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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Serie: Practical Guide Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Introducing Entrepreneurship: A Practical Guide reveals the stories of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, distilling the key points into down-to-earth, realistic advice to help you turn any business opportunity into a successful venture – while avoiding the pitfalls of pursuing a pipe dream.
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Seitenzahl: 225
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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About the authors
Alison Price is a Chartered Psychologist and Occupational Psychologist who has coached senior leaders and CEOs in prestigious organizations. As well as being an inspirational keynote speaker, Alison lectures at Kingston University London and comments within the media on motivation and success. She was a semi-finalist in the competition `Britain’s Next Top Coach’.
David Price has spent two decades studying achievement and success. He holds qualifications in coaching, psychology and neurolinguistic programming. He provides advice to entrepreneurs and those starting a business, and has headed a social enterprise that raises funds for charity.
Alison and David are passionate about enabling entrepreneurs to be successful, so get access to free resources at:
www.TheSuccessAgents.com
Authors’ note
This book contains frequently used research and methods. Where we know the source we have been sure to reference it, but our apologies here to the originators of any material if we have overlooked them.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to everybody who has had a dream to build something and has gone for it. Some people lead the way while others follow. If you have a passion for your interests, want to live by your values and are committed to putting in the effort towards building an enterprise to achieve these things, then you are most certainly a leader.
A special thank you to Alison’s sister, Jacqueline Hardt, who not only read and scrutinized the content of this book, but also acted as our roving researcher in the US and interviewed some of the entrepreneurs we feature.
Contents
Introduction
17 March, 2008 was a life-changing day for us. We were on holiday in Australia, sitting on Bondi Beach, away from the all-absorbing treadmill of our day-to-day schedule working in the financial service industry. This enabled us to take a step back and ask ourselves fundamental questions such as, ‘How do we want to spend our waking hours?’ and ‘If we could do anything in life what would it be?’
On Bondi Beach, our dream to start our own business venture was born – working with organizations and individuals to help them to achieve their goals, through the application of psychology, motivational techniques and consultancy advice. You may have had a similar moment in time when you first ‘caught the bug’. We can tell you from experience that it’s a great bug to catch.
That day, we had no idea how things would turn out and we had big doubts, as taking a step into the unknown and working for yourself can be a very daunting prospect. Like any business, we certainly still have room to improve and grow, and we continually put effort into this. However, if while sitting on that beach we could have known all of the amazing things that we would achieve in our first five years – not least writing our fourth book, which you are currently reading – we’d have been absolutely stunned.
If you are at the start of your journey as an entrepreneur you probably have some of the same anxieties we did, but you should also feel very excited by the possibilities that lie ahead. Be inspired by the words of the famous inventor, Thomas Edison:
If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
The purpose of this book is to catalyze you to astound yourself.
Our take on entrepreneurship
A traditional definition of the word ‘entrepreneur’ might go something like this:
Entrepreneur: A person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit
Oxford English Dictionary
However, we see this as a somewhat outdated view. Let us explain why.
Firstly, although many entrepreneurs are aiming to make money, others have a different primary focus – for example, they are dedicated to tackling a worthy cause that is dear to them. Admittedly, someone like the late Anita Roddick, the founder of the successful retail chain The Body Shop, had to earn money to pay the bills. However, through her work she also challenged the cosmetics industry to reduce cruelty to animals through inhumane testing. Being an entrepreneur isn’t always solely about making a profit, and therefore the principles within this book apply more broadly (although you’ll find plenty of tips on how to make money contained in the next 25 chapters!).
Secondly, we subscribe to Richard Branson’s famous quote that entrepreneurship is about turning what excites you in life into capital, so that you can do more of it and move forward with it. We’ve met many people who have successfully turned a long-standing hobby into their livelihood and have lost count of the number of times we’ve heard the phrase, ‘Work doesn’t feel like work.’ The case studies in this book are proof that it is possible to make a good amount of money while doing the things that you love.
