So, what exactly IS an Entrepreneur?
So, I have a challenge for you all. One that I think many of you out there can identify with.
Help me start to define what it means to be an “entrepreneur”.
I’m not talking about entrepreneurial qualities either. My Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey series of last year did a great job of getting a conversation started on the qualities required to be a successful entrepreneur. I think we identified a good starting list of qualities, and your input combined with the results has helped me think through what I want to change about the survey and I’ll be running a new one very soon.
No, in this post I’d like to start a different, but complementary discussion. I’d like to examine what it means to be an entrepreneur.
It’s not your employment status
Most of us tend to think of entrepreneurs as either people who have quit their jobs to work full time on their dream, or work on it after-hours in their garage. Truth is, there are all kinds of entrepreneurs. Many companies promote entrepreneurial activity, Intrapreneurship, within their walls by fostering a culture of risk-taking and innovation either throughout the company or in selected groups.
There are also people, I call them Extrapreneurs, who pursue entrepreneurial endeavors “on the side” while maintaining traditional employment. Maybe it’s a bit of consulting, maybe it’s an online business; but they are still taking an entrepreneurial route.
It’s not how much you make
There are a variety of entrepreneurial support organizations in my region; I happen to work for one. There are also a number of entrepreneurial networking organizations. The conditions for membership in these organizations vary widely and you could find an organization to join whether you were a pre-revenue startup or a $50M company, and everywhere in between.
It’s not even how successful you are
While my part of the country tends to be a bit more conservative on this issue, traditional thinking on the coasts is that the investment risk in you as an entrepreneur goes down with each venture you start regardless of whether it was successful or not. Certainly this is not a statement that applies to all entrepreneurs, but I have heard it used in conjunction with some fairly high-profile meltdowns; that the lessons learned from the failure made the entrepreneur even more valuable in his or her next startup.
So, WHAT is it?
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I have a couple thoughts written down. I’d like to hear from you all first though. Tell me when a person becomes an entrepreneur. Tell me what has to happen for an activity to be entrepreneurial. I know we have some smart, entrepreneurial folks reading this blog so tell me what you think.
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Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey - Wrap-up and Moving Forward
This is follow-up post 3 of 3 to my original survey. In interested, here is the previous recap:
- Survey follow-up 1 of 3 (Review of necessary and supporting qualities)
- Survey follow-up 2 of 3 (The big list of comments)
Continuing my examination of the entrepreneurial survey results, in this post I’ll share changes to the list of entrepreneurial qualities I’ve made based on your feedback, and talk about how to move forward.
Unchanged Qualities
Many of the qualities from the original survey remain unchanged. Whether they got voted as a necessary or supporting quality, they generally were considered a core quality of entrepreneurship. These qualities were:
Communication
Courage
Focus
Hard-working
Initiative
Passion
Positive Attitude
Vision
Charisma
Coachability
Curiosity
Objectivity
Discipline
Faith
Resilience
Changes Made
Based on comments made, I did make some changes to some of the qualities. You made some great comments that really got me thinking in different ways about some of these qualities, so I made the following changes to the list:
Commitment becomes Perseverance
Character becomes Integrity
Creativity becomes Innovation
Flexability becomes Adaptability
Independence becomes Self-Reliance
Additions
Finally, you caught some great qualities that I left off the list, notably:
Comfortable with Risk
Competence
Leadership
Moving Forward
I’ve thought a lot about how to not only take this survey forward, but better ways to represent entrepreneurial qualities.
My tendency usually is to try to distill down long lists into something much shorter. We have a long list of entrepreneurial qualities here and I spent a long time trying to combine qualities and thinking through which maybe shouldn’t be on the list. In the end I decided that all the qualities had merit and instead of trying to reduce them, maybe we just needed a better way to rate them.
The two categories of necessary and supporting ended up feeling kind of arbitrary to me. I gave a lot of thought to a better way to represent the relative importance and have decided that a 10 point rating scale would serve this purpose well. Not only would this give survey responders more flexibility in rating qualities, but aggregate ratings could be averaged for each quality giving us a much better way to identify qualities felt to be more important from those contributing qualities that, while important, might not be as critical. These rankings could also then be used as the basis for an entrepreneurial assessment.
So What’s Next?
