There are three answers to the question, “Would I make a good entrepreneur?”
1. All Colors can be entrepreneurs.
2. All Colors need the help of other Colors to succeed in their new venture.
3. Some Colors make better natural entrepreneurs than others (see Figure 26–1 on page 248).
The reason you need the other Colors on your entrepreneurial team is that natural entrepreneurs have their weaknesses, and less natural entrepreneurs have their strengths. So it’s not where you start as an individual—it’s the team you assemble that ultimately will make or break your venture.
Here are the innate entrepreneurial styles of the four primary Colors. You also will have some of the strengths of your backup Color as well.
You are one of the best of all Colors at setting goals and making plans to achieve them. You prioritize, follow through, and evaluate progress effortlessly. What you are not good at is modifying your well-laid plans to adapt to changing circumstances.
Figure 26–1 Colors as Entrepreneurs
Before casting your business plan in stone, run it by people you respect who are of other personality Colors. Ask them what additional options to consider, especially involving a work team or your family. Don’t rush into it, even if you are excited and energized.
Then, schedule reevaluations at specific points along the way. Mark your calendar to sit back and reflect whether your goals are being met or you need to readjust them. You may be tempted to avoid this uncomfortable task; inviting a Blue or Green to help prevents procrastination. This one exercise could spell the difference between success and failure.
You are not one of the world’s “dreamers and schemers,” but many Golds have come up with brilliant business ideas and gotten rich from them. At your core, you are driven to be a responsible overseer of people and resources, and this makes you a cautious risk-taker. In your favor, you are not likely to be diverted by other opportunities, as Reds and Blues often are. You will rely on tried-and-true methodology to move predictably from one milestone to the next.
Once in business, your first priority is establishing order. Systems and procedures are in place virtually from Day One. The sooner you can create predictability in your business, whether in sales, manufactured inventory, or cash flow, the more comfortable you are.
Foreseeing and responding to changes in the marketplace will never be your forte, and handling unexpected crises is downright stressful to you. Make sure you have a Blue or Green on board to identify future trends that might impact your business. Get a Red to buffer you from the normal crises to which all young firms are subjected.
The Rooneys—Father and Daughter Entrepreneur Team
At age 36 Trisha Rooney Alden is President of R4 Services, LLC, a leading records management company she formed thirteen years ago. She always wanted to be an entrepreneur and has let little get in her way. This includes marriage, having two babies, and joining her husband in another city while keeping her business headquartered in Chicago. Shuttling between clients and family in some fifty trips a year utilizes all her Gold organizational skills. She needed help.
Enter her father, Phil, former CEO of a public company who of late had been enjoying a stress-free life managing his investments. Today he comes into R4 Services at 5:30 AM every morning without getting paid. Why so early? “That’s when the day starts operationally,” he explains. “By 8 AM clients have urgent needs and we need to respond to them in a timely fashion.”
For Golds, family is key, and Phil truly enjoys the opportunity of helping his daughter fulfill her dreams (even in the early hours of dawn!). Of course, he is quick to point out that she makes all the decisions. “R4 Services was a multimillion dollar business when I came aboard,” he stresses, “I just provide support and advice where needed.”
Trish and Phil are both Gold backup Greens, and the firm’s culture reflects this. For instance, Trish has a small cubicle rather than a large corner office. “I love it that way,” she says. “I am out of the office a lot with clients; this way I get to hear everything that is going on,” she adds, reflecting the Green need for connectivity.
In order to succeed in a business that handles intricate records management and destruction issues for some 600 clients, collaboration between father and daughter is key. So is listening to, and cultivating the opinions of, the service and warehouse staff. Phil picks up donuts each morning to ensure that the early arriving staff has something to eat.
Both father and daughter take great pride in the low turnover of their staff, noting 60 percent have been with the company for over ten years. “One of our goals,” they say, “is to help employees have really good lives and a great place to work.“ This is a classic example of how Gold/Greens attend to the practical needs of others.
Trish sees her top strengths as working well with people, listening deeply to clients to discover needs, communicating clearly, and always delivering what has been promised. All these strengths express her Gold/Green components. Clients are highly energizing to her. “I like to organize them,” she says, “and to call them often to talk about present and future needs. They are my passion!”
