After serving as an officer in the Marine Corps, I launched my first venture, which was a free boxing gym for inner-city youth and young adults in Newark, New Jersey, called the IRONBOUND Boxing Academy. I was working full-time at a private school in downtown Newark, lived on campus and oversaw a residence hall of 70+ teenage boys, and I was also a graduate student pursuing my master's degree in American Studies from Rutgers-Newark. From October 2016 to the summer of 2018, my life consisted of work, school, and boxing. I was the epitome of the Third Shift Entrepreneur, only I didn't know it at the time. In June 2018, with a nudge from my own Third Shift Entrepreneurial community known as Bunker Labs, a veteran nonprofit organization that helps people start businesses, I left my job to pursue IRONBOUND Boxing full-time.
For the past two years, I've taught boxing to CEOs in the NYC Metro Area, served as a part-time consultant supporting veteran entrepreneurship initiatives, and moonlighted as a brand strategist with an E-Commerce Coffee Company based in Atlanta. I even managed to launch my own podcast called Confessions of a Native Son. If there's anything I've learned along the way, it's that it's time for a new playbook for entrepreneurs. Too often we create myths around entrepreneurship and tell stories of Harvard dropouts who make their way to Silicon Valley. That thinking and those stories leave the vast majority of us out.
Starting your own business takes more time, money, and effort than you expect, and especially so because a lot of that time, money, and effort is spent on the wrong things. Before you waste money, rack up tons of debt, or step into the unknown, I encourage you to understand and embrace a Third Shift Entrepreneur mindset. The sad reality is that the majority of business literature today doesn't accurately reflect the vast landscape of our American identity, particularly for minorities. There are socioeconomic and racial disparities among our society, which have left out many groups from business ownership. If we're going to overcome them, we need new frameworks and playbooks.
There's nothing more freeing than being able to generate income for yourself and your loved ones as an entrepreneur. You unleash untapped power and confidence in yourself when you're able to come up with an idea for a product or service and monetize it. The entrepreneurial journey is one of the most rewarding experiences—a true act of realizing your full potential. I believe everyone who has the aspiration should have the opportunity, and my hope is that the strategies in the following pages reveal an approach that will allow you to do so. This is a book, in essence, that creates a pathway to entrepreneurship for the rest of us.
—“IRON” Mike Steadman