Sounds like a strange call to actions, not being a solo entrepreneur if you are in a team. A contradiction in terms? No, not really. There is a wealth of literature on the importance of building a team to work on an idea. There is a nice article on Entrepreneur.com on the “There is no ‘I’ in Startup“. I don’t wish to suggest that it is impossible to create a startup if you are on your own, far be it, if in doubt check out my friends at FounderCafe.com (formerly micropreneur academy) that has a wealth of solo entrepreneurs.
What I’m talking about is being in a team situation, i.e. having a group of people who are notionally founders/team members but really you are the only one carrying the can and moving things forward. Hence the solo entrepreneur in a team. To illustrate this, I’ll offer an analogy that my old Professor Roger Needham used that was, if you are making an English Breakfast, you require eggs and bacon. In this breakfast making team, the chickens are interested observers and the pigs are committed. So that is a question to ask yourself, who on your team are pigs and who are chickens. It should be self-evident that you want as many people as possible to be pigs if you want to all row in the same direction towards your goals.
Which would you rather be in this project the chicken or the pig? Photograph: Courtesy Creative Commons/Flickr/ Arnold Gatilao |
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But how harmful can chickens be? Well, as a pig, you only have limited time and resource to ‘make things happen’. Chickens can waste your time talking, having endless meetings or sending you down blind allies just because they are there, rather than they need to be explored to reach your goals.
So what to do? If you have yet to build your team, pay lots of attention to not just what skills potential founders bring to the party but also their motivations. Harvard academic Noam Wasserman in his excellent book “The Founders Dilemma” has numerous case studies about founding teams who had asymmetric motivation and commitment. This is often looked at in allocation of stock (well I say often, actually the norm seems to be equal share regardless of whether you are a pig or a chicken)… but stock allocation is a separate post. I would actually think about whether you can do without someone on your team if they do not have the same commitment. Bizarrely, this might result in the ‘ideas person’ not being part of the team, or at least not being part of the operational team i.e. they might have an advisory role and nothing more. Remember the old adage – ideas are cheap, it is execution (delivering) that counts.
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