• Not all entrepreneurs are these amazing inspirational people. Some people are entrepreneurs because they cannot get a regular job, or they can’t stick with one. I went into it with this idealized view of people who chose the independent route, not realizing that many are there because they have no other choice, and many are totally not inspirational at all. Also, a lot of entrepreneurs idolize large companies, rather than seeing small enterprises as the best.
• Employees will never care about your business as much as you do. No matter how good someone is in interviews or discussions about a job, they will never be as invested. I realized that it is much better to work with complimentary and equal people, rather than having a full-time employee.
• It is not impossible to do business with friends and family, but it can complicate the relationship. Although it is fun to work with friends at first, it can be challenging as well in terms of maintaining the friend-side of that relationship.
• As an entrepreneur, you have a lot of freedom, but you also have a lack of security. Even accounts that seem rock-solid for years can change with no warning. It is important to keep your eyes open at all times for new opportunities in case this happens.
• The vast majority of business owners in Canada are white men. If you are thinking of entrepreneurship as a way to change the status quo in terms of our established social hierarchy, it is not that easy.
• Finally, always get payment up-front with new clients! If they are too cheap to pay up-front, you never know if you will get payment later.

So – as you can probably gather, some of these lessons were difficult, YET, I still want to be an entrepreneur. Especially now that my son is born, being a work-from-home person gives me opportunity to be “out there” doing cool stuff, but also, I have time to be with my son as much as possible.

For my next steps, I think I will continue consulting, but mix in other opportunities, such as teaching, developing iPad apps and building a non-profit or a think tank. I want to give back to the world more, and that what is there now is still not enough. Onward we go!

I don’t wake up every morning with a great feeling–I explained in the previous post–mood swings are wide and frequent. No matter the mood, I now know the meaning of passion. It’s innate; you have to have it to continue. You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to experience passion–people are often passionate about their hobbies. However, if you experience passion through your work, you achieve a different level of envelopment; you get to do something you truly believe in and have it be a focal point for you every single day. If that zest ever loses its luster, then its time to move on, but at least you’ll know what it is.

This is counter to how some see the poor -  people who do not want to work. Others see the poor as victims of the flaws or inequality in the system – that the poor are especially powerless to change. The approach is then to pump more money into the system to give the poor a chance. Essentially, there are two options – either you go to work for someone or you accept hand-outs. Yunus is putting forward a third option – being self-employed.

In Micro credit programs undertaken in the US for example, Yunus said that there was disincentive to become entrepreneurs from the government in the form of reduction in welfare payments and other welfare benefits. He also says the administrative burden of businesses in the West is high, making it difficult for non-professional to start businesses. Any entrepreneurship programs that do exist, are based on training which he thinks is not necessary

In Canada in particular, I find there is a general distrust of business, and people with conscience want to stay away. He makes an interesting point:

I am not a capitalist in the simplistic left/right sense. But I do believe in the power of the global free-market economy and in using capitalist tools. I believe in the power of the free market and the power of capital in the marketplace. I also believe that providing unemployment benefits is not the best way to address poverty. The able-bodied poor don’t want or need charity. The dole only increases their misery, robs them of incentive and, more important, of self-respect.*

He continues on a justification of using private-sector means to help the poor:

We can condemn the private sector for all its mistakes, but we cannot justify why we ourselves are not trying to change things, not trying to make things better by participating in the economy. The private sector, unlike the government, is open to everyone, even those not interested in making a profit.

The challenge I set before anyone who condemns the private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?

I agree with his point. The government is very hierarchical and naturally authoritative, where as entrepreneurship is free and creative.

I am proposing two changes to this basic feature of capitalism. The first change relates to this overblown image of the capitalist entrepreneur. To me, an entrepreneur is not an especially gifted person. I rather take the reverse view. I believe that all human beings are potential entrepreneurs. Some of us get the opportunity to express this talent, but many of us never get the chance because we were made to imagine that an entrepreneur is someone enormously gifted and different from ourselves.

