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Chris Grayling ‘Army of Entrepreneurs’ Proposal

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Every business start-up has a cost, and if you’re on the dole you can’t easily afford to buy basic equipment. At the moment the only start-up cash available from the “new deal” for unemployed people trying to start a business is £400. We don’t think that’s nearly enough, so we’ll give the business start-up specialists the ability to fund costs of up to £2,500, and then reclaim the money from the benefits saved once the business is up and running.

Chris Grayling – How to Lift the EconomyWith an Army of Entrepreneurs

On the face of it this looks like a great idea.  The logic is both simple and compelling.  Startups cost money.  People don’t have it.  Let’s give them it, funded out of future benefits savings.

Several reasons why I think this might not work in practice:

  1. It will attract a lot of people to the £2500 who are not sufficiently committed to enterprise and self employment – enterprise professionals will spend hours of their time wading through the sharks to find the genuine latent entrepreneurs.
  2. It will encourage some people into enterprise for whom it is almost certainly not the best option – business failure rates are likely to increase with this type of soft start-up provision – damaging the enterprise culture in the medium term.  Only if we use robust investment criteria will this be avoided.  This means turning a proportion of applicants down – leading to bad word of mouth.
  3. If business ideas are viable they will find investment – the problem is still not lack of cash – it is lack of investment ready business plans.  Let’s spend our money here on providing inspirational coaching and good technical advice (NB there is already plenty of technical advice out there – labeit patchy in quality)
  4. Sources of funding and sources of advice need to be kept separate.  It is too easy to tell the funder what they need to to hear if they are to release the money.   You MUST be able to speak the unvarnished truth with your advisers.

There maybe ways to overcome most of this stuff.

However IF the only reason a business gets started is because of a £2500 gift from the government – offset against future benfits savings – then I for one would worry.  Unless there is real commitment, passion, talent and skill to invest in I can see lot of cash going down the tubes.

Your thoughts?

Fascinating and Frightening in Equal Measures?

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Kanya King is a remarkable woman.  More precisely she is a very unremarkable woman with a remarkable story.  We all have the potential to do remarkable things.  She is best known for re-mortgaging her house to see her dream – The MOBO Awards – become a reality.

She is passionate about giving young people the opportunity to experience enterprise.   To inspire a new generation of business entrepreneurs.

To further this passion she has teamed up with Thomson Local – the database people – to challenge school children (16+) to develop business ideas that will benefit their local community.

The best will secure a  bursary of £100 and mentoring from a ‘business hero’.

Thomson will also build them a web site – apparently whether their business idea demands one – or not.  It might have been more interesting if Thomson helped them to develop a strategy to get to market.  The default position of ‘I need a website’ is not always the best one.

The overall competition winners will win a ‘money can’t buy prize’.  VIP experience at the next MOBOs perhaps?

I love the fact that this kind of stuff happens.  That people care about enterprise.

But I worry too;

  • I worry that they cite research (unreferenced) suggesting that 81% of British children want to run their own business – can this be true?  On what basis has this want developed?
  • I worry that combining the forces of a for profit like Thomson with a business planning competition will further distort what educationalists percieve enterprise education to be all about.
  • I worry that the emphasis on ‘pitching your ideas’ – letting others attach their valuation to your business dream – will emphasise an external locus of control that is unhelpful to the entrepreneur.
  • I worry that asking young people to focus on making things better in their community – perhaps before they have learned how to make things better for themselves might inculcate lessons of selflessness that could be unhelpful.
  • I worry that this type of scheme will attract those who are already destined for an enterprising future and turn off those who think that school based competitions are uncool and that business is for geeks.
  • I worry about the language of supplying ‘business hero’ mentors.
  • I worry about the volume of work that such projects place on students and their teachers at a really busy time in the their school life.
  • I worry about further strengthening the perception that enterprise = business and more teachers resisting the enterprise agenda as a capitalist plot to brainwash young people.
  • I worry about the fact that the website that is the home of the competition appears to have no RSS feed.  I am invited to ‘check back’ for updates!  As if web 2.0 had not happened!!

So I have signed up to offer to be a business hero – notwithstanding considerable reservations.

Let’s see where this takes us!

The Creative Entrepreneur – WOW

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Good networking event last night hosted by WYLLN, bmedia and nti.

Explored a couple of questions:

  • In a fast-moving industry dominated by freelancers and SMEs, what does ‘Leadership & Management’ really mean?
  • Why is it important?

More prosaically put – why are so many creative/digital businesses poor at establishing basic business processes, managing other creatives and getting paid?

My opinion?

It is because we (the business support industry) insist on training digitals and creatives (and every other entrepreneur) that they have to do all this stuff if they are going to be successful in business.

And this is, frankly, nonsense.

It damages people.

It distorts them from their true purpose.

