage sales with my grandpa to buy items at a very affordable price. Afterwards, I would go home upload those items to eBay or Craigslist and sell them for a profit. This was in FOURTH GRADE, and I loved it! Now obviously I had help finding the hobby. My grandpa had been doing it for years, but the first time I purchased a Yamaha trumpet for $20 and sold it for $130 I was hooked! It wasn't the money that was so enticing to my 4th grade self. The idea of being self proficient was so much stronger than any amount of money. It was amazing! Even exhilarating! My 4th grade self made $900 that summer, and of course half of that went directly to the bank. That was my first taste of entrepreneurship, but it wasn't my last.
A few years later I started dabbling with technology. Technology still amazes me to this day. The idea of a single instrument can influencing billions of people instantaneously awes me. The potential is phenomenal! I started off messing with random things, learning basic html until I eventually reached a site called Weebly. Weebly is a front end web development site where you can build websites without an immense amount of knowledge. It has a very easy drag and drop interface that made it a really efficient learning tool. The really cool thing about Weebly is that it also gives you the ability to manually go in and change the website's code if you're a proficient programmer. It's an amazing tool that has really affected my philosophy to this day. I love the idea that technology builds on itself. If you want to you can literally make a website in five minutes using tools like Weebly where as it used to take weeks to create a much simpler web page. The biggest lesson that I've learned from Weebly is the idea of using tools and resources to your advantage. There is a million and one ways to do something, but the efficient ways are usually better. If you can use the tools freely allowed to you, your productivity can spike tremendously. This gives you time to focus on other areas that could could benefit your clients. Later that year I learned enough about coding to use Weebly's templates to profit as a freelance website developer/designer. I would use the template and then go into the code to change settings exactly the way I wanted them. I can now develop websites so quickly that I usually help the customer with Search Engine Optimization (improving traffic to your website through Google, Bing, and other search engines) for free. Weebly has taught me to use my tools to provide efficient and better services for my clients. This gave me a competitive edge in a somewhat crowded free lance area. Using tools efficiently to improve my customer service helped me to make self made profit for the second time in my life as well as give me a strong base for my next entrepreneurial undertakings.
In 2015 my friend Jacob Lane and I founded Rawls Treats LLC. We sell healthy, natural, and homemade dog treats to dog lovers. You can check out the site I made via Weebly at http://www.rawlstreats.com. The entrepreneurial experiences that I have been fortunate enough to partake in through Rawls Treats have provided amazing educational experiences. I have learned A LOT about tax laws, licenses, retail, banking, and other business oriented topics. It's been amazing, and I have loved every step of the way! So far we have shipped our treats to just over 20 states including New York, Washington, Texas, Utah, Kansas, and New Jersey. Jacob and I initially started selling our natural dog treats door-to-door, personally introducing our selves to members of our community who could potentially be great connection. We then decided that we would be able to expand if we could focus on the manufacturing and business sides of things. So we decided to involve our high school community. We now have had over twenty of our high school peers sell our dog treats door-to-door, several of them making hundreds of dollars. Two have made over a thousand dollars in under three weeks. Our best salesperson, Jordan Bell, sells just over 10 bags an hour on average. He makes $4 for every bag. As a high school student he is making more per hour helping Rawls Treats than several college graduates. We have also had other people in our community help us blog, take pictures, spread our name, give us advice, help us bake, create videos, write articles, create flyers, and help with a numerous number of other things. That is an amazing feeling for us! It's amazing how Rawls Treats started. We started Rawls Treats to stand out, but at the end of the day the real success comes from bringing people together. This has been the biggest lesson that entrepreneurship has taught me thus far.
I absolutely love the thrill of being an entrepreneur. I love the learning process, the obstacles, the success, the networking, and the dreaming. I love achieving a dream through a logical, determined approach. There's no other feeling like it in the world! If given the grant to attend The Next Generation Summit, I would use the opportunity to absorb as much information as possible, to network with as many people as possible, and to personally improve my self as much as possible. Entrepreneurship is more than just a passion for me. Entrepreneurship is my life; it's who I am. It's what I am. Entrepreneurship is engraved into every ounce of my being. I love it with all of my heart, and I will continually improve in every way that I can to become the best leader and entrepreneur that I can be. I want to give you a sincere thank you for taking the time to read my email and for considering me for your grant. Your consideration means more than you know, so thank you for your time.
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