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After many years as a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, and an investor is a few, I seem to hear the same qualms and stereotypes more often in these times of rapid business change and global competition. In my opinion, now is the time to run after the huge new opportunities out there, rather than worry about all the risks, and never start. Yet I still recommend practicing discipline in all your actions.
Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to learn to avoid the pitfalls of being an entrepreneur and learn the discipline required. You can do this by taking advantage of university courses now available, joining a startup accelerator such as Y Combinator, networking with peers, investor groups, and startup mentors.
One of the first challenges is to get over the common myths of entrepreneurship I recently saw debunked in the newly expanded and updated book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup,” by Bill Aulet. Bill is an experienced entrepreneur, and he is now also the Ethernet Inventors Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
I like his summary of ten common myths about entrepreneurship that must go, and I paraphrase them for you here, with my own insights added:
1. Entrepreneurship is all about a driven individual. The truth is building a new business has always been a team sport, and that fact gets truer every day as the world gets more complex. Multiple complimentary partners and a smart team always increases the success odds, since a single individual rarely has the range of skills and bandwidth to succeed, no matter how driven.
2. Founders must have special charisma to succeed. While charisma may be helpful in the beginning, it is difficult to sustain, and may become counterproductive. The best founders concentrate on producing real value for qualified customers. The most important skills include communication, recruiting, and selling the value proposition to all constituents.
3. Entrepreneurs are born ready and don’t need training. Creating and growing a business requires many skills, including problem solving, legal contracts, operations, and finance. None of these are inherent in any genes we are born with. Research also shows the more times people start companies, the more likely they are to be successful in the end.
4. Business founders are smarter than the rest of us. A high level of general intelligence is always helpful, but continual focus and obsession for becoming an expert in your innovative business solution is the key to success. Their determination is to solve a customer problem better than anyone else and learning everything they need to know.
5. You have to love taking risk to be an entrepreneur. What great entrepreneurs learn is how to detect intelligent and informed risk. This is where they have some knowledge and some advantage, where the risk-reward ratio indicates it is rational to pursue a given opportunity. They understand there is no place in business today where there is no risk.
6. Great entrepreneurs are just the lucky ones. Real entrepreneurs make their own luck by working smart and hard, never giving up, and learning from their own failures. They also seek out mentors, and study the tactics of successful business leaders before them. They are always able to balance their passion for a new solution against real market forces.
7. Successful entrepreneurs must come up with a novel idea. An innovative idea is necessary to catalyze a team into action, but more important is executing effectively on a viable idea and evolving it over time with real customers. Ideas that are extremely novel carry the highest risk of failure due to long and expensive customer learning curves.
8. You need to be young to be an entrepreneur. Research indicates that the average age of founders for their first startup is now 45 and continues to increase as the business world becomes more complex. Entrepreneurship does appeal to young professionals because of its low cost of entry, their passion for technology, and a desire to manage their own destiny.
9. Entrepreneurs have a low success rate per startup. All successful professionals have pushed the limits of their craft and are not measured by the individual mistakes they have made, but by the satisfaction and ultimate success they have achieved. Most founders have started multiple companies and achieved success in their current business, or many.
10. Entrepreneurs are undisciplined in startup execution. The truth is quite the opposite – with limited finances, no reputation, and a very finite amount of time in which to build a brand, every aspiring new business founder needs discipline to communicate effectively, systematically use modern tools to track metrics, and find new marketing strategies.
In summary, these myths are not only untrue, but they are also detrimental to the mindset of every aspiring entrepreneur who is searching for a fulfilling and satisfying lifestyle. I urge you move forward, with discipline, on your dream of having fun with your own business while making the world a better place.