Finally, traditional definitions of entrepreneurship often emphasize the element of risk-taking. Clearly, some case studies featured in this book do fit with this school of thought. However, while researching entrepreneurship, particularly among the current generation of entrepreneurs, we’ve commonly found a very different and far less risky approach to starting a new venture. Advances in technology and communication have made it easier to start a venture from the comfort of your armchair with little more than a laptop, internet connection, some spare time and a bucketload of enthusiasm.
Therefore among modern entrepreneurs we’ve found a very common pattern – aspiring entrepreneurs frequently have an idea for a new venture and begin to trade without a formal business plan or a bank loan. Their emphasis is on testing the market with very little risk and minimal financial investment. Using this strategy, they hone their niche, research their target market, and critically, this period of ‘dabbling’ confirms the decision about whether to go ahead or not. The philosophy is very much along the lines of, ‘little to lose, everything to gain.’
Obviously there will always be some risk involved when starting a new venture (particularly if you are relying on it to pay the bills), and you need to be sensible when embarking on this type of journey. However, many people take the view that the job market is so unstable these days that working for yourself can actually be a safer bet. At least entrepreneurs are in control of their own destiny, have the power to make decisions to change the course of their venture and know the truth about how it is performing.
Throughout A Practical Guide to Entrepreneurship, we’ll focus on this alternative, lower risk approach to starting a business or social enterprise. You’ll find it particularly helpful if you are looking to start your own venture, large or small. If that is the position you are in then you are the person that we’ve had in mind as we’ve written this book and we hope that it gives you a short-cut to success.
A blueprint to your success
An important thing to note is that this is a practical guide to entrepreneurship. There are many other books and courses out there that teach you academic and theoretical approaches to starting a business, and you may wish to complement the knowledge gained through this book with information from such sources. However, this guide is deliberately designed so that you can throw the traditional textbook out of the window. Rather than being another book that tells you what you are meant to do, this guide covers what successful entrepreneurs actuallydo in the current day and age. With key points covered in each chapter, we’ll show you simple but effective strategies that are working for entrepreneurs right now, and will help you to apply them yourself.
To help you to achieve your own ambitions, this book is packed with case studies of real people running a wide range of successful ventures, from a music production studio to a bakery to a cricket bat factory. We describe exactly how these ventures got started and how they grew, giving you a blueprint for success.
Some ventures featured as case studies are relatively new and consist of sole traders; some are well established and employ teams of people; others have successfully been sold on for significant sums of money. This variety is designed to ensure that there is a relevant case study to inspire you, whatever your venture, although many of the lessons are applicable across a range of different businesses. By following each entrepreneur’s story throughout the book, you’ll soon notice a number of common themes that can show you how to achieve success. Furthermore, if you know that you want to become an entrepreneur, but are at a loss for precisely what to do, you’ll find lots of ideas to help get you started.
Good luck with your journey – and enjoy it!
We wish you the very best on your entrepreneurship adventure. It will be challenging, but it will also be a hugely rewarding experience. Revisit this book along your journey and re-learn the lessons that our group of entrepreneurs has shared with you. Most of all, do share with us your own success stories, as we would love to hear them.
Alison & David Price [email protected]
1. Why become an entrepreneur?
Everybody else at university talked about getting a job, but I wanted the freedom, challenge, excitement and adventure of having my own business.
Steve Roe, Hoopla
Entrepreneurship is satisfying and addictive. When we interviewed the entrepreneurs (like Steve Roe) for this book we couldn’t help but feel the glow of pride and passion that came from them. They have been rewarded with an exciting journey, achieving what they wanted and more. With hindsight, the benefits (and drawbacks) of being an entrepreneur are clearer. But in the face of uncertainty, before their journey began, what made them take the plunge – and what factors could be tempting you right now?
Key push and pull factors
We’ve interviewed a wide range of entrepreneurs from very diverse backgrounds and industries and have found a surprisingly common answer to this question. Aspiring modern-day entrepreneurs are typically:
1. Fed up with their current existence, feeling:
• Demoralized by a lack of opportunity to progress and achieve their potential.
