WHAT IF YOU’RE MISSING AN ESSENTIAL TRAIT?
At this point, I hope you’re certain that you’re an entrepreneur-in-the-making. If so, you might be saying to yourself, “Let’s get to work!”
I urge you to be patient. The next three chapters provide the final filters. And truth be told, I’m still trying to scare you away.
In the title of Michael Gerber’s great book, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, e-myth is short for the “entrepreneurial myth,” that every business is started by those with business skills, when in actuality they’re mostly started by technicians—and that’s why they fail. Gerber says not everyone should take the leap. He describes the wrong person taking an entrepreneurial leap as having an “entrepreneurial seizure.”
An employee who decides to start their own company because they’re great at their job, but doesn’t possess the essential traits, is having an entrepreneurial seizure. Unfortunately, in most cases they fail because they don’t possess all the other characteristics, over and above the job skills that they need to succeed at being an entrepreneur.
Gerber goes on to describe the three levels of people in every company: the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur. The technician is the employee who does the specialized work. The manager is the person who manages the systems and the people. The entrepreneur is the visionary, the opportunist, the “catalyst for change.”
The point is that you must know yourself and decide. Are you really a great employee (technician)? Are you a great manager? Or are you truly an entrepreneur? If you’re great at your job and are thinking of taking the entrepreneurial leap to starting your own business doing that job, make sure you aren’t having an entrepreneurial seizure. Make sure you’re someone with all six essential traits. Just as a gas-powered car needs an engine, transmission, wheels, a steering wheel, gas, and oil to function, the entrepreneur needs to be visionary, passionate, a problem solver, driven, a risk taker, and responsible.
Imagine not having one vital component for your car. You won’t go far. The same goes for lacking an essential trait.
So, what if you’re missing any one of the six essential entrepreneurial traits, but still have all of the others? Let’s look at why that won’t work.
NOT HAVING THE VISIONARY TRAIT
Not being visionary means you’ll never really be able to connect the dots and see the big picture. You’ll also struggle to create something from scratch or to continuously innovate and improve upon what already exists.
If you have all the other traits and not this one, you’ll probably make a great salesperson. As a salesperson you can make a lot of money with your passion, problem-solving skills, strong work ethic, ability to take risks, and sense of responsibility.
NOT HAVING THE PASSIONATE TRAIT
If you aren’t passionate about the void you’re going to fill in the world with your product or service, you’ll never survive the many setbacks and failures that will occur, especially in the first few years. No one has ever devised a magic formula for enduring the tough times. Only passion for your customer, offering, or solution will help you push past the barriers. That passion for your product or service gives you the energy, tenacity, and optimism to ignore the fact that the odds are stacked against you. That’s what enables you to pull off what most people can’t.
NOT HAVING THE PROBLEM-SOLVER TRAIT
It might seem that being visionary and passionate makes you a great problem solver. Unfortunately, they don’t. I’ve met many “idea people” who are extremely passionate but just can’t solve problems. They have their “big idea,” but have no ability, desire, or interest in solving the hundreds of issues that are going to arise over the next few years of building a business—or even the one problem they will need to solve tomorrow.
Like the great boxer Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” A problem solver takes the punch, reassesses the plan, adjusts, keeps moving forward, and typically wins the fight. Someone who doesn’t possess this trait gets rattled by the first punch and then gets their ass kicked.
A problem solver has the ability to consistently create value for their customers, clients, and employees by listening to and understanding what’s not working and then fixing it.
If you don’t have this essential trait, but you have all the others, you might want to buy a franchise that aligns with your passions. The beauty of a franchise is that you’re buying a proven system, where the franchisor has already solved most of your problems and continues to do so as new ones arise.
NOT HAVING THE DRIVEN TRAIT
The downside of lacking this essential trait should be pretty obvious. It’s the most common reason entrepreneurs fail. To succeed, you have to love working hard. Entrepreneurship means rolling up your sleeves, and most people just don’t want to work that hard. They aren’t self-motivated enough. Being driven means you never take your foot off the gas. You know that there are a thousand other hard workers trying to beat you and you must outwork them. You must have a burning desire to succeed.
