Bad Entrepreneur

Being an entrepreneur is far more lonely than many people think it is.

I was reading a post on a blog recently where the blogger / entrepreneur was commenting how she had gone into business for herself and when she had kicked off, all her friends commented that they would be there to support her and thought she had a cracking idea.

Nine months down the line, not one of those friends had supported her business in any way, shape or form and she is finding out that actions (or lack there of) speaks much louder words.

One of things I am seeing quite a lot of is less talk about My start-up and more talk about working together to build ventures of decent size and scale.

There is an important lesson to be learnt here – building a business is very difficult to do on your own. Sure it is great to read how Richard Branson built Virgin or Mark Shuttleworth built Thawte, but you need to remember that while they might have been the driving force behind the businesses, much of it came from surrounding themselves with good people who had a dream to build something.

100% of a R100k business is not as impressive as 10% of R100m business and I’m pretty sure I know which one I would rather have.

My point is that while it would be great to take all the glory in YOUR business there might be a bit more value in collaborating with others and building something decent.

Locally, think of guys like the Letschert (Union-Swiss) and Levy (Blue Label Telecomms) brothers and you will see what I mean that you don’t always have to do it on your own.

It also helps to be able to draw on other peoples skills and contact bases when you are running a small business. How many people do you know and how much benefit could you draw from a few well-connected friends? (and no I don’t exactly mean in the same way that Jacob Zuma’s relatives have “benefited” from their connections!)

I remember doing a presentation to the guys at Wimpy once and I realised about 48 hours before we had to present that I was totally out of my depth and didn’t know how to package it. I was fortunate in that I had a mate who specialised in doing these kind of presentations and with next to no notice, he was able to pull together something that was way more professional than I could have done.

Even today it was re-inforced for me how valuable collaboration is. I approached my developer with a suggestion for a new project and I had been budgetting for development work to be done. The guy liked the concept and came back to me suggesting we go in as partners on it.

Suddenly we have two sets of arms, ears, eyes and legs trying to develop something that has the capacity to be really funky. That is a helluva lot more energy than one person trying to develop something as a sideline.

Throw in the fact that he is based in Cape Town and I am Gauteng and suddenly we are represented in two geographies without having to stretch one person thin on the ground.

I know that a lot of the social media tools have created this idea of superstar entrepreneurs but the reality is that a lot of small business successes come on the back of teamwork, not individuals.

You will have plenty of time to work on your books about your entrepreneurial brilliance down the line when you’ve actually built something that works, but maybe the focus upfront should be on working together to build something tangible as part of a team.

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