The Dance
Between
Business Owner and Entrepenuer
FROM SABEF Struggledork:
Business: a person, partnership, or corporation engaged in commerce, manufacturing, or a service; profit-seeking enterprise or concern.
Key: profit seeking
Business Owners are risk adverse.
The Business Owner: My definition of a business owner is someone who plans for and manages from the future because they have information coming in on a daily basis that is aggregating and showing patterns that can create futures.
I find it almost insane that banks and financiers ask entrepreneurs to do a business plan. Most entrepreneurs I know are so full of the success in their heads they will put numbers together that tell as many lies as are needed and are not based in any of their own realities. They are just something that they think the lender wants to see.
That is why a business owner’s skills are so important for the ongoing success of any long term business idea/venture. They work from existing patterns that have been created over time. If the business owner can see the habit that created the pattern, they can now start to predict futures and manage the way forward as the idea becomes a business. In other words, they can see who buys, why they buy, the pricing of the products, what it takes to be profitable, and how we are going to get to that future. At that moment, the business owner has the information to be able to stand in the future. It is the business owner’s abilities to see futures that are ultimately what makes or breaks the business.
Bucky Fuller would say, “Unity is Plural, at a minimum of 2”. Every business needs a level of risk- embracing and a level of risk-adversity to grow into a long-term, viable and then sustainable venture. They need a partnership of both to sustain a successful enterprise. It is the role of the Entrepreneur to take an idea to the level of viability and then turn the business over to risk-adverse Business Owners/Mangers to get to a point of sustainability. Throughout the life of the business, there is a continual and ongoing dance between the Business Owner and the Entrepreneur to manage the way forward. I think this is a very important part of why businesses often don’t become long term. Either the Entrepreneur totally moves off to develop the next risk (and stave off boredom) or the Business Owner strangles the business by not being able to develop and adjust to the futures that are required.
When an idea grows to a business footing, this is now the foundation of the business… this is not the end of the Entrepreneur. The entrepreneur now can take on the role of developing new products and new areas to apply and appease their risk-taking nature. The different challenge for the Entrepreneur now is the business is no longer a start-up idea…. it is now a thriving, living entity, which they must consider and care for. That is my biggest problem…. I like risk and I get bored easily. Sometimes I have to watch my nature and not devalue the role of Business Owner and thus cause so many problems that I become the problem. In spirit, I am a great Entrepreneur. I also am able to be a good Business Owner.
I’m a very good Entrepreneur. Business is a team game and I am always on the look-out for Business Owners who can manage the risk I create.
An Entrepreneur needs to get out of the way of the day-to-day functionings of the Business Owner, otherwise he/she will drive the Business Owner nuts. And yet when energy is needed in the business for direction, the energy of the Entrepreneur is needed in the business again.
Until next week.. When we will talk about the four golden rules of business.
SABEF Struggledork
From Sipho:
Business owners and entrepreneurs are just so different by nature and in the skills they have. They are also vastly different in their mode of operation (particularly under stress!!). A business is an entity… a living, breathing creation that to me needs to be treated like a baby, then child and then mature person. And a good business needs the skills of both the business owner and entrepreneur to thrive and move towards sustainability.
Only I Entrepreneur or 2 Entrepreneurs together = crazy, wild, unpredictable, not much finished, too much unmanaged risk, usually disaster and death of the business.
Only 1 Business Owner or 2 Business Owners together = stagnant, stifling, boring, lack of growth, not enough risk and death of the business.
There is a synergy that is created when one of each comes together to form a business. I am not saying it is smooth… most of the time, it is not. It is robust, loud and exciting. But the dance between the 2 people and the energy they bring to the business is the magic that can be created in a well-run business.
Most of the time, SABEF Struggledork and I respect each other’s strengths and weaknesses and get on extremely compatibly (it has only taken 21 years!!). Sometimes, we just bang heads and drive each other nuts. He drives me crazy ‘coz he starts so many things before I have completed the last lot of tasks. And he creates unpredictable chaos where ever he goes! And I drive him nuts, ‘coz I methodically plod along getting stuff done, I sometimes do not understand what he is talking about and I sometimes do not follow his instructions as well as I could!
Having said that, I trust SABEF Struggledork and what he is doing. I trust that he has the best interests of our family, our business and all those who rely on it at heart. I don’t know how I would go if I needed to follow somebody else who is “a crazy person” masquerading as an entrepreneur, and there are many around. People who profess to be entrepreneurs, when actually, they are not. They don’t know what they are doing and are just reckless with time, energy and money (often their own and other people’s). They usually end up losing a whole lot of all of them.
SABEF Struggledork can see the big picture about what needs to happen and where we need to go. He has an amazing capacity to join together seemingly unrelated dots to form a big, useful picture. I can see what needs to happen to the smaller details to ensure a profit each day. For some of my projects, I do 90% of the grunt work and when it all gets too much and I get too tired, SABEF Struggledork comes in and finishes the last 10% so that the job is complete. That’s all I want… things completed so I can move on to the next thing!! SABEF Struggledork knows he can start new projects and that I will come in and clean-up the mess created!
Please give us your comments/thoughts about all this. Do you think you are more like an Entrepreneur or more like a Business Owner? Can you relate to anything we have written? Please share.
Here’s to another big week next week, doing all the EOM clean-up required before Christmas!!
Sipho
And there it is! The Dance Between Business Owners and Entrepreneurs
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