Blog, Entrepreneurial Mindset

The entrepreneur mindset

What is the secret of being an entrepreneur and how can anyone be an amazing one?

There are some very important pointers that suggest than entrepreneurial leaders are made, not born. These are people who are open to new opportunities and develop themselves into entrepreneurs, no one else can do it for them.  Entrepreneurship cannot be learnt, only practiced.

The development of the mindset may occur at various stages in life. Through research the main periods of a person’s life, normally while some form of transition is occurring when a person propensity to accepting risk is heightened. Statistically this occurs during adolescence, after completing education, after divorce, after redundancy and also after retirement.

However, growing up in a cultural environment where business owners and leaders are the norm and have the respect of their community is also very very important aspect which ensures the individual understands the importance of the role. In Britain today we still like to demonize entrepreneurs, Dragon’s and hard nose bosses in the Apprentice, to just name two popular culture. We only see businesses on the new when they are doing badly.

So once we understand that starting a business is normal and something which is good for society, the health of the economy and also creates more wealth for the country than any other occupation, we can move forward.

The second group of factors are funding, people and know-how. Mastering these leads to amazing success and there are some lessons to be learnt from others.  For those starting their first business, bootstrapping is the key, use only what you have and what you do not have, either find cheaper, more entrepreneurial way of getting it, or just do without. This attitude is one we can see if many famous entrepreneurs, like Theo Paphitis who uses his children’s inheritance to show how he does not like wasting money.

Managing other people is one of the major problems for the entrepreneur, other people rarely have the passion, commitment or single-minded dedication to the business that they have. These people require management, appraisals and paying in set intervals, based purely on some dates in a calendar and not on effort, output or more importantly the profit they created. The benefits of having people who can multiple your talents is endless, once you have mastered managing them.

The skills required to be an entrepreneur is vast, accountant, sales director, marketing guru, logistics expert, health and safety specialist, taxation consultant, operations manager and HR administrator. However, each challenge provides opportunities to learn new skills, develop the business further and ensure than any new opportunities that lie behind these tasks are fully utilized.

Entrepreneur know how can be learnt, development and tuned whilst still in education or other employment.  You can start a part time business, join a society or group, volunteering, or just researching on youtube/TED and the many other sites which have great content. 

It is this attitude to risk or failure that allows the opportunistic mindset of the entrepreneur to find out and develop new businesses. Failure is the opportunity to truly learn what it is like to be an entrepreneur. Sergey Brin , Larry Page  and Mark Zuckerberg are not entrepreneurs, they are business owners who largely have only one very small (yet highly valued) experience of business. This development of an active and dynamic knowledge of risk is what will ensure your success and the success of the country you live in.

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Not invented here!

Entrepreneurs are brilliant at looking at a problem and adding resources from various areas to create a solution. They don’t care where it was created and even who owns it, they just know they have a problem to solve. After reading the news papers this week, I see that Google has purchased Motorola for its patents and in another article, independent games developers are being sued by patent holders for providing in game links to buy more of their games. Entrepreneurs and software developers need the space to create new revenue models and opportunities, using everything that could possibly be available. Especially in a recession!

Many academics are the opposite, if there is a problem they must own this problem and solve it in pure independence, leading to potent disregard for other solutions. This has led to organisations that have not changed their business model, their internal structure or the products they provide, in cases for almost a thousand years. The opportunity to innovate this education industry is so much over due that new businesses are moving fast into the sector to take on these paralysed educators.

Again, this week in the papers the University of Buckingham achieves one of the best results in student satisfaction. This university is a private one, not government funded. It has a flexible four inductions per year, four ten week semesters, two and three year degrees and career focused courses which clearly its students love. This focus on customer satisfaction has made it look around the industry to find what works and how could we make it better.  It’s a good job that Oxford and Cambridge didn’t patent the courses they started almost a thousand years ago.

I am very interested in how industry sectors re-invent themselves, especially when faced with challenges based around an evolving business model or new technology. Within education, the use of remote course access and e-learning is the clear advance which will occur in the coming decade. We have seen the first generation, which as always is, take what you do and just make it digital. Now this hasn’t worked, filming a one hour lecture was never a good idea and only shows the lack of interaction certain tutors allow. However, we can start to see some amazing developments, using mixed media, learning styles and combinations of self and organised learning timetables being offered.

The business model will also change with more internationally franchised course offerings and introduction of loyalty price reductions (Foundation, Degree, Master, Doctorate), discount pricing strategies through enterprise or other types of engagement and sponsored places which just taken off with the introduction of higher fees. Universities will also start to develop less capital-intensive infra-structures and lower salary overheads. This will ensure a business model that is centred on a variable cost per student and not a fixed campus cost.

Only one thing in business should be assumed and that is things are always changing, this ensures the fittest are able to move with the market, developing new ways of surviving problems that their industry is presented. This is why Motorola was purchased, Nokia have moved to Second division and teamed with Microsoft. We will see how our university brands are able to adapt to our new world order, business model and delivery mechanism.

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Entrepreneurial Summer Holidays

The Summer holidays for students are a great time to just sit in the sun and dream away the long hot summer days, enjoying their youth, a care free spirit and the lack of real responsibility in a modern digital debt laden society.

Or are they?

The first thing I will say is that they should be, those endless summers created some of the best literature, greatest relationships and most inspirational events this great country has to offer. There is no better place to be on a true summers day that in the English countryside. (Sitting on a packed train, in the rain)

So lets get back to the 21st century.

