Entrepreneurs

I recently had the privilege of being in the room with about 30 small business owners and entrepreneurs. It really drove home to me why I like working with these folks so much. It was a pretty diverse group of gender, race, age and level of business experience. There were a number of folks who had been laid off in the past year or so and decided self-employment was their best option. There were some young, recent college grads who got out of school and found they were not headed for that great corporate job, because there were none to be had.

The thing that struck me though is the one common attribute every one

of these people had was optimism. To be honest there were probably a few of them who should not have been quite so optimistic, because they had no income, no funding and only a concept of a business. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together folks who were in similar situations of being recently self employed. Which in many cases meant they were recently unemployed.

They took a poll and every single person there was a Schedule C business, even the ones who had been in business 5 years and had a couple of employees. These were folks who were not sitting around moaning about how bad the economy was or how evil their former

employer was for laying them off, nor even looking for job leads. Everyone in the room had dusted themselves off, pulled up their britches, faced the fact that they had to control their future and so were doing something about it. In fact they were excited and energized to be doing something about their future regardless of where they were along the path of getting a business going.

I thought about all the business meetings I have sat through with big corporations. Meetings where we might be talking about excellent new business opportunities or even meetings where we were discussing how well things were going with a recently launched line of business. Not one of those big corporate meetings had anywhere near the level of positive energy that you could literally feel in my entrepreneur gathering.

Having worked in both environments lead me to thinking about why things are so different in big companies vs. small entrepreneurs, so here's my observations:

External Competition:

I have noticed that big business almost always views competitors as bad. The competition exists only as a target for you to crush.

Small business folks are competitive and want to win, but not many of them think having 100% market share is a good thing. I remember discussing a competitor who was opening a store literally right across the parking lot from an existing small business. The entrepreneur was not worried, he saw competition as a good thing and he had complete faith in his product. The end result was the competitor opened for business and the existing store's revenue jumped 30%. It turns out having both stores next to each other drove a lot more traffic to the shopping center. Being a major player in your market may sound appealing, but in my experience it rarely turns out well in the long term. Major market share tends to lead to laziness because you are already consuming most of the business available so additional effort to gain more brings little reward. It also allows corporate ego to set in where you think you are in control and you think you know your market and your customers so well, but in truth you eventually become out of touch with both because you quit trying. It turns out some competition and a fear of failure is a great motivator. Competition also validates that you are doing something right.

Internal Competition: In my opinion, this has to be the worst part of working in big business. Even though you would think working for the same company people could see that they are on the same team, but the truth is I have found it to be a dog eat dog environment.

There is no sense of loyalty shown to fellow employees and everyone seems to be out to promote their own personal agenda before anything else. I don't mean to make everyone working in a large company sound evil, they are human just like everyone else and human nature is to survive. Survival in a large company means staying around and beating other co-workers for the opportunities to move up. Obviously there can be infighting in a small company also, but I think in a small company it is easier to see the entire picture, making it easier for individuals to understand and buy into the idea that everyone benefits from the success of the whole team.

Enthusiasm: Like I said the group of entrepreneurs I met with were excited about their business and some had not even earned the first dollar from their new job. Contrast that with my experience in big business where it seems to be frowned upon to be overly excited about anything. I had an experience where our company was given the opportunity to showcase some of our products, for free, on a popular national television show. It is the kind of promotion value you can't buy, but rather than enthusiasm, the opportunity was generally met with an attitude that it was an inconvenience. I had to push and persuade people to get on board with the project and give any level of support to make it happen. Contrast that with a similar situation with a small company, where folks gladly threw everything at and were all pumped up about an opportunity to be featured on a local venue, even though we paid for the privilege. Maybe it is the internal competition thing where people don't want to work on something another person may get credit for. Maybe it is just difficult to find a passion for advancing the interests of a big impersonal corporation, but it is not often you see employees in large organizations who are excited about what is going on at work.

Long-Term vs. Short-Term Think:

The mantra for big business seems to be "what have you done for me lately?". I really see this in difficult economic times like the current economy. Large companies are not looking for opportunities, they just want to cut cost, usually by cutting jobs, to keep their profits on an upward trend. A capitalistic economy will always have up and down cycles, that is just the basic economics of supply and demand. Small businesses may be struggling even more than large corporations right now, but most of the entrepreneurs I talk to realize this is a down cycle and that down cycles are when you find opportunities. Finding and taking on opportunities mean the small business person has to be willing to accept lower short term profits for the potential of long term gains.

Risk Taking vs. Status-Quo: Entrepreneurs are usually risk takers. Striking out to start your own company is an unbelievably risky endeavor. It is true that the majority of new

businesses fail within the first 5 years. Large companies always seem to be trying to maintain the status-quo. I understand why. It makes success much easier and allows a company to be more efficient if things don't change. The problem I see with that attitude is change is unavoidable. In fact I believe our economy is entering an era when the pace of change is rapidly increasing. The Internet has made it so easy to identify a new market opportunity and create a startup venture, sometimes literally in days. Because of the desire to maintain status-quo it is not unusual for large companies to stay 1 or 2 steps behind the curve. It is very rare to hear of a large corporation being on the "cutting edge". In my opinion, the future is going to find large companies 5 or 6 steps behind smaller competitors which in most cases will be an impossible gap to close.

If you work in a large corporation, they are certainly not evil and you are not an evil person for working there. Every big company, started out as a small company and they drive a large part of our economy. In fact large corporations are very well suited for many people's personalities. They offer structure and a degree of security.

If you do work for a big company, but find that corporate life doesn't seem to fit, I recommend reading Escape from Cubicle Nation.

I think I am a reasonably self aware person and some of my characteristics are:

I tend to be optimistic

I tend to think long-term

I tend to be loyal to people

I tend to be willing to accept reasonable risk

If you have not figured it out yet, I tend to prefer working with small companies also.

Recent experiences have only reinforced that for me.

In my profession, I find it unbelievably rewarding to help entrepreneurs achieve success with their business. (In many ways using knowledge I gained working for large companies) The enthusiasm and "can-do" attitude is contagious.

If you have recently become self-employed, I suggest you check out the Unintentional Entrepreneur. It is put together by Network Solutions and Outright.com and it's FREE.