With a passion for automotive care and maintenance, James Li believes the skills he learns from his experience from both outside and inside school will help him run his own business. Li has recently started attending Arapahoe Community College  for a business transfer degree, hoping the knowledge will help him run his own business one day. 

“Right now I do own my own business, cleaning cars, it’s not bad,” Li says, “it’s a great way to get started.”

Once Li gets all the resources he needs, he believes he’d be able to build a better company because his priorities heading into the business world are different from other businesspeople.

“I think the top head, the owner of all these businesses, their main focus is not ‘Oh, my mechanics, they’re not the best…’” Li says,  “They don’t really care as much.”

In his classes thus far, Li is told how there are some aspects in the business world that are unrealistic, like spending extra money to get certain tasks done and done faster.

Yet with his interactions with customers in the work setting, he believes that businesses could be more successful if there was more consideration of both its workers and customers.

“You can make a business that’s more for the people,” says Li. 

In treating his own customers with kindness and respect, Li hopes that one day, if he does run a larger business and has his own employees, he’ll teach them how to do the same. Ensuring that these employees get the proper training needed so that every job given is a job done right.