I plan on taking all these changes into a new entrepreneurial survey I will run the first thing in the new year, instituting the following changes:
- I’ll use the changed entrepreneurial qualities listed above
- I’ll use a 10 point scale as the basis of quality scoring
- I’d like to limit survey takers to just entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial support personnel
After the survey is completed, I’ll report on the new results and try to come up with a basic entrepreneurial assessment tool. I’d also like to write more articles on the individual qualities and am open to suggestions as to what you would like to see in this area. I think a mix of more “Stories from the Field” showing qualities in action combined with more analytical examinations of each quality is a good mix to start with. I read an article a while back that looked at Courage from an excess/deficit perspective and that might be an series I undertake for all the entrepreneurial qualities.
After the entrepreneurial qualities survey is wrapped up, I’d like to get into the same exercise dedicated to Leadership Traits, the other main topic of discussion planned for this blog. Going forward, I plan on running both an entrepreneurial qualities survey and a leadership traits survey once per year, each. That will let us track trends on the results and hopefully provide you with a basis for your own personal growth or research. I do plan on publishing databases of each survey here on the blog for download.
Thanks again for all the comments and responses. We’ll take the new survey first thing next year.
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“The Idea” or “The Team”
Walking around our incubator last week, I stopped in to talk with a younger employee of one of our tenants. In the middle of our chat, he asked me if I had an opinion on the question of what contributes most to a start-up’s success: the product/service/idea or the team developing it and taking it to market.
For those who know me, I have an opinion on pretty much everything. This one however, was a no-brainer. I think I heard a VC in town say it best:
I rather invest in an “A” team with a “B” product, than a “B” team and an “A” product.
Takeaway
I don’t think this is just a cliche limited to just entrepreneurship. There is a universal truth embedded here. If you are interested in growing your company, making a strategic initiative a success, or undertaking any important program of any size, I suggest you examine the strength of your personnel beforehand, and make sure you give them the tools they need to grow.
When I was in IT we had a similar saying: “Good people can make bad applications a success.” The seeds of success lie in your people, it’s up to you to as leader to make sure they get what they need to grow.
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Thank You Anita
It’s been that kind of week - lot’s of people to thank. That’s a good week in my book.
Yesterday (12/9/08) I was a guest expert on Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends Radio program. The entire process, from working on the topic and questions with Anita, the scheduling and logistics with Staci, and the actual program with my facilitator Steve Rucinski, was nothing but professional. It’s no wonder Anita’s blog is subscribed to by over 220,000 people!
My topic was advice for Manufacturing start-ups. In a half hour, we covered quite a wide range of questions, from what’s changed in the manufacturing space, the three most critical aspects to consider in starting a manufacturing company, to one tip on how manufacturing entrepreneurs are avoiding most start-up costs all together.
If you’d like to read an overview of the show, or listen to a recording of the interview, here are some links:
You can also order transcripts off the Small Business Trends Radio website. It’s acting a bit slow right now, so I can’t get to the transcripts page to see if there is a charge or not.
UPDATE - The transcripts are $10 to cover transcriptions, printing and shipping costs. I didn’t see mine in the list yet, but I would guess it takes a while to get the show transcribed.
I’ll put a plug in for Anita here also. If you haven’t stumbled upon her radio site, then you may want to take a look around. Every week, she has a different small business expert on the show talking on a variety of issues. Looking over some of the most recent and popular shows, I see titles like: Building a Successful Community Giving Program, Using Facebook to Market Your Business, and How to Start a Business with No Money.
So once again - Thank You Anita! I look forward to working together again in the future.
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Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey followup - the Big List of Comments
This is follow-up post 2 of 4 to my original survey. In interested, here is the previous recap:
- Survey follow-up 1 of 4 (Review of necessary and supporting qualities)
It’s hard to believe it’s been a couple weeks since I first wrote on the entrepreneurial qualities survey, but time flies quickly this time of year. In that post, I took a look at the basic results of what got voted as a necessary quality, and shared my thoughts as to whether there were any surprises to be found. Since I also took a quick look at the supporting qualities as well, I don’t really see a need to examine them separately.
So in this post, I thought I’d take a look at the comments that were left to see if there were any good qualities that were missed in the original survey.
