With the publication of Secrets to a Successful Startup at the beginning of this year, I’ve been invited to attend podcasts and radio shows to talk about all things entrepreneurship.Once when I was playing soccer, I overheard our top player make a comment about our coach: “He could overcomplicate making a ham sandwich”.For some reason that comment stuck with me, and over the years I’ve had plenty of reasons to think the same… but never have I seen it so clearly demonstrated than when talking to some of the hosts of these shows.
The problem is that most of them are management consultants and marketers who have never actually started a company… so their view is of a complicated, multi-tasking superhero or heroine who is somehow gifted in whatever it takes to be an entrepreneur. They make it sound mysterious and challenging — and I don’t see or experience it that way.All the successful entrepreneurs I know (and all those I’ve studied through biographies) never set out to be one at all. They are, and were, ordinary people like me, stumbling through life trying to figure out how to put sufficient bread on the table. Then one day they encountered something that, for whatever reason, got under their skin — so much so that they wanted to fix it.Like Richard Branson who needed to fly to his girlfriend so chartered an airplane…Or Sara Blakely who got annoyed at the sewn ridge under her foot in her pantyhose.They were simply people who wanted to fix a problem, set about doing so, and became entrepreneurs by default. I am the same. The main reason I wrote Secrets to a Successful Startup, is because no such startup guide exists and those that claim to be helpful are mainly written by academics or consultants. It bugged me. And the more I thought about it… the more it got under my skin until I decided to fix it.That’s all entrepreneurship is. It’s simple, not complicated. In fact, it comes from the Old French Entreprendre, which means to undertake. Simple right? We undertake fixing something. So, we are all entrepreneurs. We just have to find meaningful things to fix.CheersTrev