Most students have around three months off (around 25% of the year), so they should plan what to do as most parents don’t like such long periods of parental supervision thrusted upon them after having recently finding their freedom.

The answer to the long summer break has always been to gain experience: Life, Work, Places, Travel, Opportunities, Skills, Extra Learning and Revenue. So you need to think about how to do this entrepreneurially.

So going out and getting a job during the summer basically means three choices, paid casual work e.g. Bar, Internship e.g. major corporates or run your own business.

How do you ensure you get real benefit of working in some casual job? The answer is to think outside the box, how about working in a bar in Goa, help the owner to double their revenue during the summer,.. just make it different, make it fun and ensure you get some great contacts and references.

There are loads of Internships and one of the best websites to get you started is www.Enternships.com. Here they have jobs in many sectors in various locations, which you can apply for. What is interested is the length of time you can spend in some businesses, so over the summer you could work in 3 or 4 companies gaining a vast amount of experience in a particular industry sector. This is very valuable for your CV and also in deciding what you want to do for a permanent role.

I meet a lot of students who run businesses and the summer provides the opportunity to increase their income from a part to a full time amount. It also allows them to take the business to the next stage and ensure they are in good shape for the following years studies. The balancing act of studying for a degree and running a business can be difficult, however, some students have turnover of between 20,000 to 200,000 per year. Its about time management and focus.

The summer is a great opportunity to revisit your entrepreneurial side and think how can I make a real difference to my life.

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Entrepreneur E-Learning

Over the last two weeks I have been developing a new online service for Entrepreneurs, an eLearning site providing courses in Sales, Marketing and how to start a Business. Further course are planned in the Autumn 2011.

Entrepreneurs are amazing people, yet have certain traits that make them hard to work with. First of all they are time limited, by the very nature of starting a business and also very geographically diverse. Secondly, they tend to have very little money and I feel wrong in taking too much money from people who should be investing in their businesses. Thirdly, they tend to learn in different ways.

So we have designed these courses to fit their entrepreneurial needs…

The design of the courses ensures the pace of the course is dictated by the entrepreneur. The can take as long as they desire and also review, redevelop and re-understand the course element in the context of their business.

The core cost of running course is training, venues and organizing everyone and everything to be at the right location at the right time. ELearning allows us to have the course starting any time and always open. The entrepreneur also does not have to travel and therefore has more time to spend on their business.

One aspect we do lose with online course is the loss of the real face-to-face networking which is so important when learning, knowing there are others who have the same problems. This we will fix using LinkedIn.

One important lesson which the internet is very aware of, if content is free it has no value. Everything known to mankind is available on the internet, however it’s the application of knowledge is where value lies. As an entrepreneurs we understand this. The courses develop knowledge through the application of this knowledge, in an entrepreneurial way.

For many years I have know that there are three type of learning styles (Fleming’s VAK/VARK) model:

  1. Visual
  2. Auditory
  3. Kinesthetic or Tactile

Kinaesthetic learning is a learning style in which learning takes place by the entrepreneur actually carrying out a physical activity. This means we have incorporated an element of developing their business in every course.

These courses are now in beta release and having our first set of beta-entrepreneurs from UK Universities through and if you would like to join then please email me.

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Apprentice: G is for Growth

In the last week I have read about three European G-countries, Germany, Greece and Great Britain and thought how would they do f they were teams on the Apprentice. These are three very different countries within the European Union having three very different experiences with the current economic opportunities. So lets have a bit of fun during this blog, and it’s just that.

So picture this: The third teams are lined up and told they have taken over a small business and this business needs to start growing by increasing their sales and revenue. The target is €7bn.

The teams then go off, brain storm, SWOT analysis and then run around phoning each other,..etc etc until they have to pitch.

The first to pitch to the customer is Great Britain, they first take the client sight seeing and act out some poetry by one of the worlds most famous authors. They show the customer around the birthplace of the author and create one of the best relationships with the client. Then it pitch time with the Project Manger takes centre stage, who then went on to tell the client how to do business, about business ethics and what is wrong with the client’s shop. The client provided €1.6bn in sales. These sales are good, but will not help the project manager develop the growth required in the business in the short term.

The second to pitch along the European high street is Germany and again did a little sight seeing but lower key. The pitch from the project manager is very powerful and business like, this time after some exchange of ideas and a common approach to long term development did €10.3bn in sales. This has placed this team on one of the best growth paths of any business and a sure winner. You would expect no one in this team to be going home this week.

The third country Greece is currently closed for business did not receive the customer. The project manager had a team meeting to agree to receive €270bn in investment without providing any equity. They also reduced the wages of everyone in the team, agreed to sell some assets and decided to make the other teams pay part of their earnings to them over the next 30 years. The customer is current looking at this team as an equity investment opportunity, when the team is ready to do business.

Then we move back into the boardroom to receive the feedback from the customer. Germany will be a long-term partner, customer and investment opportunity. Greece has developed an innovated yet unorthodox approach to business, however the customer believes there are long term opportunities. Then we come to Great Britain, the customer did not like their approach to business and thus the low sales, the pitch was heavy handed and the customer did not see a long term business future. Someone in this team will be out this week, the Project Manager has to decide who will be coming in with them to answer why this task went wrong.

In the words of Lord Alan “And then one of you will be going home.”

Talking About Entrepreneurship