Mastering the New Entrepreneurship
The barriers to entrepreneurship
are crumbling, and every six months, technology makes starting a business
easier and easier.
As a result, entrepreneurship
has become more appealing to a wider range of people. If you measure success in
terms of personal growth and flexible work, their success rate is sky high.
Here’s a list of the old and new
ways of thinking when it comes to starting your own business:
Old:
Entrepreneurs are born with a specific set of character traits.
New:
Entrepreneurship is learned.
There is no single way to be an entrepreneur, according to
research by Saras Sarasvathy of the University of Virginia Darden
School of Business. There are actually many different types of personalities
that can succeed because there are so many different ways to structure a
business.
The key is to pick a business
that plays to your personality traits. For example, someone who has lots of
charisma and leadership skill, but little interest in day-to-day details,
should probably run a larger company than someone who’s capable of doing all
the dirty work required for a one-man show.
Old: Raise
money and spend a lot of it on advertising.
New: Raise no money and spend no money on advertising.
The viral efficiencies of Web
2.0 make today’s Internet very effective for spreading good ideas quickly. You
can think of an idea and test it right away, and if you get traffic to your
site the idea is good. If there’s no traffic, that’s not a sign to spend money
on advertising, it’s a sign that you don’t have a good idea.
Reddit, for example, was started by two twenty-somethings
who emailed their friends and invited them to use their new online tool. Their
friends liked Reddit and passed the email on to their own email lists. No
advertising budget whatsoever was required, and two years later Conde Nast
acquired Reddit.
Old: Women
will get power in corporate America and change it.
New: Women
are getting what they want by leaving corporate America to start their own businesses.
While a steady stream of press
releases touts the increasing flexibility of corporate jobs, it isn’t happening
in practice. But instead of pounding their fists against the doors of corporate
human resources departments, women have put their energy toward growing their
own businesses.
More businesses are started
today by women than by men, and most of the sole proprietorship businesses are
run by women. This tells us that women have won the fight for flexible jobs by
creating them for themselves.
Old: The
self-employed are happy because they’re doing what they love.
New: The
self-employed are happy because they have control over their work and they have
a flexible lifestyle.
The idea that you need to do
what you love is more of a platitude than solid career advice. Instead, the
best advice might be to do what fits your life best, and create a life that you
love.
Rebecca Ryan, CEO of Next Generation Consulting, writes
about how instead of living to work, people today are working to live. In this
context, self-employment is a very effective way to create a life you want.
Old: Climb
the corporate ladder, learn the ropes, then start a company.
New: Start a
company to get out of climbing the corporate ladder.
Learning the ropes at a big
company is sometimes slow going. You often only learn what your own department
does, and if you have a really bad job, you only learn what your department
does from the perspective of the copy machine. This is no way to learn about
business.
The fastest way to learn about
business is to try it. And since there’s very little cost to starting an
Internet business, you can try one, fail, and start another, and another, as a
way to teach yourself about business.
Eventually something will stick,
and even if it doesn’t, you’ll probably get enough experience to skip the
drudgery of the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder.
Old:
Entrepreneurship is all or nothing.
New: You can
test the waters by starting a company while you have a corporate job.
Setting up shop online is a
matter of using your mouse and clicking on the kind of features you want in
your store. And there are new ways to do business online that didn’t exist even
two years ago. For example, you can buy and sell web sites on 24-hour message
boards, and you can set up an arbitrage business around buying and selling web
traffic.
Many new types of businesses are
ideal for pairing with a career you already have. Marci Alboher
wrote a handbook for starting this kind of life: "One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success."
Old: Starting
a business is risky.
New: Staying
in corporate life is risky.
Most businesses succeed, most jobs end. The statistics
about most companies failing assume that most entrepreneurs want to run the
next Microsoft. In fact, most people don’t. They just want a flexible, fun,
rewarding job.
In that respect, if a company
provides fun, flexible work for even a short period of time, you can say it’s a
success even if it fails soon after.
Old: Do a lot
of planning and make sure it’s going to work before you start.
New: Forget
the big plan — just try it.
If it doesn’t work, just try
again. This is not true for, say, starting a restaurant, but for a company with
little cash outlay there’s little risk to running without a set plan.