• Undervalued and underpaid.
• Caught up in the rat race.
• Frustrated by poor management and drained by office politics.
2. Excited by the opportunity to create a better future, where they can:
• Be in control, even in the face of economic uncertainty.
• Anchor work around a personal passion, that doesn’t feel like work.
• Live an existence that is in harmony with personal values.
• Have greater flexibility to work when and how they want.
• Feel that life has real meaning – spending precious time doing something that matters.
• Put a strong technical skillset to better use, working for themselves and therefore reaping all the benefits of their hard work.
3. At a crossroads where they feel that they have nothing to lose by taking the plunge:
• Being made redundant.
• Being made to reapply for a job they don’t actually want.
• Not succeeding at interviews for a new job.
The only sure bet in this world is yourself.
Ryan Prettyman, Radiation Detection Services Inc.
• Which of the above reasons resonate with you?
• Are there any other push and pull factors, specific to your own circumstances?
You can think of push and pull factors as being like a magnet. Once these factors become strong enough, they will force you to move from where you currently are and mobilize you to take action.
Starting the ignition
Using the metaphor of a road journey, you have now found the motivation to get in a car and start the entrepreneurial engine. But what do you do next?
One option is to jump in the car, drive, and see where you end up. This could be fun and might lead you to some amazing discoveries along the way. However, you then risk wasting a lot of time and money and potentially missing out on better opportunities. Worse still, you could end up hating your destination and wishing you’d just stayed at home. In other words, you can end up defeating all of the reasons why you became an entrepreneur in the first place and may find you’re in a worse place than you were before.
For this reason, we advocate beginning with the end in mind, and thinking, ‘What are the ingredients that make for a successful destination?’
What makes a successful destination?
You might equate a great entrepreneurial destination with a black Amex card, five star hotels and a massive home. But before you leap on the bandwagon and try to make millions, just pause for a moment and ask yourself: ‘What is success?’
It’s interesting, in the first instance, to consider what society views as success. If an entrepreneur banked, say $1,000,000 in personal income each year, do you think society would label them as a failure?
But the key question we ask is, ‘At what cost is that so called “success” achieved?’ For some, the toll on health and relationships alone will be immense.
Achievement is certainly an important element of success, and something that aspiring entrepreneurs are hungry for. However, we believe there are two other key factors which are equally worthy of consideration and pursuit, which we advocate you aim to factor in when planning your entrepreneurial venture: Meaning (M) and Positive Emotions (P), which, together with Achievement (A), make up our ‘MAP to Success’TM. So let’s take a look at Meaning and Positive Emotions in more detail.
The ‘MAP to Success’
M – Meaning
There’s no doubt that being an entrepreneur can be an immensely time-consuming experience. So before you go all guns blazing down the entrepreneurship route, you should stop and realize the value of your life, and reflect on the question, ‘What actually matters to me?’
Let’s fast forward to the end of your life. Imagine yourself looking back over everything you’ve done – what would make you say, ‘I did something really valuable with my time?’ It can be quite sobering to think about this, whether you are an entrepreneur or not.
So what drives ‘meaning’? This can be hard to describe and will obviously vary between people, based on personal values. But key ingredients in the ‘meaning’ recipe often include:
• Deep relationships with others.
• Being part of something bigger than you that positively impacts many people.
• Leaving a legacy.
• Being proud of putting your energy and talents towards something really special or important.
• Experiences in life, such as travelling, or doing something new.
One of the best things about being an entrepreneur is that it is a vehicle for greater freedom and choice over how you spend your time. This gives you two viable options for pursuing meaning:
1. Through your work itself
2. Through having greater flexibility with your time, which will enable you to pursue meaning through non-work-related activities
However, there’s a very sober word of wisdom from seasoned entrepreneurs to be heard: don’t fall into the trap (which is very real and catches many people) of being so driven to achieve that you forget what actually matters to you. No one wants to end up like Mr Burns in The Simpsons – cut-throat and rich, but at the same time hated and lonely.
