So here is my contribution to Enterprise Week.
DO NOT START UP YOUR OWN BUSINESS – UNLESS YOU HAVE TO.
Not the message that is usually put out, especially by national, regional and local government, but after 25 years of running and supporting small businesses, that is my best advice. Don’t do it – unless you have to. Unless of course you have money to burn.
Because the truth is that small business is a really hard game. You have to provide a great product or service – and one miscalculation, or one bad debt, can put you out of the game and into the bankruptcy courts. Few people succeed in business the first time they try.
It takes resilience, persistence, self confidence and courage.
The chances of success are slim and the levels of commitment and hard work required are, in most cases, enormous.
Your business will almost certainly steal you away from friends and family at least for the first few years, and many successful entrepreneurs talk about how much their business has cost them in terms of their relationships and health, as well as cash.
This is the reality of entrepreneurship that needs to be taught. (Policy makers please take note. If we were this honest about the nature of entrepreneurship we might not get as many people involved in enterprise week – but a far higher percentage that did get involved would go on to be successful entrepreneurs.)
Those that ‘have to’ start a business fall into two very different camps. The first ‘have to’ because they have no other economic option for survival. Enterprise is their ONLY option. It is the only way they can make a living. For those whom enterprise is a forced choice the outcome is rarely great.
The second group ‘have to’ because it is the only way that they can have the freedom to do what they have to do, to be the person that they have to be and provide the products and services that they really have to provide. Enterprise provides them with a way of becoming the person that they feel they have to be. It is about their own identity as a human being.
So the rallying call for enterprise week should be,
‘DO NOT DO IT- UNLESS YOU HAVE TO!
Unless it is the only way for you to become the person that you really want to be’.
And if we invested our energy into helping people to really understand who or what they want to become we might find that all of a sudden ‘enterprise’ starts to look after itself.
Of course for those that ‘have to’ enterprise can be a wonderfully powerful vehicle to achieve remarkable results. I am not anti enterprise – quite the opposite. I just wish we could present it honestly as the double edged sword that it truly is.
Filed under: enterprise, entrepreneurship, operations, outreach, strategy | Tagged: enterprise week, entrepreneurship, truth
Great post, Mike! I think this does need to be said but I’m less convinced that the policy makers and the people holding the purse strings will listen. Like you I’ve given up on going to these Enterprise extravaganzas. I’m tired of hearing the Just So stories and sick of being talked to as if the enterprise professionals were some sort of fairy godmother; they don’t possess a magic wand and they can’t always make things happy ever after. Building a business is a drama not a fairy story. Often it’s a tragedy, occasionally a farce – but it is always damned hard graft and nobody is really fooled by promises of pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. Time to grow up, stop kidding ourselves and tell a different kind of enterprise tale.
Phil
Thanks for that. What are the elements of the different kind of enterprise tale?
For me it would include – becoming unstuck, becoming the person that you want to be, providing products and services to be proud of, creating real value for others based on your own knowledge and skills.
I think it is also worth separating our enterprise from entrepreneurship. I think everyone should be helped to be ‘more enterprising’ but we should only help those that really have the hunger, who ‘have to’ start their own businesses. Those without the hunger/passion/desire should be helped to recognise this needs to be their first focus – working out what they really ‘have to do’ with their lives. Only then might they develop the energy needed to succeed in entrepreneurship. It is not something to be done on a whim.
[...] This kind of approach, when well implemented, results in significantly higher survival rates. These high survival rates soon teach others that it can be done – with passion, commitment, skill and hard work. And although progress on the ‘enterprise agenda’ may initially be slow it will accelerate as the successful entrepreneurs tell their stories and provide local role models. And on the occasion when it goes wrong the entrepreneur won’t blame the enterprise professionals for ‘encouraging’ them. They will recognise that this is down to them pursuing their dream. Not down to ‘us’ using sticks and carrots to manipulate them in pursuit of a funder’s policy goals. [...]
Hi Mike
As such a (derided) policy maker I take your point to a degree, but there’s a big difference between the marketing ‘hooks’ you see to engage people and the responsible service that should make people aware of the risks. On the other side of the coin advisers and coaches are often ignored by entrepreneurs who then end up in a sorry mess.
I don’t think everything in the pre-start/start-up world is rosy but we certainly have a mantra of ‘quality not quantity’,; plus a service that aims to provide options to limit risk and negate it completely when we can.
I’ve seen data from the BETA model recently that shows higher start-up and survival rates in LEGI areas. This kind of undermines most of your theories.
Finally, ‘entrepreneurship’ , running your own business’ and ‘be your own boss’ are used to engage people, mainly because the term enterprise means nothing to them. Engagement in enterprise, enterprise skills and activity is really what much of our support is about. Our independent evaluation shows half our clients say we’ve had a transformative or significant impact on their confidence levels. I think this is a positive, but would like to see it much higher.
Only about 20% of clients we work with go on to serious pre-start and start-up support; almost three quarters of new starts say they without our support they would have started with less or no support. A significant proportion of these would have started anyway – very few say it wasn’t any help to them so…
John
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Firstly many advisers and coaches have a very pro-enterprise stance.
Secondly that pro-enterprise stance continues throughout the journey beyond initial engagement. When did you last share a case study where a would be entrepreneur is fighting to stave off the bailiffs and rescue their marriage?
Thirdly I have witnessed the regional obsession with numbers of start ups. I have not seen survival data published. However where I am closely involved with LEGI and its legacy I know there are casualties. Many face a lingering failure as programmes do what they can to artificiality support businesses by ‘putting work their way’ providing access to finance and providing free publicity. I would anticipate a rise in failure rates once LEGI support is withdrawn (March 2011?). Failure rates after 18 months and 36 months will be interesting to record.
I am not surprised at all that start up and survival rates are higher in super output areas. I KNOW these areas are ‘enterprising’. It is just economists who count VAT registration rates that assume they therefore lack enterprise. I am not clear how this undermines any of my theories…perhaps you could specify the theories that you are referring to?
I would love to see a copy of your independent evaluation. Is it in the public domain?
What do you mean by serious pre-start and start-up support? I think I need to understand more about your model and how it links with the mainstream service providers to make a comment on these numbers. Perhaps if you invite me down.
My take on most LEGIs I have been close to is that they are curates egg – good in parts – but I do worry about their long term legacy -especially where large capital investments have been made in buildings with weak business plans beyond LEGI subsidies.
I am concerned if 3/4 of your clients say they would have started with less of no support. This must raise serious questions about LEGI additionality? Perhaps there is a typo here somewhere?
My interest is not throwing brickbats at LEGI programmes. It is in developing long term and sustainable approaches to promoting enterprise in communities. Again in my opinion the LEGI good times have allowed us to build ‘gold plated’ approaches to enterprise support in some areas that cannot be sustained. DCLG thinking behind LEGI was always about 10 year investments. The failure to deliver on this long term investment will inevitably leave project sustainability compromised.
I look forward to finding out more about your work in Sheffield.
Mike