GoFaxer Blog

A recent interview at Businessweek.com with legendary business guru, Michael Gerber, suggests that entrepreneurship is a learned set of skills. This goes contrary to the popular belief that entrepreneurs are born. My belief is that anyone can become a successful business owner if they want to be. But you can’t teach desire.

Gerber says:

“I believe that every single one of us has the ability to be creative; it is an instinct that we are born with. It is part of our nature that is not very developed.”

This is a noble cause, but I think that many people are happier not owning their own business. Many people prefer being specialists. Entrepreneurs need to be generalists, not just as a learned skill, but as a natural way of thinking. Even if you are a specialist by nature, you can learn to think as a generalist, if you want to badly enough, but there’s still no guarantee that you’ll enjoy it.

You can teach someone how to balance a P&L sheet. You can teach someone how to use technology like fax to email to give a business an economic advantage. You can teach someone how to choose effective advertising. But if a person doesn’t like to learn about such things, they’re fighting a no win battle.

With that said, I still think that Gerber’s new book, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, would be a great read for anyone desiring to learn the skills of running their own business, as long as they want them.

As I’ve said before, I’ve read many business plans in my day and they all usually stink. They’ll say something like, “This location brings a lot of tourists that we can market to.” And that will be it. They don’t bother to mention exactly how they plan on marketing to those tourists. I read an interesting article at BusinessWeek.com that confirmed my belief in good planning.

This article tells the story of two brothers, John and Tony Calamunci, who dreamt of owning their own chain of hot dog restaurants. But they waited over 25 years before taking the entrepreneurial plunge. Why? Because they wanted to do it just right, planning every detail.

When I say they planned every detail, I’m not kidding. They hired a Mapinfo, a location research consulting firm that did vast and detailed location analysis. The firm identified their target customer as college students and lower-to middle-income families with children. With this knowledge they then identified 4,500 possible locations nationally that would be right for their business.

I know that a lot of small company owners like to get down to business. They like to open their doors and work out the details afterwards. But judging by the quick growth of Johnny’s Lunch Franchise, I think that all that planning might be the right way to go. Planning everything from the type of fax machine (I recommend email fax) to who you want as your neighbors makes all of the difference in hitting your growth projections.

There is a common perception that going into business for yourself is a dangerous approach to life. I read a great article by Bill Buxton at BusinessWeek.com about this issue. He make the distinction between gambling and risk taking. He says:

“. . . just because someone won a multimillion-dollar windfall by buying lottery tickets with their retirement fund, or survived running a treacherous river without any training, the fact is not altered that what they were doing was gambling, not investing. The end result is as unrepeatable as it can be inadvisable.”

He submits that running your own business is in fact a risky venture, but not a dangerous one. Dangerous is where you throw caution to the wind and allow fate to be your guide, whereas entrepreneurship allows you to mitigate a lot of the factors of the risk. By making smart decisions that decrease your costs, like choosing to use email fax, you decrease your risk. And by making smart decisions that increase sales, like hiring an amazingly talented sales manager, you further decrease the risk of failure.

When you consider the fact that there is no guarantee that the cushy and comfy corporate job that you have is going to be there forever, think again. With a constantly fluctuating market place, no job is safe. At least with owning your own business, you control the risk factors to a greater degree than you might working for someone else.

That, to me, doesn’t seem risky. It actually seems safer.