In Defense of the Entrepreneur

First-person account of an entrepreneur's shortcomings as a manager.

Tweet

A few words on behalf of 'bad managers'

I plead guilty to being a living, breathing, crusty, and -- oh, yes -- successful entrepreneur. Four times I put my money where my ideas were, and four times those businesses grew to adulthood. Today more than 230 people are gainfully employed as a result of the success of companies I nurtured. I do not, however, feel an overwhelming rush of pride when I make that statement. For 20 years I sat in my crisis-strewed offices, acting out the Entrepreneur's List of 1,001 Basic Business Errors, making the same needless, redundant, energy-draining mistakes.

I have now sold my last company and, at age 54, am perched comfortably here in Southern California, the land of everlasting golf. The professional managers who bought the company have put me out to pasture. I have no quarrel with that. I was fairly compensated for my efforts. Yet I am troubled by one aspect of what happened, namely, my failure to make the transition from entrepreneur to manager. In that I suspect I am not alone.

I'd guess most entrepreneurs lack the skills and temperament required to manage their companies to maturity. We try to overcome this deficiency with elbow grease and adrenaline, but sooner or later we are forced to turn over the keys to professional managers better equipped to handle the job. That's tough enough. What makes it worse is that many of those managers seem to take pleasure in trumpeting our failings to the world.

A case in point is Steve Bostic, a PepsiCo graduate who took his American Photo Group to the top of the 1987 Inc. 500 list by buying a handful of companies and applying his skills as a professional manager. "Frankly, I detest the word entrepreneur," he said in an interview with Inc. ("Thriving on Order," December 1989, [Article link]). "I prefer to think of myself as an enterprising individual.? Enterprising individuals are?resourceful and disciplined? They've usually been educated in the corporate environment? In my mind, an entrepreneur is someone who doesn't care much about information or facts. He operates on instinct? He's liable to pull out both guns at any moment and start blazing away. Those guys?create havoc with everybody around them. They're always rolling the dice."

Bostic notes that entrepreneurs have a nasty habit of falling in love with their businesses. Enterprising individuals, in contrast, create businesses in order to sell them. "I think the worst thing you can do is to fall in love with a business and lose your objectivity? Business is a way to build equity and value."

Brrrr.

I give Bostic his due. He sounds like the classic professional manager, detached and oh-so-focused. I just wonder if his employees share his coldly objective goals. And by the way, has he been tapping my phones? Sadly, most of the entrepreneurial shortcomings he points out are mine.

Unlike Bostic, I did not get a corporate education before setting out on my own. I became an entrepreneur for the same reason Truman became president: I didn't know any better at the time. I stumbled into my calling. I had no training, no significant business experience -- nothing but a need to provide for my family and an overpowering urge to do it my way.

I had discovered that urge in my initial entrepreneurial venture, undertaken in 1968 while I was still employed by the St. Regis Paper Co. That year three friends and I opened the first racquetball club in the country -- The King's Court, in Edina, Minn. It was an immediate success, and we soon opened a second club. Though I spent barely 10 hours a week in the business, I found the experience both energizing and fulfilling. I had never known you could have fun and make money at the same time. It was my first taste of being an owner rather than an employee. From then on, I couldn't be satisfied with anything less. In 1970 I left St. Regis and went entrepreneuring full-time.

For the next 20 years I was just the sort of entrepreneur Bostic has in mind. I operated on instinct. I fell in love with my business. I shot from the hip. I rolled the dice. Not that I am a gambler by nature. Most of the time I was too intent on the dream to recognize the risks. Even if I had, I lacked the experience and the resources to protect myself. So I took the risks, made the mistakes, and paid the price, and somehow a successful business emerged.

In retrospect it seems to have emerged almost by accident. After scraping together about $100,000, I bought a tiny neighborhood sporting-goods store that had fallen on hard times. The business, General Sports Corp., had a wholesale side, selling uniforms to schools and athletic associations. In 1972 we were having trouble with the screen printing of the uniforms. So I persuaded someone I knew to start a little screen-printing operation in his house. Shortly thereafter I bought the business from him and moved it into a space of its own.

In the next few years the store did well, but the screen-printing company did better. We started similar operations in a half dozen other cities, providing screen-printing services to local sporting-goods stores that had wholesale businesses on the side. In 1978 I sold my stake in The King's Court to raise additional capital for National Screenprint Inc., as the company was now called. I also became a minority partner in a start-up that made and sold weight-training equipment.

 1 | 2  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: