What makes an entrepreneur
People turn into entrepreneurs at different times and for different reasons. Yes, there are entrepreneurs who started out selling sweets to their friends in the playground. But research shows that typically entrepreneurs start their first venture after obtaining business experience elsewhere. Maybe they’ve been made redundant; maybe they are fed up with the current way of doing things and want to try something new; maybe they just want to do their own thing.
However they start, entrepreneurs are people who build profitable business solutions to real-world needs. They’re practical people. Inventors worry late at night in the garden shed over an invention; entrepreneurs are the people who bring ideas out of the garden shed and into reality. Entrepreneurs acknowledge the advantages brought by coaching, support, expert insight and robust, objective advice.
What makes successful entrepreneurship
Successful entrepreneurship isn’t about entrepreneurs acting in isolation. It’s a team activity. Businesses founded by teams grow faster and further than those created by individuals. Ambitious entrepreneurs will not be satisfied just with the act of business creation but will choose growth and will therefore need to invest in organisational design and management process to support this. The biggest constraints on growth in any business is the capability and capacity of the management team, so entrepreneurs need to think seriously about the development of the senior management team as well as the development of the board, recruitment, and then performance management and reward.
Fostering ‘intrapreneurship’
Entrepreneurs aren’t just involved in start-ups. Big businesses interested in keeping their organisations fresh often look at fostering internal sources of entrepreneurship. Such organisations appreciate the need to think afresh about how to structure their approach to entrepreneurship (or ‘intrapreneurship’, as it is often known when applied to an established business) if they are to give it a chance to succeed and prevent it from being stifled by the big business culture.
Where we come in
Our entire careers have been focused on the particular needs of entrepreneurial owner-managers and the businesses they have created. We have long known what too many entrepreneurs and owner-managers only find out the hard way – that most of the insight and advice provided by business advisers is aimed at the big established business, not the fast changing, fast growing entrepreneurial business.
If you want help supporting your business, your team or yourself, that is grounded in a genuine understanding of the entrepreneurial, the owner-managed and the growing we encourage you to give us a call.