Dan Sullivan describes those who are self-motivated as “batteries-included people.” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sat with “batteries-not-included people” who want to be successful and accomplish big goals. These people start out totally energized when I sit with them for an hour or two. During the meeting, I help them document their vision, plan the big picture, assess the money they’re going to make and all the people they’re going to help.
However, when we start boiling down the plan of attack and all the work that they must do in the next three months, the life completely goes out of them. They look like they need a nap, and I never hear from them again.
In case I haven’t mentioned it before, entrepreneurship is hard.
NOT HAVING THE RISK-TAKER TRAIT
Many people with great ideas are very passionate, incredibly hard workers, and very responsible. But they already have a great, secure job. Or they want to wait until they save up a certain amount of money, or until the kids are in school, or until they get married, or until they’re taller, or until (fill in the blank). They’re just too afraid to take their leap.
Here are three decision-making philosophies:
1.It’s more important that you decide than what you decide.
2.Just get it 80 percent right the first time.
3.If you have 70 percent of the information and feel 70 percent confident, move forward.
If you aren’t comfortable living by those types of guidelines, you’re probably not a risk taker.
Looked at another way, maybe you constantly overanalyze tough decisions and end up frozen when it’s time to make the call. In that case, you’ll rarely make the tough but necessary decisions that will keep your company growing. You’ll typically panic when competitors are kicking your ass rather than outthinking them.
A risk taker is able to make a tough call when they know people won’t agree with them and the stakes are high. The point is made in a Fortune magazine issue on decision making: Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, said that in his years and years of research, “No major decision we’ve studied was ever taken at a point of unanimous agreement.”
If you have all of the other traits and lack this one, partnering with a true entrepreneur might be the right decision for you.
NOT HAVING THE RESPONSIBLE TRAIT
Picture someone who is visionary, passionate, driven, a problem solver, and a risk taker, but they don’t take responsibility for outcomes. They blame others when things go wrong, and they feel they’re entitled to future rewards because of their past accomplishments.
A lot of people are like that. They complain that their idea would have worked if not for (fill in the blank). Or if they had (fill in the blank). These people tend to fail quickly, because the blame game quickly escalates. It creates resentment in the people around the person casting blame. Morale is always low, and employees tend to leave.
Think about whether or not you have this critical trait. When you come down to it, there are really only two types of people in the world: those who take total responsibility and those who blame others.
Think about the people in your life right now. You can put each of them in one of these two categories. They either take total responsibility, or they don’t. Most important, decide which group you’re in. The reason I believe the responsible trait is genetic is that when you separate people into the two categories, you’ll find siblings often divided up into each group. How can so many brothers and sisters who grew up in the same household, raised the same way, by the same parents, be so different when it comes to taking responsibility? In my opinion, the reason can only be nature over nurture.
Regardless of whether it is nature or nurture, it shows up in people at a young age and continues through their lives. In his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck, MD, describes two extremes on the responsibility spectrum. He writes, “Most people who come to see a psychiatrist are suffering from what’s called either a neurosis or a character disorder. Put most simply, these two conditions are disorders of responsibility, and as such, they are opposite styles of relating to the world and its problems. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility: the person with a character disorder, not enough.”
Now, I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not saying all people have a disorder. All I know is that the thousands of true entrepreneurs that I’ve interacted with take responsibility. Whether or not the amount of responsibility they take for things is entirely healthy, well, that’s for a different book. It’s just who and what they are.
If you don’t have this vital trait, you might find that being a one-person show, solo entrepreneur, independent contractor, or freelancer is a better path for you. You’ll have no employees to blame. While you might still blame your customers, clients, and vendors when things go wrong, at least you won’t have any employees walking out on you.
SUMMARY
Now let’s go back to the entrepreneurial range we laid out earlier, covering the spectrum from being self-employed to a true entrepreneur.
The six essential traits define a true entrepreneur. It’s important for you to decide where you fall on that range. If you’re missing a trait, you might then fall to the far left of the range.
This chapter began with a comparison of a would-be entrepreneur missing a key trait to a car missing a vital component. Not having a trait makes the success of the entrepreneurial leap highly unlikely. Just as someone who is six four and 220 pounds will probably never be a horse-racing jockey or someone who faints at the sight of blood might never become a surgeon.
If you’re thinking you “sort of” fit the bill, you’re probably not a true entrepreneur.
Know thyself.