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Learning from Serial
Entrepreneurs By Steve Ernst, CPA  I was fortunate enough to attend the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2006 Awards last November. The weekend was filled with presentations from extremely knowledgeable and experienced executives, authors and broadcast personalities. In addition to hearing a heartfelt keynote by Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons and co-founder of Home Depot, there were also cogent and timely political thoughts from Mary Matalin and James Carville, and talks from authors Marcus Buckingham (First
Break All the Rules) and Kauffman Foundation president Carl Schramm (The
Entrepreneurial Imperative).
However, it was a panel discussion of leading entrepreneurs, expertly moderated by Deborah Norville, which caused the audience of over 1,000 to sit up in their chairs and take notes. The panel included:
The ideas What each of these individuals has accomplished amounts to much more than just a listing of companies founded, IPOs, and shareholder/stakeholder equity positions. Each used the word "team," and you felt they meant it to the marrow of their bones. Herbert Kohler spoke of the four key competencies any businessperson with an entrepreneurial spirit had to possess before survival could be considered a possibility. The first was a commitment to building trust. He said it as if trust was paramount, the foundation, the bedrock of what he'd done in establishing and building the Kohler Company. He said it as if it, to him, was a given. You have incalculable opportunities to establish, build upon and solidify the trust you need from and in those who are hitching their wagons to your idea, those who are helping you achieve your goals and those to whom you are talking as funding sources to underwrite your growth. However, lose it once and it's gone forever. It was, according to Kohler, the most valuable asset you can acquire and the easiest to squander if you did not make it the centerpiece of every decision and every utterance. Second in his key competencies was the need to set extraordinarily high standards for yourself as the entrepreneur. Personal goals and the perseverance to attain them was the example that would be seen by everyone else in the organization as the standard, the expected, the baseline. The third key competency was the need to drive continuous improvement. He stressed the word "drive" – the key leadership characteristic when it comes to this focus on getting better. Libraries are filled with self-help books on this topic and companies have taken the concept and made it part of their DNA. But all too often, it's the drive from the top that wanes and lessens in the face of other priorities, pressures and demands. The fourth area of key concern for any entrepreneur should be to keep a focus on the end customer at all times – not the pass-through customer, not the channel, but the person who depends on the product doing what it was promised to do. Again, all too often in an entrepreneurial atmosphere this fourth key is taken for granted, but when decisions are made as to product cost and quality, this has to be a competency that can't be argued, qualified or subverted. Other ideas that came out of the short presentations made by each of these examples of perseverance kept the focus on execution, execution, execution and, in today's shrinking globe, internationalizing your ideas at the earliest opportunity. Q&A In a very free-flowing "question-and-answer" period, another area that came under fire from almost all of the award-winning business leaders was the stifling regulatory environment that faces today's startup and growing companies. Kohler noted that an entrepreneur needs to reinvest 90% of earnings each year to give the developing company a chance to survive. However, he said, "Today's regulations inhibit if not eliminate innovation." Dr. Frost was even more to the point when he said that the regulatory environment is onerous to the point of absurdity. When asked about the most important elements of a business plan, the panel focused more on the need to identify risks and contingencies for down times rather than concentrating on the upside potential. The existence of detailed management contingencies for significant downside risks was the sign of a well-thought-out plan as well as an entrepreneur and team with their feet on the ground. |
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