Small Business Entrepreneur Blog

Funny how you get different perspectives on the same thing. I would like now to comment on an article written by Earl Stringer & Rachel Bishop – Are you an Entrepreneur? I will copy paste the main ideas below and give you my comments:

• Entrepreneurs can be any shape, size, age, race or religion. They do, but always there are at least some business environment factors that alter the entrepreneurship ways. For example, Eastern Europeans are less entrepreneurial than Western Europeans.
• What makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur is commitment, the willingness to lead and the passion to succeed. And money (or the desire of have some)
• Great Focus – True entrepreneurs have great focus. I have to agree, my mentors became successful as entrepreneurs in the moment they discovered something to focus on. They didn’t get that from the beginning but somewhere on their entrepreneurship life they discovered the right direction and they focused on following that path.
• Creative – Most entrepreneurs have a seemingly effortless way of being creative. Creativity and business innovation is what makes companies stand a part and take the lion share on a market. This doesn’t necessarily mean coming with a completely new idea for a product or a service, just getting to do something better and serve a need somewhere in the simplest way possible.
• Good With Money – Being able to keep track and manage money wisely is another well-known characteristic of an entrepreneur. If as an employee you’re probably thinking to buy a new car, buy a vacation or something like this once you got a rise, a real entrepreneur will always think about new investment opportunities or about growing the business. This doesn’t mean that entrepreneurs do not lose money or make mistakes, they do, but they think about money as a resource for even better bigger things.
• Decision Maker – One who can make big decisions on their own without worrying about others opinions. Well, if you are in a decision making position as an employee, you probably got about half of what taking a decision mean to an entrepreneur. First of all, when you are an entrepreneur, chances are that only the most difficult decisions make it to you. Second, because you are not an employee you could take decisions in a different way – an employee will follow the rules, while you might not.
• The Ability To Lead – Most entrepreneurs put themselves in the position of being the boss. No matter if you hire the best managers to control your business, you will still have the lead position. Sometimes people do not expect management decisions from you, the entrepreneur, but expect to be a leader.
• Always Learning – True entrepreneurs never stop learning. I’ve always thought about things and ways to do things as a learning experience for something bigger that sits around the corner. And this way of thinking that there is something else to follow teaches you to learn from anything that happens, good or bad.
• Fearless – Having no fear is definitely a characteristic of a entrepreneur. I completely disagree with this. Fear of failing, fear of risks is what a real entrepreneur feels. Entrepreneurs are not real risk takers, because everything they do is after a calculated thinking. Sure things might work or not, but fear is real, it just matter how you are handling fear.

The original article.

I’m sure you know what an Elevator pitch is. Wikipedia says:

“An elevator pitch (or elevator speech) is an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride (for example, thirty seconds or 100-150 words).

The term is typically used in the context of an entrepreneur pitching an idea to a venture capitalist to receive funding. Venture capitalists often judge the quality of an idea and team on the basis of the quality of its elevator pitch, and will ask entrepreneurs for the elevator pitch to quickly weed out bad ideas.”

To me, an elevator pitch is just like a blind date. You are pitching to a person that you don’t know and met by chance. And just like on a blind date, the first impression counts and it needs to bring you a “second date”.

I’m not what you could say en expert on elevator pitching as here were I live (Eastern Europe), investment and funding happens on a much different way. However, even without knowing it, almost everybody does at least a couple of elevator pitches at family reunions, social or business meeting when you are asked: “So what do you do?”. And you have to come up with a very rapid answer, that is not complicated and explains in a few words what you are doing.

In this environment (family or social meetings) you have to prove yourself that you are worthy and did something with your life. In real cases scenarios when you pitch a potential investor, things are a little complicated: you have to make them give their money to you.

There are plenty of articles on how to make an elevator pitch. I do however think that an elevator pitch is not a “poem you should learn”, but it gets self-crafted over a series of trials and errors pitches during your entrepreneurship life. My 2008 elevator pitch is way different from the one I did 2007. And the 2005 elevator pitch actually makes me laugh.

There are some things you should have in mind when getting out your elevator pitch: what needs do you cover, what’s unique about the way you are fulfilling the need and how much money it will make.

Here is a story about a successful pitch and a video that says things better than I do.

Yesterday I’ve come across Monika Mundell’s 9 Things That Could Ruin Your Entrepreneur Spirit and I couldn’t resist commenting a little bit on the items. If you remember my older post There is something wrong with entrepreneur’s minds – entrepreneurs are able to postpone the accomplishment of their dreams, or even act against them for the final purpose. So it seems that before getting more time, more money and being your own boss, you have to pass through a time where you don’t get time at all, all the money are invested and every customer is your boss.

Anyway, getting back to the Monika’s article, I will copy the “things” here so I can comment them.

• Uncertainty

Entrepreneurship is uncertain business. When you become self employed you don’t know whether your business will take off or not. But if we never try, how do we ever know? This could especially be a problem in the beginning stages. In a young business it is hard to tell whether our ideas will eventually work out.

Correct. Actually I think that if you are an entrepreneur, and even if your business does well, you will always have a degree of uncertainty until the exit day when you can really say it was successful or not. If you are a start-up, chances are that you think that having the first 100k in the bank makes you certain your business is doing great. Until next morning when your competition makes a move and gets your market share. Or until oil prices go up and your fleet is more expensive to run.

• Risk of failure

Most of us are afraid of things, situations or even people. Being in business for yourself won’t change this. Especially when our own capital is involved we tend to get very scared.

I have plenty of articles dealing with entrepreneurship fear of failure. As I actually wrote in this article yesterday, “having previous entrepreneurship experience doesn’t make starting up a new business easier. It actually makes it harder. Not only that you know what went wrong with the previous one, but this time you also have something else to loose that can make you more cautious: money and pride. And if you had a great idea once, it’s really so hard getting a new one that is as good as the last one.”

• Hard work

If somebody ever told you that being an entrepreneur is easy, they were lying. It isn’t easy. What is easy anyway. Picking your nose perhaps. If you want to step into your own entrepreneurial shoes you need to understand that there is hard work involved. Not necessarily hard as in physical, but mental and tiring.

I’ve already wrote that entrepreneurship is hard work. The bad news is that no matter how many employees you have to work for you, entrepreneurship is hard – you can see the reasons in my article – damn, I’m smart

• Long hours

As an entrepreneur myself I work long hours. While some might say; what is the purpose of slaving away from home with the worries about business, if you can work for a boss instead and do half the work, I understand.

Working for yourself means is very hard to draw a line where the workday ends. And even if you get home to your family, an entrepreneurs have a terrible bad time disconnecting from the issues and challenges their business has. It’s almost like an obsession. And being on top of the food-chain means you are the final link in the problem solving process. I mean every problem that doesn’t have a solution – guess what – makes it to you.

• Irregular income

As long as you are prepared and put some pennies aside for the slower times you should be fine. Problems start when entrepreneurs burn all their money, thinking it will just keep flowing. While the thought is one I rather like, nature has shown us that it won’t always work that way.

I’ve said it before. You might not realise before starting up, but getting a $300 raise is far more easy if you are an employee than having to build your business to get $300 more. Funny, isn’t that? And you thought entrepreneurs should have more money than you, the 9 to 5 worker, because they “keep all the profits for themselves”. Wrong. I have an article somewhere about this. Can’t find it right now.

• No benefits

But we don’t get sick pay, holiday pay or even 401k benefits. Life insurance is also another topic to consider, as well as work cover if that exists within your country. Basically any benefits we take for granted as an employee will fall away when we go into business for ourselves.

Yah. You should read this: entrepreneurs can’t quit.

• Marketing

One problem is that hardly anybody is a born marketer. That means we all have to learn and adapt to our industry as an ongoing learning experience. We can’t afford to rest and have to keep our eyes on the ball to stay competitive and in the game.

Hmmm. Don’t know about that, why should be a problem. I’m a marketing professional, probably that’s why.

• Lack of quality time

Ok, this is a biggie. If you have family, pets or friends that are used to seeing you around on birthdays, Xmas and other common holidays, then you might be in for a shock. Sometimes in business we have to keep working when the world parties.

Time? What’s that? I think this is put lightly. Think about weekend work. Think about holiday work. You wouldn’t do that for your employer? Entrepreneurs do that, hoping that sometimes will pay back. And there is no saying if it will ever do.

• Missing funds

Depending on the business you seek to run you will need some major funds (even if you start small). Sometimes those funds are simply not available to us and that could be the first major hurdle to face as a budding entrepreneur.

Well, if at your 9 to 5 work you are probably talking about budget (having or not having budget for something), start-up entrepreneurs talk about having enough money in the bank to pay the bills at the end of the month, or pay the wages.

You might want to read Monika Mundell’s original article, so here it is: 9 Things That Could Ruin Your Entrepreneur Spirit

We have a joke here. “Why Australians never change their boomerang? Because they can’t throw of the old one as it gets back to them”. God knows why we have this joke as we are on the other side of the Earth from Australia.

If you are an entrepreneur and have a business you can always start a new one. But what you can’t get rid of is the entrepreneur-ism. I’ve once said in one of my articles that entrepreneurship is an opportunity enhancement, it doesn’t directly put money into your hands, but it facilitates it. While doing interviews with entrepreneurs on my other blog entrepreneurship-interviews.com I discovered an amazing truth about how entrepreneurship goes in terms of success and failure. If you ask most of the today’s successful entrepreneurs you will soon find out that they went through a series of business flip-ups, failures and missed opportunities before reaching gold. But they got entrepreneurship in their blood, and they couldn’t get rid of it.

Being an opportunity enhancement, even if you fail from time to time, I don’t think you can stop thinking that maybe the next thing will be the next great thing. Still, having previous entrepreneurship experience doesn’t make starting up a new business easier. It actually makes it harder. Not only that you know what went wrong with the previous one, but this time you also have something else to loose that can make you more cautious: money and pride. And if you had a great idea once, it’s really so hard getting a new one that is as good as the last one.

That’s probably one of the differences between a (small) business owner and an entrepreneur. Not all people are looking to develop their business, expand, or start a new one – they run a business that keep them happy and look no further. Entrepreneurs are different. They have the bug, and it’s like a boomerang. They can’t get rid of it, no matter how much they fail or succeed.

Wei Yang accepted to make an interview about EasyAutoSales, Georgia’s fastest growing web 2.0 automotive startup that he thinks it will change the way cars are offered on the web. He Co-founded EasyAutoSales.com, together with some local entrepreneurs and started with no outside investments. The site launched its beta in March and garnered a million cars within just one month.

Here is the interview.