As we have not yet completed the first decade of the 21st Century, it may seem foolish to label the rest of it on the basis of early returns.
Yet so much has happened to our planet since the year 2000 that anyone who cares to look can see that we are in ”a whole new world.” As we watch so many of our giant corporations, those that are ”too big to fail” crumble around us, we can’t help but wonder if the symptoms signal a fatal disease - a profound change in the nature of business itself.
All businesses were small once. Entrepreneurs have always been the starters, the risk takers of new enterprise. But the goal has been to grow large, the bigger the better. What follows is an excerpt from Building an Entrpreneur Country, by Julie Meyer, Founder and CEO of Ariadne Capital. it’s a long article ; this is just a teaser. The whole can be found HERE.
. . . The rise of the serial entrepreneur, the micro entrepreneur, the young entrepreneur, the portfolio entrepreneur and the lifestyle entrepreneur has been unmissable over the past decade in the UK.
This trend has arisen due to “Individual Capitalism”, a form of business where the basic unit is the individual rather than the corporation. The Internet opens up opportunities in how people work - remotely or from home, from their phone, as a small firm looking much bigger than they are - so that this shift away from “Company Man” to “Individual Capitalist” has gained enormous momentum. The recession has created many Individual Capitalists in the form of freelance consultants, but even more are corporate refugees of their own choosing. . .
Those of us who have run our own firms understand the enormous pressure of keeping a team aligned, making payroll, keeping fixed costs low, staying ahead of the competition, and getting people to buy what we sell. All of society benefits from the work that we do to develop our businesses, create jobs and generate wealth. Many of us feel, however, that we go to ‘another country’ everyday when we go to work. The speed and intensity at which we must work, the values it requires to build trust in an organisation, the level of dedication and drive seem inconsistent with the rest of society. Others just “don’t get it”. We would love for the corporate titan who never has had to worry about cashflow in a personal way to walk in our shoes for just an hour; entrepreneurship is not for the fainthearted. If you open the newspaper on any day of the week, you’ll see that the media focuses on the FTSE 100 - old, established, “big business”, and on governments who are actively defrauding the “little guy.” The media don’t really start paying serious, regular attention to any emerging company until it has arrived in a big way.
And yet small does become big, and start-ups do change the world, in the process creating jobs, new industries, wealth and pride in our ourselves.
So the average company owner, the SME entrepreneur, the Individual Capitalist goes to work each day in a fictional place - let’s call it - “Entrepreneur Country”. He or she manages his firm from ‘near death experiences’ to ‘breakthrough moments’ and back again. There is no work-life balance, and the stress rips through their personal life pretty regularly. It’s not because they aren’t good business people. Business is a rough old game, and there’s no job security if you are the owner.
And yet business creates the wealth from which all of society operates, so an inspection of “Entrepreneur Country” might be worthwhile if we are to understand how to build more successful global leaders out of the UK.
What are the best practices of the UK’s more successful start-ups? What is it like to spend a day in “Entrepreneur Country”?
