Entrepreneurs Blend Passion and Prudent Risk Taking

Successful entrepreneurs are fueled by a passion to change the world tempered by prudent risk taking. Many risks have to be managed on an ongoing basis.

Entrepreneurs Blend Passion and Prudent Risk Taking

Successful entrepreneurs are fueled by a passion to change the world tempered by prudent risk taking. Many risks have to be managed on an ongoing basis cannot be eliminated once and for by careful planning or the achievement of a particular milestone:

managing cash flow and the risk of a downturn,
meeting your obligations to your family as well as your business,
continually developing new skills and connections to cope with evolving customer needs and new competitive threats.

Noam Wasserman had an article yesterday’s Wall Street Journal on “How an Entrepreneur’s Passion Can Destroy a Startup” that focused on entrepreneurial passion and prudent risk taking. He has some excellent advice with regards to a shared risk analysis with your spouse (and a plan how to decided when to quit before you are in the middle of the roller coaster ride) and identifying potential risks and problems with you plan (what Gary Klein has called a “pre-mortem” in other contexts is incredibly useful for a startup team to do periodically, not as a way of hanging crepe but of anticipating and preventing or mitigating foreseeable problems).

Here is a list of risks he identified

Wasserman Tests: Excess Entrepreneurial Passion

Wasserman Test: Do You …	SKMurphy Commentary
Feel like you are on mission to change the world?	This is a good thing. I think this is probably a good thing. Doesn’t mean you should prepare to run your business. But if align your business with a higher purpose I think you are more likely to persevere.
Get insulted when someone points out legitimate flaws in your idea or product?	This is a red flag, but it may be as much about personal maturity as anything else.
Find it hard to come up with pitfalls you might face or to detail a worst case scenario for your venture?	This is a red flag, but it may be less about passion and more a lack of knowledge about business or your industry. You need to do premortem’s periodically to prepare for problems and mitigate those you can.
Raise money from professional investors when your #1 goal is to “work for myself” or “to control my own destiny”?	I think this is a low probability situation. This can happen but normally entrepreneurs motivated by a desire for autonomy don’t seek professional investment and those that do are typically screened out as part of due diligence.
Hire friends and family whom you may not be able to fire if they underperform or circumstances change, because you are confident you won’t face those issues?	I think this is a low probability situation. If the business is not doing well typically friends and family want out, if it’s doing well you can often find people role that fits their talents if they worked with you in the beginning.
Neglect to run careful tests to assess consumer demand?	This is an ongoing challenge not something you can ever fix or satisfy. Large business fail at new product launches quite frequently as well, I think this is less a passion problem and more something that is very hard to do.
Assume you won’t need a financial cushion in case the venture takes longer than anticipated to generate income?	This is an ongoing challenge not something you can ever fix or satisfy. Sometimes it’s the fact that a team is almost broke that forces them to make the necessary changes to succeed.
Resist talking honestly with your significant other about the money and the time you expect to commit to your venture, and about the potential pitfalls you face?	This is a real risk. This is a hard conversation but one that has to happen frequently. You have to treat you spouse or significant other as a member of the board of directors. I don’t think this is a passion problem per se, but failure to make a joint decision and keep them informed is a real risk.
Figure you don’t need to address the holes in your skills or networks in advance of founding?	This is an ongoing challenge not something you can ever fix or satisfy. There are always holes in your skills, consumer demand changes require new skills, competitors attack you in unanticipated ways that require new expertise, your network is never broad enough. I don’t think you are ever prepared enough and you have to be learning and connecting on an ongoing basis

I was struck by one paragraph:

For instance, almost 800 founders took a predictive test that evaluated their startup ideas, and then received recommendations about the next steps they ought to take. Thomas Astebro and his colleagues found that a sizable percentage of founders who received a recommendation to halt progress on their startups because the idea wasn’t commercially viable kept going anyway—29% of this group kept spending money, and 51% kept spending time, developing their idea. On average, they doubled their losses before giving up on pursuing their idea.

It Does Not Help To Tell An Entrepreneur Their Idea is Not Viable

It’s not helpful to tell entrepreneurs that their idea is not commercially viable. All new ideas are not commercially viable when judged by “conventional wisdom” until conventional wisdom changes. Entrepreneurs are probably even less inclined to take advice from college professors who have never started a company. If you could reliably predict the economic viability of new idea you would not be selling analytics you would be making investments. Here is Thomas Astebro’s bio from Genesis Analytics

Tom Astebro is currently Associate Professor in Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo. He has seven years of experience in scorecard development. Tom developed the Genesis algorithms and technology as part of research at the University of Waterloo that was sponsored by CIBC and Nortel and earned the distinction as the creator of one of the three “Most Promising Technologies” in a recent Canadian competition.

Tom has published 29 articles, made 49 presentations at conferences, obtained research funding from NSERC, SSHRC, MMO, Carnegie Mellon, Telia, Volvo, Handelsbanken, and the Sweden-America Foundation and won ten international/national research awards. His research has been mentioned in Business Week, the Financial Post, the Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen. He has worked as a management consultant for banks, insurance and manufacturing companies in Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands and has taught at Universities in Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Australia. Tom holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.B.A and a M.Sc. from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

Encourage Prudent Risk Taking But Don’t Try To Blunt Passion

What is very helpful is to get entrepreneurs to test their key assumptions–“what else would have to be true for your business to work”–and get them to start testing critical aspects of a plan. When a peer entrepreneur is working on a idea that you don’t think is viable, it doesn’t help to tell them “I don’t think it will work” or even “Here is why I don’t think it would work.”

Instead, think about framing it as

What risks are you worried about?
Here are three challenges I think you business has to overcome to be viable. Do you have evidence or results that indicate that this won’t be a problem?
What could you do to test or explore how to work around these problems before investing time and money in other activities that don’t attack the riskiest areas first.”

What Would Have To Be True For For Startup to Thrive?

This approach to helping an entrepreneur think through their risks and challenges is something we try and do at a Bootstrapper Breakfast when someone says what they are working on and another attendees says something like “that’s a crappy idea or that will never work.”

We try and get them to think through “what would have to be true for it to work? What are the key challenges they have to manage to make it work?” Because entrepreneurs can always tell their friends with “real jobs” about what they are working on and either be told, “that’s not viable” or “that’s great” (meaning please stop talking about this) and not get useful feedback or critique.

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Entrepreneurs Blend Passion and Prudent Risk Taking