Everyone can be an entrepreneur
“The French don't even have a word for entrepreneur,” President George Bush reputedly once quipped to Tony Blair. Whether true or not, it was revealing.
There are many ways to measure entrepreneurship and governments vie for globally recognised top spots. I embarked on some research to understand the diversity and complexity of these rankings but I came away baffled. After an hour, I felt I could declare Martha-stan the entrepreneurial capital of the world without too many experts quibbling, as long as I had produced an insane number of metrics.
These myriad frameworks may be helpful when world leaders are competing with each other for bragging rights, but in my opinion the numbers don’t reflect the wealth of founding talent we have all through society, wherever you are. Think of all the people starting charities, developing a “side hustle” or forced to become freelance because of covid.
Entrepreneurship has underpinned my whole life. My mother started her own successful business and some of my earliest childhood memories are of stuffing envelopes full of books when my father decided to self-publish one of his gardening blockbusters. In 1994, My first job was in a start-up consulting company. I was the tenth hire and I learnt as much about the media and telecoms sector we specialised as I did about scaling up and building a small business. It was also there that I met Brent Hoberman, the brilliant brains behind lastminute.com and with whom I would embark on one of the most rollercoaster entrepreneurial experiences imaginable in 1998.
One thing I have learnt from working across the public, private and philanthropic worlds, is that everyone can find some benefit in thinking like an entrepreneur. Even If you are part of the 36% of the UK who has no desire to start a business, I defy you not to find something useful in thinking like a founder.
Vast academic tracts have been written on how to cultivate an ‘entrepreneurial mindset” but I suspect you would never read this column again if I were to précis them. Yes, take risks, apply for a job you don’t think you’ll get, suggest a product innovation you’ve been secretly imagining. But they are obvious. For me, there are two other skills you hear less about.
The first is curiosity - finding out the detail of how something works, being interested in jobs that aren’t your own. It will never be time wasted. Starting a business normally involves a massive learning curve - especially if you have spotted an opportunity in an area in which you are not currently an expert. You can't get funding or build a product without asking questions about everything and of everyone.
Good questions make the difference between effective and ineffective information flow. For example, when i was helping set up the Government Digital Service with a team of civil servants tasked with building a new citizen-facing website, they were brilliant at asking about every part of the current process. This enabled them to dismantle the old technology with a deep knowledge. Nothing was out of bounds and all ways of working were questioned. As they began to build gov.uk, on which we all now rely so heavily, they did so having mapped everything out carefully and understood how all the pieces fitted together. They were civil servant entrepreneurs.
The second is persistence. Most founders I have met have been told repeatedly that their idea won’t work. When I first described the idea of lastminute.com to people, they would walk away from me in disbelief. When Brent and I first tried to raise money, we were refused by all but one venture capitalist whom Brent had found through the most circuitous route. Brent is one of the most brilliantly persistent people l know. He called the head of sales at Alitalia about 30 times to convince her to take a meeting with us in order to get airline seats to sell.
Persistence is different to tenacity and to hard work. Persistence means you just keep plugging away at something that might even be very boring but is important. All of us have tedious parts of our work, but an ability to keep going is surprisingly rare.
I was impressed recently when I met someone who was running client sales in a global ad company. Winning new business is always hard, especially in these tough economic times, but they were growing their accounts. They were absolutely relentless about getting in touch with prospective customers. “I’m not too grand to call someone ten times” they told me. “I will keep on with the tedious work of trying to make contact by whatever means necessary”. In their role, it meant a lot of chasing, trying to get mobile numbers, calling and texting and doing this repeatedly. It worked;the persistence paid off.
You may think you don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in your body. You may despair at our societal lionising of founders. Don’t let these thoughts stop you from seeing the benefit of thinking like one occasionally. You never know, you might like it.