If all of us started to view every single human being, even the barefooted one begging in the street as a potential entrepreneur, man or woman to explore his or her economic potential, the old wall between entrepreneurs and laborers would disappear. It would become a matter of personal choice whether an individual wanted to become an entrepreneur or a wage earner.

Who would have thought… an almost Marxist justification of entrepreneurship. I obviously don’t think that Micro credit and entrepreneurship are the catch-all solutions to global poverty. The political issues such as corruption and wars, environmental issues and system, race and gender inequalities still exist and contribute to the problem. But I find Yunus’s approach a refreshing contribution to solving the poverty problem.

*All references are from pages 205-207 of Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus. 

The craving is to continue without structure and keep on finding whichever kind of business I want like a stream of consciousness – but structure is what makes the business tangible. When you think about it, a business is a figment of the imagination… a creative act. I know that the business culture tries to make it solid and stable seeming… but I think that is just a shared illusion enacted to attract investors. A business, unlike a work of art or writing doesn’t take a single form. You can’t quantify it into your product, your store or yourself. It is more than all of these things. Which is one reason why businesses are so hard to value.

So – the plan is the way to give the business shape. And – of course, choosing not to have a shape also creates something… a business shaped by random forces instead of by the hand of a designer. So – in the coming weeks, more blogging… more planning… and hopefully more sleeping .

I actually have been in business for two months, but I have been so busy with customers that I haven’t had time to focus on branding – which is a great problem to have. Thanks to my two best friends from highschool for creating my logo and my name .

So few Canadian entrepreneurs are brave enough to do business state-side, let alone around the globe, and I think that Greg should be credited for his boldness to take risks. He also kept his business private and kept the head office in Canada, giving a lot of us rare opportunities to work on international business. Much of Canadian marketing is simply implementing programs designed by the head office, either in the US or elsewhere. With Securit and Shred-it, my colleagues and I had the chance to strategize, build and execute international programs from scratch.

I put his logo on my post because in my time in his Marketing department, he was always critiquing every design, whether it be a truck or a website, for having the logo be too small. The result of course was huge logos everywhere. I also remember standing out in a cold February parking lot debating over truck designs – people shouting out their opinions over the wind.

My thoughts are with the Brophy family on this sad week.

Gerry was a realist – admitting that he worried about the risks that took and about the mistakes that he made. He also mentioned that when assessing a risk, he spent much more of his time weighing the potential pitfalls in the risk, rather than the potential upside, which I found to be very good advice for an entrepreneur.

Perhaps since Heather and Gerry are married, a questioner at the end of the interview said something to the effect that "behind every great man is a great woman", to which Gerry replied:

I don’t think that is true. Some entrepreneurs are single. Some are homosexual. Some are women themselves. But, I will tell you about how great it is to have a partner.

I thought this was a wonderful response, because Gerry as an older, straight man could have taken the traditional route and waxed poetic about his wife and her supporting role in his life. Although his statement did not reflect the reality and questioning the fairness that a woman is ‘behind’ a man, I thought that his answer was a great step in the right direction.

I read this great story in the book How She Does It and thought it was inspirational for entrepreneurs. It is a story about entrepreneur Andre Guglielmo who was raised by deaf-mute grandparents and upon seeing the high unemployment rate in the deaf community (80%) she decided to start the marketing company Diversity Partners. It ended up to be the first for-profit corporation in America for people with disabilities. Here is the story* of  her first deal:

In 1996, I got a meeting with American Express, and I knew nothing about walking into corporate America. And I went into my closet: No business clothes. And I had a babysitter coming and you know what that’s like – of course, the babysitter never showed up. So I got myself together in a mismatching outfit with a two-year-old in tow. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life. Ten men, with a two-year-old, wearing not exactly a New York City business outfit.