The challenge is being comfortable with who you are, what you want to become and what you want to spend your time doing.  Enterprise is a long term process of becoming, of exploring and realising potential.  And then finding people you can work with to do the rest.  It is about negotiating your self interest and building the right team.  All really successful business are team starts.

Why don’t we teach this?

  1. Find out what you love.  What you really love. Something that will keep you engaged for years while you strive for mastery and excellence.
  2. Get really good at it and keep getting better.  Specialise.
  3. Understand the importance of other things that you do not love.  Learn to respect and value them.  If you are a creative/digerati this is likely to be management, sales and marketing. (Most creatives and digitals have spent many hours over many years working alone honing their craft.  They tend to be introverted and uncomfortable with conflict.  Hence the aversion to management, sales and marketing.)
  4. Find other people who love doing the bits you hate.  Form a team.  A strong team. Form it with care. Take your time.  Unpicking the wrong team can be very expensive.
  5. Collaborate on developing a vision and an action plan for the business.
  6. Act – act often.
  7. Reflect and learn.

Simple.

DO NOT TRY TO DO IT ALL.  You will build a mediocre business.  You will find yourself falling out of love with large parts of it.

Dave Pannell from the Design Mechanics recognised that he would perhaps never have been a really great graphic artist (I think I heard you say that Dave).  And my guess is that this freed him up to run a great design business.  His job is to work on the business as it grows and to spend less time working in it.

Liz Cable from Reach Further is building an agile team of freelancers and employees covering all the main bases.  Balancing the demands of MD/entrepreneur working on the business, and passionate digerati working in the business is already a challenge.  Being  1.4 of an FTE is not sustainable.

I suspect that Liz will either have to spend more time in the MD role or find someone the team trusts to take this on, freeing her up to surf the wave of technology and its application to building better businesses.  Or she may find a way of balancing the two.  However if the growth plans she outlined are to be realised I suspect a decision one way or another will be required before too long.

You see the real job of the entrepreneur is to manage the art of becoming.  It is about the emergence of identity; building a life and a living – not the development of cash flow forecasts or the ticking of boxes on a competence framework.  And when we take this seriously we will develop much more powerful and engaging process for enterprise education and build more powerful, sustainable and great businesses.

We must remember that the Latin root of educate is ‘to lead out’.   Our job is to facilitate the emergence of identity – not to pour in the trivia of business skills.

Getting the right enterprise clients

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I recently received an e-mail from a friend and customer of mine who is managing a size-able enteprise project:

“Mike

I am using the training that me and the team have had from you to inform a business plan.

We are identifying an issue with people coming to us wanting funding for safety passports, fork lift truck licences etc. We are letting them apply straight away, but then they go away and we don’t hear from them again. 

To ensure we have more impact and build the relationship I’m going to look at solutions like using a minimum number of outreach sessions before unlocking other opportunities e.g. funding.  Where we have a relationship with the client we find out more about them, including often that they don’t really want what they are asking for in the first instance and rather something else, or that there are bigger issues holding them back. Also this process can weed out those people who can really afford to pay for training themselves – if we pay for them we are changing nothing about them or the world.

I don’t want to go down the Jobcentre route of the client having to be out of work and desperate for at least 6 months or 3 months to access any support but I think if word gets round you have funding then you get overrun with people, not all of whom have many barriers, which is what we’re finding.

I think this sends me back to thinking about who and how we really want to help and work with and to what end.  I think a lot of it is in the contracting that you describe in the Enterprise Coaching cycle.  Having the opportunity to build rapport with the client and really set out what you are both bringing to that relationship.

Yours…”

This outlines a number of challenges that are faced by enterprise support projects – which few have the courage to tackle head on – because it might make “the numbers” look worse.

As soon as you start to offer funding or direct opportunities to people, you start to attract a lot of the wrong kind of client.  Well, perhaps the right kind of client – but with the wrong motivation – and with a fundamental  misunderstanding of the power and potential of  your offer to them.  People motivated by a desire for handouts or quick fixes, rather than those that really want to work towards long term and sustainable progress.

You really want to ONLY attract people who come to you because you can help them by being kind, compassionate, caring, supportive and challenging.  ie the ONLY thing you offer is life changing transformational coaching. 

All the other transactional stuff (skills, money, training, premises etc) is available elsewhere in the system. Our job is to build the desire/commitment/hunger to help people to use it. 

I don’t think the answer is to delay helping people to access what they think they want.  Although we should know that most of our clients will initially present us with what I call ‘A BIG LIE’.  Very few clients will present us with their truths until we have earned their trust and repsect. 

They nearly all tell us a big, fat, safe lie to begin with. 

The answer is to help them to get some of that stuff (otherwise they will see us as useless and hard to work with) and challenge them as to what they REALLY want to do with it – and will it give them what they are looking for? 

This is all about being able to be acceptant and confrontational – which I also cover in the enterprise coaching training.