What about stress areas? Pricing services and having clients negotiate downward are stressful, as are doing budgets and focusing on the financials of the business. These reflect her Green side, which dislikes confrontation and excessive work in the area of numbers. Here she relies on her father’s thirty-plus years of business experience.
As two Gold/Greens, father and daughter have established an easy work relationship. He oversees operations, she focuses on new business development. The mutual respect is evident and contributes to the firm’s steady growth.
Meanwhile, they are also actively involved in a wide range of philanthropic organizations involving children, museums, universities, and hospitals. In true Gold fashion, they welcome opportunities to take care of their community.
case study two
Helen Glunz
Helen Glunz is president of the Glunz Family Winery and Cellars and arranges the importation of wines into the Louis Glunz Wines, Inc. warehouse. Since they were first married, she and her husband Joseph B. Glunz, president of Louis Glunz Wines, Inc., have worked in the wine business together. Ten children later, “I am starting to fade now … I try to take Mondays off.” Helen admits to accomplishing this goal only four or five times a year.
The company produces draft wine for the restaurant market, varietals, fortified wines, and what Helen refers to as “fun” wines. These are family favorites like May wine, Glogg, and Sangria, which are sold through high-end retail outlets like Marshall Fields and Whole Foods. Reds are naturally attracted to working with fine wines and good foods.
Putting ten children through college placed big demands even on this successful couple’s budget. Helen’s husband Joe, a Green/Red Introvert, decided to meet the challenge by purchasing ten acres across the street from their family farm and establishing a raspberry “U-Pick” operation. “Every time I hear Joe say, ‘I have an idea,’ I get nervous,” Helen admits. “But almost always I go along with him, because he is usually right.” Helen’s Red spontaneity helps her here, and the fact that her husband is a Green means he has outstanding ability to create product brands. In 2004 Glunz Raspberry Wine, a fortified dessert wine made from part of their ten-acre crop, won five gold medals in international tastings.
Reds don’t plan, they evolve. “Planning” is an ongoing process of flexible decisions. You set goals by instinct, always ready to turn on a dime. The ability to change direction based on market needs is a very real strength. But setting real goals that others must work on is a challenge. Set short-term targets; your people will have a clearer direction, and immediate successes energize you.
Reds are the born entrepreneurs of the world, but need the right circumstances to thrive. You are natural risk-takers, negotiators, and crisis managers, skills that are critical in the start-up phase of a venture. You excel as long as what you are doing is in demand and business is brisk. When a venture ceases to be fun and stimulating, your attention wanders. However, in crisis mode you excel, coolly managing the situation long after others have caved in.
Reds are impatient with formal education and prefer practical knowledge. These “street smarts” serve you well in new ventures. When interested, you become a real specialist in your field, with or without formal training. You see rules and procedures as guidelines only and never feel particularly bound by them (to the chagrin of any Gold partners).
Your freedom of thought lets you “surf” the marketplace with fresh ideas and new ways of responding to customer desires. A Green will help you market those terrific ideas and get your promotional tasks done quickly. Conventional ways are the last thing on your mind when beginning a new project. Strategic thinking and organizational skills ultimately are needed, however. Bring a Blue on board to help with strategy and a Gold to organize your office.
You’re a natural at strategizing, creating plans, and refining them along the way. Too much complexity is your goal-setting blind spot. Be sure to add practical details and concrete steps to your business plan. You won’t enjoy it, but it will help keep you realistic about your plans.
case study three
Nordhal Brue
Nordhal (“Nord”) Brue is the 60-year-old founder of the Bruegger’s Bagels chain. Like many Blues, he excels at combining passion, good ideas, and financial business acumen into single entrepreneurial ideas. Others see him as both intense and playful. “He is a deep thinker,” says Chris Dutton, CEO of Green Mountain Power, “who can analyze issues on several different levels.”
Recognizing the many skills required to run a successful venture, Nord always partners with someone whose talents balance his own. Always a few steps ahead of national trends, in the early 1980s he saw the potential of turning bagels—then a niche, urban product—into a “quick service” food concept that would appeal to a national audience. Brue’s strategy was to start in secondary and suburban markets, far away from metropolitan centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago where bagels were well-known, in order to test the economic feasibility while educating his customers’ tastes.