This is a moderately lengthy post with a lot of good comments on entrepreneurial qualities. If you don’t have the time right now, you may want to save this post for a bit later. However, I do have one request - towards the end of the post I do ask for your comments on one particular topic. If you have just a couple minutes, I would appreciate you reading the section titled “Humor”, and leaving me a comment on the question I ask. As always, I appreciate your input.
So let’s step through the comments and see what pops up.
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Next Week on Small Business Radio
As anyone who knows me will attest to, self-promotion is not one of my strong suits. So don’t look for this post to be much longer than a couple short sentences. I actually came close to forgetting to post it at all. However, I’m quite excited to have been invited to be a guest expert on Anita Campbell’s Small Business Radio show. Anita is Editor in Chief of a her own little media empire which includes a hugely popular blog and radio program. The best part is she’s right in my backyard, Akron, Ohio. Even better is she’s a darn nice person.
The show is scheduled for next Tuesday, the 9th at 1:30 EST. The headline for the show is:
Our featured guest is, David Crain, Director of Entrepreneurial Services, Magnet. With ever-advancing technology, cheap outsourced labor, and globalized logistics providers it should be easy to startup a manufacturing company. But the challenges have become greater. Manufacturing requires a highly skilled workforce; capital intensive equipment; customers demanding ever-changing products and focus on internal procedures to stay competitive. Dave discusses the challenges, several ways to increase your odds for success and one shortcut many entrepreneurs are using to avoid startup issues all together.
You can listen to the show live via the web, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/smallbiztrends.
And please… no hecklers!
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Are your customers part of your Business Plan?
Sounds like a crazy question, doesn’t it? Well, I’ve been following an online saga over the weekend that makes me think that some entrepreneurs aren’t aware, or don’t care, about this simple premise.
I Want Sandy is an online scheduling and reminder service. Get any kind of information about daily “stuff” (appointments, things to remember, lists, reminders, etc.) into Sandy and she will not only kept track of them, she would send you timely digests and reminders.
The service, nicknamed IWS, was extremely popular in the online scheduling community. Although IWS had a number of competitors, the flexibility with which one could get information into the service was, I’m told, head and shoulders above her competition. Sandy was also integrated into some popular gateway services, like Jott and Google Calendar, making the service even more convenient and woven into the Web 2.0 fabric of (online) life.
So I was surprised when over the weekend I saw a post in one of the tech blogs I follow that I Want Sandy was shutting down. You can read the official announcement from the I Want Sandy CEO Rael Dornfest here. Basically, the IP was acquired by Twitterwith no intent to do anything with in the near future, Rael took a job in Twitter’s User Experience department (after working there as a consultant), and the servers keeping IWS and another of Rael’s services running, will be shut down December 8th.
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Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey followup 1 of 3
As promised, I’ve given some thought to the results generated by the Entrepreneurial Qualities survey I recently ran. I’m going to break my thoughts into four separate posts:
- Thoughts on the qualities voted “necessary”
- Thoughts on the qualities voted “supporting”
- Comments recap
- Where to from here on the topic
The first post is the easy one - a recap on the qualities voted as necessary and my thoughts. If you remember, I defined a quality voted as necessary as one capturing a solid 80% of the total vote. This resulted in the following 11 qualities:
- Commitment
- Communication
- Competence
- Courage
- Focus
- Hard working
- Initiative
- Passion
- Positive attitude
- Responsibility
- Vision
Small surprises
Out of this list, nothing really took me as “out of left field”, although there were a couple that I must admit I was mildly surprised to see voted as necessary; in particular, Communication and Positive Attitude.
On Communication, I’m not surprised to see it identified as a necessary quality, it absolutely is. I guess I was more surprised to see it voted as one. Given the somewhat obvious nature of some of the other qualities it was nice to see this one identified as well. Plus, entrepreneurs don’t always recognize the value of good communications skills.
Positive Attitude was a bit more of a surprise, and another pleasant one. Given all the challenges, demands and setbacks you endure as an entrepreneur, a positive attitude is an important attribute of success. To see it voted as a necessary quality was a bit surprising and an interesting result. Personally, I’m torn as to whether it’s absolutely a necessary quality, but if I look back at how I described necessary qualities (that possessing a preponderance of them could be viewed as greatly increasing your chance of success), then I’m inclined to agree with the survey. Plus, a positive attitude just creates so much good business karma that it truly is indispensable.
