Once I had great ambitions to be a successful businessman like Richard Branson, Ricardo Semler, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs… maybe. Yet, my two failed attempts so far have taught me that perhaps this path is not for me. I can say that I learned a lot from failing. In particular I learned how not to succeed. *Coughs* More specifically, I learned five things that if I knew at the time I would have changed the path I was on. It wasn’t until afterwards that I knew I was up the creek. By then it was too late.

Not listening to my guts

I can’t count the amount of times my intuition told me that I was doing something wrong. One event I can remember committing to a 12 month plus work cycle thinking in my head… oh yes this is great idea. Then as I sat down to start it my heart sank. Have you ever had that feeling? I just knew on the inside that it was a bad choice. But alas, I soldiered on to fail miserably in defeat.

Not taking feedback seriously

When you have a product that isn’t selling the first, no the VERY first thing you ask yourself is why. The next thing you ask what are people saying about my product. I read watched on shoemoney.com this week that to be a successful blogger you need an edge. But that edge needs to be understood by your customers and how will you know you have them talking about it unless you get feedback to check. Feedback is really from cybernetics… it means when the system takes an output, learns from it and acts accordingly. In my case (both times) I ignored what people were saying… more commonly known as THE BUZZ. Hence, my input never changed and so the cycle of debt increase kept going. Pay attention to feedback!

Not questioning my own ideas

Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra all have something in common. What? They were megalomaniacs of course. They never really thought through some of their ideas and I would say didn’t have a good critique process in place. Sure, it’s nice to be smart, wonderful and dashing… however do your ideas suck? If they don’t who told you they don’t? Mum? Ask someone you know who will tell you the truth and then listen to them. It’s not personal it’s about a product. Sure, you put your heart into it… but constructive criticism and even mindless sledging can improve you. If it leads to cash… who’s going to complain?

Not listening to my family

I don’t know how many times I told my wife she was wrong. Well, she was right. So was my Dad and of course a few others. Even though your family can be very discouraging at times and painful … listen to them. They may just be right about something.

Trusting in a product that wasn’t market researched

Finally… don’t ever go to market to buy a fat pig without first knowing if you can sell that pig and make a profit. Business is not all about profit but to keep it going it sure helps. If you are thinking of launching a product make sure in advance that you are confident about the market for it. Don’t be like me and hope to God it will work because it has to. Things in society, become popular through social networking, word of mouth and trust. Research these things… find out what people will say, how your idea will spread (if it will) and so on. If your product is not going to at least make it’s money back and then some… forget it. As a Doctor market research friend of mine used to say, ‘research, research, research.’

I hope this helps you to avoid the 20k plus disaster I had in business. Have I learned… yes. Some would say I have become overcautious and now take a long time to make business decisions. Me, I will get back on my feet again but let me tell you… I won’t do the above five again. Not anytime soon anyway.

Imagine this: my two daughters were playing shops the other day when my eldest talked my youngest into buying a plastic vegetable from her imaginary mart for 20 cents.  I walked in as my daughter decided to hand over the real money for something she already owned and I wondered is this an early sign of a entrepreneurship?  In Richard Branson’s autobiography he notes that a schoolteacher said he would end up either in jail or in business.

Recognising Entrepreneurial Skills

In my daughters case you might say she is showing evil skills.  I beg to differ.  She is looking for a creative way to make money.  Albeit, an unethical one.  Sure with a little training and maybe some time in the school or hard knocks she will get there.  Actually, I think she wants to be a vet now.  Either way those entrepreneurial skills she has can be developed to help her be the best paid vet in Queensland.

How to nurture those entrepreneurial skills

One of the things you need to realise is that entrepreneurial skills is to find some activity that supplements their core personality.  Now at the risk of sounding corny I like what I saw on the girl scouts cookie page:

Many successful business women today say they got their start selling Girl Scout Cookies. Girls practice useful life skills like planning, decision-making, and customer service. During cookie activities, girls are members of a team working towards a common goal, with each girl striving to do her best. Every local troop/group is encouraged to set realistic goals, such as planning field trips and community service projects, to accomplish during the year. The money earned from cookie activities helps the troop/group achieve its goals.   So when your local Girl Scouts come calling with this year’s best-selling cookies, remember you’re saying hello to tomorrow’s business leaders.”

Of course selling girl scouts cookies is one way to train up your kid in the way the should go.  I am looking at such things and wondering now what can I do to facilitate those skills to give my children the best possible future.

I subscribe to [tag]problogger[/tag], like I imagine most bloggers do, and I came across this article this morning about full time blogging being a process.  In the article it referenced (I am academic what can I say) the article from Get Rich Slowly about finding the guts to follow your dreams.  Now, I am reading the E-Myth Revisted by Michael Gerber at the moment and I think he would have something to say about becoming a ‘full time blogger’.  Gerber identifies three roles of the business person:  The Entrepreneur (visionary), The Manager and The technician.  The manager runs the business whilst the Entrepreneur focuses on it’s creative growth when the technician is performing the duties required to get the work done.   A friend of mine says it this way.  There is the pioneer who blazes the trail and then there’s other people who support that work by being ‘administrators’ and keeping the work going.

One of the great revelations for me in reading the E-Myth was the realisation that it’s okay to be an entrepreneur.   I am totally the person who see’s the vision and knows what needs to be done and so forth.  I am a very bad manager however and an even worse technician.  If you are like that, then you will find management work to be boring, heart wrenching and difficult to do.    Judging by experience so far and what I read in the blogosphere, full time blogging really is not an entrepreneurial pursuit.  It’s another job.   So what’s the difference?

Work versus Entrepreneurship

Work is routine ‘technican’ work.  Blogging, even though it’s a creative pursuit is largely work.  Why?  There is a creative marketing element for sure.  You have to write articles that attract visitors, put advertising in sidebars and in posts and so on.   Blogging is a ‘technical’ skill that you become good at like most forms of writing over time.  Say my dream is to be a fireman and my friends dream is to be a blogger.  As a blogger he is self-employed and most people would say ‘entrepreneur’.  I would say my blogger friend is just using his skill to make money the same way as a fireman does.  There is no difference.  Two technicians in different application fields.

Entrepreneurship is based on creativity and growth work isn’t

Now you will use your creative abilities in your job as a fireman, for example but this does not mean you are reinventing the practice of fire fighting.  The fire fighter who reinvents and continually improves firefighting is the entrepreneurial fire fighter.  The blogger who reinvents the job of blogging continually to find new streams of income is an entrepreneurial blogger.   Why?  Entrepreneurship is not simply going out on your own and making a new business.  There is a pioneering element to entrepreneurship where a vision for something is put together.   I meet people who I would consider to be entrepreneurial academics.  These are people reinventing things and using creativity and vision to bring forth pioneering change into their lives.  Clearly, blogging can be entrepreneurial but in most cases this isn’t so.

What makes me realise this is just how hard it appears to be to make a living as a blogger.   Some people I have read about find it very difficult and metaphors are drawn between blogging and hand to hand combat.   A case in point is the Problogger versus Shoemoney interview.  Have a look at the amount of time Darren Rowse puts into blogging!  That’s a full time job.  Two hours of writing versus how many hours of routine, technican like work?  I rest my case.   Work is hard, routine and after all BORING to the entrepreneur.  I therefore submit that whilst blogging can be entrepreneurial, it most cases it’s just another type of job.