Brue was right. By the mid-1990s Brueggers had grown into almost 500 stores throughout the country and ushered in the first “healthy alternative” quick food concept. He sold the company in 1996 for a stock trade worth $123 million, rebought the company for $45 million a year later, and resold it again for an undisclosed amount in 2000.20
Brue has since founded Franklin Foods, a soft unripened cheese manufacturer. While excited about its potential, he’s not wedded to it, or any company he builds. “If Kraft says we have to have it, if it’s worth more to them than to me, then I’ll do a new thing,” he told Vermont Business Magazine in January 2004.21 Brue is also chairman of four boards, which he thoroughly enjoys. “I am always better at dealing with the big picture,” he says, “which is another way of saying I am not great at the details. My mission is to get these companies to articulate a vision that will take them to the next level—find that very exciting,” he says in typical Blue fashion.
Many a Blue has launched a successful business off limited information or a hunch. It’s the ideas that excite you, and you’re at the peak of your talents when creating and refining them. You understand and accept that risks are part of the deal, and you are well able to cope with them.
Daily routine makes you restless; your style is to handle many projects at once. Seeing new trends in the marketplace is an entrepreneurial strength. But it can be a weakness in attempting to actually get things done.
Fortunately, Blues delegate freely and rely on other Colors instinctively. You’re the idea person, and you want others to handle the people, procedures, and controls. Make sure you get a Green on board to tap substantial people and promotional skills, a Red to move things along, and a Gold to set up those needed procedures.
For you goals and plans are changeable, depending on whatever is exciting to you at the moment. Prioritizing is problematic for you, especially when two or more exciting things compete for your attention. The process and the people you meet along the way are of more importance to you than final outcomes.
You will stick to a goal if it helps you find your deepest possible satisfaction. If you can stick to a (relatively) permanent core goal, especially one that reflects your personal values, underlying goals will be more achievable and less of a distraction.
Other Colors will criticize and pressure you into making rigid, financially oriented plans “to keep your business on the right track.” You will not complete these plans and will frustrate those who are dependent on you to set direction. You must have the ability to make legitimate detours while keeping sight of the ultimate destination. More than any other Color, you need to partner with a friend, preferably a Gold or Red, who can ground you in the present when needed. You do best when collaborating with other Colors.
case study four
Carla Hall
Carla Hall formed the successful Carla Hall Design Group, a marketing communications firm, in 1980. Though she has tried, she has never been able to complete a formal business plan. Most stressful yet is to formally market herself. “If I follow my natural style, I find the right long-term clients,” she says.
Carla’s clients are some of the world’s top financial firms for whom she helps create a brand or image, expressing it through logos, marketing materials, websites, advertising, presentations, events, and trade shows. Her strength, Carla says, “is to provide creative clarity and interpretations to complex messages that result in a fresh and emotional experience for her clients’ audiences.”
Defining an organization’s essence, then directing the internal team of marketers, designers, writers, and legal and performance measurement specialists to execute its outward expression is Carla’s greatest talent. It is a very natural one for a Green to possess and makes Carla Hall a highly successful entrepreneur.
Greens are less motivated by material gain than other Colors. You prefer to provide value and express your creative energies in whatever business situation stimulates you. Sometimes that will be an entrepreneurial venture, most often prompted by a change in employment status, a disagreement with the practices of an employer, or the need for a family-oriented work schedule.
The ability to create value is both your strength and your blind spot. You will build an extremely loyal clientele, but often think little of sacrificing profit margin to achieve a certain quality of product or service. This loyal clientele, however, is the heart of your business success. High customer loyalty and low staff turnover often get a Green enterprise through rough times when other companies fail.
Your superior abilities to promote and market get you noticed quickly. A Green company often takes off fast, but then needs the tough negotiating skills of Reds and the business systems implemented by Golds to survive in the fast lane. You also have the added frustration that your considerable people and communications skills are underestimated by other Colors, who want you to focus on the balance sheet rather than the customer base.
20Joyce Marcel, “Profiles in Business,” Vermont Business Magazine (January 2004) p. 17.
21Ibid., pg 23