George “Ski” Zarebski and Lolo Smith of Urban Accelerator X came to help everyone get on track around building up entrepreneurship. Urban Accelerator X works as an urban entrepreneur support organization much like their name would suggest. Usually, the initiative interacts with smaller businesses that are 5 years or younger in their business journey. The duo points out that they work with all levels of business, but the level closer to the ideation stage of business is where they currently have the most organic connection. To increase impact, they honor support for poc-owned and women-owned businesses against added barriers these entrepreneurs face. They also deliberately made their entrepreneur center accessible to the inner city. Clearly, Urban Accelerator X is adamant about supporting and expanding horizons of people growing through entrepreneurship.

Ski and LoLo explain the three huge barriers in business: management, money, and markets. Lolo specifically addressed the additional factors of emotional trauma and generational curses. Barriers with lingering effects tend to create a gap that widens over time. These are barriers that we seem to address on the surface, only to realize there is more depth needing discussion. Ski and Lolo touched on the limits seen in these lingering barriers, such as difficulty in building wealth.

A step toward minimizing these lingering barriers is to combat them from the beginning. One way is to focus on expanding the level of exposure to the possibilities of life. Ski gave an excellent analogy using an age-old question:

“When you're a kid, you almost inevitably get the question: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ It's a horrible question because the only possible answers you can give are things that you've been exposed to. That's exactly what we're talking about here. We're talking about a group of people that have not had the same level of exposure as another group of people, and so what we're trying to do is broaden that awareness, broaden that exposure.” - Ski

Feeding off this topic, we started sharing our own experiences of broadening our horizons. At times the shift was on purpose, and other times it was through shock. Each person is raised in different environments, and there comes a day when you realize what is the “normal” basic to you is not the same for everyone else. In a great illustration of this point, Lolo shared a personal college preparation experience that switched the entire perspective around family expectation and finance.

We dive more into real life stories of entrepreneurs overcoming limiting beliefs and the value of changing the lens we perceive the business world through. Both Ski and Lolo have accounts on touching stories they witnessed develop as entrepreneurs found their place. Luckily, Urban Accelerator X is continuing their work of helping entrepreneurs find their place. Ski and Lolo announce exciting news about upcoming work that will further entrepreneurs in their business journeys.

If you would like to learn more, you can visit Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or the official website.