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The following article was published in the Charleston Post & Courier's Business Major, a featured monthly column in the Business Review Section on January 26, 1998. Entrepreneurs need proper initiativesBy DOROTHY P. MOORE Special to the Post and Courier "I am five feet tall and female and people do not take me seriously right off the bat. You need to be bigger and more masculine to intimidate people; then they pay attention to you. It's like an elephant. An elephant gets more attention than a mouse. But if the mouse is the president of the company and it needs to be run effectively, then the mouse needs to learn how to manage the elephant. And that is what we do. We manage at least one elephant every single day." As Linda Horn, owner of L.R. Horn Capital Concepts, Inc., Harrison, Ohio, and one of the top ranked financial planners in the United States, notes above, management techniques are important. The value of acquiring these while working for someone else, an "incubator experience," is emphasized by another entrepreneur, who remarked, "you don't start a money management firm without having a fairly long performance track record. Not if you want to succeed at it any way." Says Ethel Cook, owner of Corporate Improvement Group, Bedford, Massachusetts, "I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit, and, because of that, I would get bored with a job after a year and stay for two years and then leave, but I learned an awful lot." We know from intensive studies in the field of entrepreneurship that intention, "a conscious state of mind toward the goal of founding a business," may be a critical factor in beginning a business. One Chicago architect fits the definition of an intentional entrepreneur perfectly. "I own my own business. I have always wanted to do this since being a senior in high school. I have really never wavered. I really like what I do. I want to make buildings. It fascinates me endlessly." Looking back, Fran (Raglin) Johnson, Owner and Founder of Elite Travel Services, in Cincinnati, remarks, "Probably I was always an entrepreneur and totally unaware of it. As far back as I can remember, since I was five years old, I was helping my aunt make lamp shades. I was paid by the shade. And if you look at it, that was an entrepreneurial experience. Because I calculated how much money I wanted to make for certain activities and products and I made that number of shades. As a very young teenager I purchased items from wholesale houses and marketed in apartment buildings going from one apartment to another selling merchandise. I cringe when I think about that now. How dangerous it was. As far back as I can remember, I found ways to make money. I cooked chicken dinners and went to barber shops and beauty shops to solicit orders for dinners. And even though I was working a full time job, if I needed money, I would do those kinds of things. I relied upon my sales skills to fund furniture purchases and to start my business. I sold things at college sales and to flee markets. So probably I was always an entrepreneur and never thought about it." As Janet McCann, an interior designer, from Wilmette, Illinois observes, "I think that tremendous drive is probably the universal characteristic among business founders. It wasn't being the entrepreneur. It wasn't running the business. It was the drive for doing what you wanted to do under your own terms. And that burning desire puts you in a situation where you can't fail." Corporate climbers come to entrepreneurship by a different route. For L. Elaine Green, who had risen successfully in her organization over a fifteen year period, the move to consider entrepreneurship was forced by radical changes in her life. There was a corporate restructuring. Because she had outstanding performance reviews and prestigious national awards, in spite of the organizational shakeups she was told she could stay on. Then opportunity knocked. She had done a video feature on Arabian horses and later had been asked to do a very large horse show in Arizona. "The Arabian horse owner said, 'why don't you put yourself on an airplane and come out here and be our guest for a week.' That airplane ride was probably the most important ride in my life. I thought, this is what I want to do--to be in video arts." Honi Stempler, an Atlanta entrepreneur, a dedicated organizational woman, says "I never had the American dream of opening my own company. Wherever I was or whatever I have done, it was always by giving 3000 percent. It was the most important thing. I worked for a company for nine years and I worked an average of 60 to 80 hours a week. I would get in at 7:00 in the morning and go home at 12:00 at night. I was married and I had that life and then I had the work life and the work life always took precedence. My husband could not count on me to do whatever needed to be whenever it was because my work was so important." The willingness to work hard and prepare is a common theme among entrepreneurs, as the career of Pat Gallagher, who now heads two Northeastern electrical companies, illustrates. "I didn't have anything that drove me from leaving another company. I was in college and a professor just told me, you have the drive the motivation, you can just do anything you want to. Why don't you try a business plan? Try to figure yourself in a business. Find your business. My first business was going to be janitorial. I searched out my customers and my market the same way I would later do for my electrical company. I wanted to find out if the customers would buy. I picked five large corporations and I marketed to them and found out what their needs were. Then I went back to the computer and searched out the competition. I would have been swallowed in the water. So I stopped all of my research and then went to electrical school. I worked very hard to get my qualifications. I started in the basement of my home, moved into a warehouse, and now I have many trucks on the street, moving from one warehouse to another. It was marketing and seeing those people and finding out their needs from the beginning." It appears clear that managerial experience gained in an incubator period provides an important training ground and contacts for those interested in starting a business. But studies have also shown that entrepreneurial and professional management skills may be mutually exclusive. In many organizations, for example, people who take initiative or do things their own way are not appreciated. A successful Kentucky entrepreneur, a former high school teacher, bridged the gap this way: "I own an advertising specialty company. I had taught school and was head of my department. I married my husband who was with IBM and then we moved. I did a study and found out that people who make a lot of money are in sales. So I zoomed in on selling and I did more research. I had a job that involved commission only but I didn't want commission only. I convinced my boss that I was worth a salary. The job was in selling, advertising and promotions. I became the second highest salesperson out of 12. The man who owned the company sold it and his successor did not know anything about the business. I decided that I knew more about it than he did so I started my own company. I had very little cash and lots of guts. I did have a lot of support from my husband." What do such experiences reveal? Research has shown that entrepreneurial success is heavily correlated with extensive managerial and start-up experience and the ability to react quickly to environmental change. The former corporate climbers in our study saw how training programs, experience in working with management teams, technical information, and dealing with budgets had prepared them to run their own businesses. The intentional entrepreneurs valued marketing far more than did the corporate climbers. They also placed a significantly higher value on self-determination, the entrepreneurial spirit. Our results thus suggest a tendency among latent entrepreneurs in corporate life to underestimate the importance of technical and marketing skills while intentional entrepreneurs may underestimate the value of managerial experience. Both are important to entrepreneurial success. It was also clear that the individuals in both groups were hard working, highly motivated, and universally valued autonomy and freedom. For Questions/Comments about this site, contact moored@citadel.edu. Site designed by Jackye Cocoros. |