Success to me is not about money or status or fame, it’s about finding a livelihood that brings me joy and self-sufficiency and a sense of contributing to the world.
Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop
Ideally you can find meaning through your choice of entrepreneurial venture itself. However – and this is key – if your work isn’t intrinsically meaningful enough to satisfy the recipe above, work hard to ensure that your entrepreneurial venture is compatible with other avenues in your life where you can find meaning. Always remember to make time for the things that matter in your life – usually your friends, family and health.
Positive emotions
So now let’s look at the third ingredient in our ‘MAP to Success’: positive emotions. Even if you are really achieving in your life and life is very meaningful, what does it mean if you feel miserable, stressed, tired, frustrated, upset – are you really successful?
While it may be unrealistic to aspire to feel positive emotions all of the time, we do think that it is reasonable to aim for your day/week/month/year to be overall net positive. It would be a great outcome if, through your entrepreneurial venture, you can aim to raise your average level of positive emotions.
We also believe that positive emotions on their own are not enough to feel fulfilled. You could sit by a pool in the sunshine reading good books for a time, but after a while it’s likely you’d feel bored and lacking in purpose. The good life needs to be balanced by achievement and meaning in order to actually feel good, factors that can certainly be met in tandem through the vehicle of entrepreneurship.
If you’re happy, that’s probably the most important thing. Everyone probably has their own definition of success, for me it’s happiness. Do I enjoy what I’m doing? Do I enjoy the people I’m with? Do I enjoy my life?
Michael Dell, founder of Dell computers
So what should I aim for?
Through our work in the field we’ve come to discover that fulfillment isn’t a moment in time – a destination – but the experience of enjoying the journey towards a destination that you deem valuable. In other words, through your entrepreneurial venture, you should aim:
To experience positive emotions while achieving milestones linked to meaningful goals.
This is the essence of a successful journey and destination.
Let the journey begin …
In the following chapters we will help you to identify precisely where that destination is (i.e. what your entrepreneurial venture will aim to do) and how to take that journey towards it.
To finish the chapter with a sparkle of inspiration, here’s a case study about one venture that is following the ‘MAP to Success’ and is reaping the rewards for its founders as a result.
Peter Thomond and Richard Raynes, SportInspired (launched 2008)
Peter and Richard met on their first day at university, bonding over a pint of beer after a long day getting acquainted with their new surroundings. As they talked about what had led them to be there together, they discovered a common theme: when they were younger, sport had played a key role in their lives. During times of difficulty at home or at school in their adolescent years, sport (karate and white water kayaking, respectively) had provided them with confidence, discipline and a sense of focus that gave them the strength to overcome that adversity.
Fast forward a decade after that first drink and the pair were still great friends, with Richard working as a teacher and Peter about to go into a leading management consultancy. Then, Richard proposed an idea to Peter based on their shared background: that they attempt to encourage young people in Hackney, London to learn more about sports and get involved with local clubs. It would enable those young people who were disengaged in society and unaware of the opportunities in sport around them to find out what was available, try it out and start to benefit from what sport could give to them.
Richard and Peter reached out to a number of local charities, businesses and sports clubs in Hackney to tell them what they planned. A number of community stakeholders bought in and supported it – the local police even knocked on doors and delivered leaflets to get people to attend! Richard and Peter would go on to create a festival-like environment, with local sports presenting what their clubs offered to local young people.
The event was a success and word of it reached UBS, the Swiss bank. UBS approached Richard and Peter with their own proposal: that as part of the bank’s Corporate Social Responsibility (‘CSR’) and talent development programmes, they would commission Richard and Peter to produce another similar project the following year. Richard and Peter were delighted to find a partner with both the talent and cash to help, and created the SportInspired Community Games.
The success of the Community Games in bringing young people into sport, and engaging corporate sponsors with the community, led to UBS continuing to support the program and referring SportInspired to other businesses with CSR and talent development programs. The subsequent growth in clients coming on board meant that their social project became an enterprise that was a full-time endeavour for Richard and Peter.
So how has this venture tapped into Richard and Peter’s own ‘MAP to Success’?
Meaning: Sport built Richard and Peter’s confidence as children and now they are passing this precious gift on to thousands of young people. They are now planning to expand throughout the UK, focusing on the toughest 10 per cent of communities to help young people improve their confidence and their lives through sport. Richard and Peter’s dream to help disenfranchised young people make the most of their lives through sport is becoming a reality.
Achievement: Within just five years, SportInspired has worked with over 35,000 people. They’ve also been recognized with a variety of awards including one from the Prince of Wales’s charity, Business in the Community. But while awards are nice, their real sense of achievement comes from how many kids they can get into sport and the community-building outcomes they deliver.
Positive emotion: in Peter’s own words …
You know you’re alive when you’re running your own enterprise. It’s scary, things can go wrong, but you are at the locus of control and that is an exciting place to be. The thing is, I’m following my passions, and it’s never a chore.
Peter Thomond, SportInspired
When you are pulled (or pushed) into deciding to become an entrepreneur, in order to be successful you should aim to experience positive emotions while achieving milestones linked to meaningful goals for your venture. If you can do that you’ve got an amazing journey ahead of you.
2. The emotional roller coaster
Success or failure is all down to you.
It’s a roller coaster of a ride.
Andrew Gittins, Proposal Automation
In the last chapter we described the three key ingredients for fulfilment in life as an entrepreneur:
1. Creating a sense of achievement.
2. Using your time meaningfully.
3. Feeling net positive emotion along the way
While this makes a great overall package to aim for – and on balance, your life should be better as a result – it’s also important to go into entrepreneurship with your eyes open. It isn’t always going to be fun and exciting; you need to be prepared for the inevitable roller coaster of highs and lows along the way.
This chapter therefore explores the emotional ups and downs of entrepreneurship and aims to mentally prepare you for the journey ahead, as well as giving you some inspiration for what it is possible to achieve with a lot of hard work!
Richard Stephenson, The Westminster Challenge (launched 2006)
Richard had been fundraising for charity from the age of eight. When he was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in 2005 to raise money for charity he ‘caught the bug’ to become a social entrepreneur – someone who uses his or her entrepreneurial skills to make a positive difference to society or to a worthy cause. He wanted to make the most of his contacts and help charities that were close to his heart.
Richard’s big idea (which would later be known as ‘The Westminster Challenge’) was to run expeditions, where politicians from all political parties, along with senior figureheads from charities, would work on the same team to reach a common goal. This had the dual benefit of raising money for worthy causes while simultaneously building valuable working relationships between charities and politicians.
It took fourteen months of hard graft before the first expedition was launched. This required:
• Sowing the seeds of the idea with potential expedition members and people who could help Richard to realize the vision.
• Recruiting/leading a team of people and a board of Directors to support Richard with the workload.
• Setting up the infrastructure of the venture, for example being legally recognized as a charitable enterprise – which took three attempts.
• Developing a challenging expedition that would grab television and newspaper headlines and attract high-profile names to join in.
• Converting interest in participating in the trek to actual commitment.
• Raising significant support and funding to get the venture off the ground.
All of this was achieved while Richard continued working in his ‘day job’.
After months of hard graft, Richard’s vision was realized, in the form of a husky dog sled trip across 100km of the Arctic Circle, with temperatures falling as low as –38°C, and with the added challenge of building and sleeping in igloos! The final team was comprised of senior figures from the charitable and political world, including Nick Clegg, who went on to become Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister.
Richard and his team of fourteen participants arrived in Finland and were briefed by the professional expedition organization that would lead them across the ice. The team would face life-threatening temperatures, potential death-trap holes in the ice, and needed to be constantly vigilant for local wildlife in an area frequented by bears and packs of wolves.
While it can be very exciting to leave your comfort zone, it is also associated with the emotions of stress, fear, discomfort and self-doubt.