My two-year-old was going in and out of the table until this one man put the two-year-old in his lap and gave him a yellow pad; the kid scribbled through the rest of my presentation. If I met that man today, I’d buy him a steak dinner. I was able to get the first big sale for my company. It was for $20,000 worth of mouse pads. I didn’t even know what a mouse pad was and kept wondering why Amex had such trouble with mice. But I just said yes. I’d figure it out. Nowadays we get sales of $2 million, but that one was so important.

*P 134-135 How She Does it | Margaret Heffernan

Now, I am starting a Web Marketing consultancy called Convert Marketing which focuses on strategically using Web Marketing in a number of creative ways.  More information will follow as I build it (it will be a week or so). I am really excited about this new independent life.

To get inspiration, I am reading an excellent book right now called How She Does It by five-time CEO Margaret Heffernan. It is about the rise of women entrepreneurs. Between 1997 and 2006, privately held businesses owned by women grew at three times the rate of all American privately held firms. The book explores why so many women are starting their own companies. I find this comparison to immigrants fitting:

Women starting new businesses have something to prove. They may need to prove to themselves that the companies that undervalued them in the past were wrong. They may need to prove their idea is right or that they really can repay a personal loan. They may need to prove that their values, their instincts, and their natural ways of working are just as good and just as effective. It may be all those things. Such women have a lot of psychic skin in the game. In this respect, women entrepreneurs remind me of a new wave of immigrants: driven out of a land they found hostile, taking big risks in their determination to create a New World where they can succeed on their own terms. America was built by such pioneers and, today, its economy continues to be enriched by the fresh thinking of women who don’t accept defeat. *

Heffernan follows hundreds of female entrepreneurs and comments on their stories. Interestingly, when women start companies they tend to hire for diversity, unlike men:

Perhaps the greatest test of all of whether a culture is fair or not can be shown in its hiring. Men’s companies hire predominantly men. Women’ s businesses hire men and women equally. The same applies to their boards of directors: Women appoint men equally, while men favor themselves at a rate of three to one. This may be because, having been on the receiving end of discriminatory hiring, women are determined to not repeat the mistake. **

So – more women-owned companies are better for all women! Hopefully mine will be too. To the New World I go .

*Pg 10-11 of this edition
**Pg 80

Instead of taking the passive approach, the entrepreneur started up shop as an outsourced admin assistant for small companies. She leverages technology to take care of the administrative needs on an ad-hoc basis for her clients, allowing them to free up their time for their business. She has a network of different administrators who take on specialized jobs such as Legal and Shorthand (yes, people still record meetings in this way).

The idea of a nomadic network of Admin Assistants is appealing to me. Everyone in her network was laid off, downsized or fed-up with their bosses. Instead of getting disheartened, they got to use their skills while working for themselves.

Another one of my writers is a Roving VP of Marketing, where people engage her to guide junior staff through marketing projects or they outsource the whole function to her. She is a veteran of the ad industry who never wants employees again – instead she has a network of creative professionals who she engages on an ad-hoc basis.

It is like people in the film industry who come together for contracts, then they break apart until the next project begins. This is a different approach from the idea of steady employment with one company. As a Marketing Manager, I find that most of my jobs involve a number of different vendors who we engage for the project to work together for a few months, then they break apart. My friend does telephone sales this way for a company that sells the services of a virtual network of consultants.

So – perhaps we are witnessing the end of a the traditional company as we know it. Instead of representing one company, professionals will all be part of various networks using our skills – allowing us the flexibility to take time off or to work more during time that we want to make more money.

During my MBA, we had an older professor who was pretty much cruising to the end of his tenure. Many of his cases were hopelessly out of date. One of them was about finding more efficiencies in a factory… I could see the eyes rolling. Now everything is just outsourced abroad to find the cheapest factors of production. Only one person in my class that I can think of was involved in production of any kind – which is a major shift from 10-years ago when my professor first started teaching this dusty case. We all discussed it, but with much less gusto than our normal debates. I wonder if some day in the future, the thought of a centralized organization will seem just as dated.