Anything missing?
There were a couple of qualities that got voted as supporting that I tend to think of as necessary. Primary among them is Coachability. This is the quality that entrepeneurial support folks like me (and investors by the way) look for to guage how positively the entrepreneur responds to constructive criticism and alternate business models. We’re not looking to see if the entrepreneur will automatically change just because someone challenges them, but rather how positively they respond.
Also, I thought Faith would end up as a necessary quality, kind of like Positive Attitude. I wonder if people thought I meant Faith as in religious faith? What I really meant is just that unshakeable attitude that most serious entrepreneurs I meet have that whatever happens they just know things will work out okay.
The supporting quality that came the closest to being voted as necessary, without getting there, was Discipline. This one makes more sense to me. We see all kinds of undisciplined entrepreneurs, but as long as they have a balance to that nature, be it through Focus, a disciplined partner, or maybe actually being disciplined but just hiding it well by being disorganized, there are many ways to overcome a lack of discipline.
So all in all, I don’t think there were any huge errors of omission for necessary qualities. The only one I may override is Coachability.
Next up - a review of the qualities voted as “supporting”.
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How big do you want to be?
I talk to entrepreneurs virtually every day, in all stages of development and across a wide varieties of sectors. While they are all different, there are many common themes. There are the questions they ask, and there are the challenges they don’t ask about that we see them all face eventually.
Today I thought I’d touch on one of those challenges, which is Growth.
Most of the entrepreneurs I work with and talk to are in either the technology space or the consumer goods space. Since the majority of them are seeking outside investment, their projected financials almost always look like the proverbial “hockey stick”. One aspect of my job is to help them get there.
While multi-million dollar companies look good on paper, many an entrepreneur has come up against some hard choices on the road there. Are you willing to give up a significant share of your company to get the investment you want? Are you willing to tip the work/life balance squarely over to work for an uncertain number of years as you focus on building your company? What will that mean to your family? Can you maintain your values and integrity on the ride up, because they will be challenged? Do you really have the skills, personality and perseverance to grow your company as big as you think you can? Are you willing to step aside to get to where you want to go?
Hard questions that many an entrepreneur has bumped up against and struggled to answer. Similarly, we see struggles on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Not every great idea is a great business. Another aspect of my job is helping entrepreneurs understand this concept. While we sincerely want every entrepreneur we meet with to be a huge success, many simply have ideas that are more in the “lifestyle business” category versus high-growth potential. It is also interesting to watch entrepreneur’s response to this challenge. How do they respond when faced with holes in their business model? What do you really want - a small business you are passionate about or a big business you’re not? Does a setback or two on the road to riches inspire you or cause you to throw in the towel?
I think we can take these lessons easily into a discussion of Personal Excellence and Personal Growth.
How big do “you” want to be? We’ve talked about personal branding a bit on this blog, and implied that your personal brand is, in a sense, your personal business. So how big do you want to be and how prepared are you to face the journey?
If you are trying to grow your brand, have aspirations to be a CEO, published author, famous artist, or start a successful company, how prepared are you to fail? Or at least fall short of your goals? Will you be challenged or will you give up. What if you are successful? Are you prepared for the seductions of power, money and fame? Are your personal values and ethics strong enough that you can stay true to yourself even as your brand takes off?
You’ll have challenges too even if you want to stay small. Even lifestyle business and entrepreneurs grow, and it’s all relative. So what happens when your brand becomes popular enough that you’re working 60 hour weeks and it’s impacting your family life? Can you maintain the quality of your brand in that situation? Do you bring in a partner, potentially growing even more, or do you scale back potentially sending the message you don’t want to be successful?
How big do you want to be?
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Entrepreneurial Qualities survey results
Survey says???
First of all, let me give a hearty “Thank You” for everyone that took the time to participate in this survey. I got some great input, validated some thoughts while having others challenged, and had some fun in the process. What more could you ask for?
So I’ll quickly run through the nature of the responses and my thought process on making sense of them. Then we’ll talk about some obvious conclusions, some not so obvious conclusions and comments left by the respondents. Lastly, my personal comments and where to go from here.