Opinion

Being an Entrepreneur

I am often asked to come up with one attribute that best describes an entrepreneur. My favourite response is 'being right about everything', a delicate mix of supreme confidence and impossible arrogance.

This is another way of describing the important prerequisite for anyone starting a new business: the need for total self-belief. However good your idea, there are always plenty of people who will question your ability to deliver, which can enrage entrepreneurs as it is always much easier to pick holes in a new business idea than actually to get off your backside and start a company. But another key entrepreneur attribute is 'not seeing the wood for the trees'; common sense and perspective can go out of the window in the white heat of enthusiasm for a new venture.

In our book The Beermat Entrepreneur we stress the need for the entrepreneur to listen to the good advice of mentors, to delegate key tasks top-quality 'Cornerstones' and then not interfere unnecessarily. The best entrepreneurs realise this, and hire people at least as effective and opinionated as themselves, which can be a volatile combination.

Step forward Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun, and fortunate enough to have worked closely with Rupert Murdoch, one of the world's most powerful and successful entrepreneurs. It is difficult to imagine a higher-pressure job than editing a Fleet Street tabloid, having to satisfy on a daily basis the interests of both a highly-motivated proprietor as well as entertain and inform a large readership, with the government of the day often caught in the crossfire.

And of course it was not all plain sailing. Kelvin MacKenzie told me the story of having to send a fax to Rupert Murdoch explaining that having finally looked at all the evidence they would indeed have to pay Elton John's lawyers one million pounds. This resulted in an industrial-strength twenty minute phone call from the proprietor, leaving the editor wondering why he had not been fired.

The simple answer is that Rupert Murdoch clearly felt Kelvin MacKenzie was still the right man for the job, despite this particular problem. But I am sure that the proprietor-editor dynamic goes a lot deeper than that, reflecting a pattern common to other powerful and charismatic entrepreneurs and their Cornerstones.

Cornerstones know they will inevitably have to stand up to the entrepreneur sooner or later. The entrepreneur should have the wisdom to accept this confrontation, judge it on its merits, and, when appropriate, take the advice on board, for the greater good. The experienced Cornerstone also knows to take it in good grace when their good idea is later claimed by the entrepreneur as their own.

Large companies pack their boards with the great and the good to add a wider perspective and, if necessary, mediate between the Chief Executive and their operational team. In smaller companies egos can take over, resulting in a spiral of confrontation and counter-claims, which can be very destructive, if not actually fatal, to the enterprise.

Everyone working for a powerful entrepreneur has an array of colourful anecdotes to share with family and friends. A typical audience response is to query why they still work for such an irrational martinet, with an underlying suspicion that perhaps they do it because they actually secretly enjoy the mood swings and abuse.

My experience is that Cornerstones work for entrepreneurs simply because they find them inspiring. Kelvin MacKenzie was inspired by Rupert Murdoch to become an entrepreneur himself and after leaving the Sun had mixed success with L!veTV, but later turned around Talk Radio which was eventually sold for a tidy sum.

Today Kelvin MacKenzie is working on his next entrepreneurial venture but remains a columnist at his spiritual home, The Sun. He considers he always understood the views and aspirations of the typical Sun reader and still clearly enjoys inspiring them; a recent column resulted in thousands of e-mails suggesting he should be Prime Minister.

I definitely felt inspired by listening to Kelvin MacKenzie's stories and left our meeting determined to make this column more controversial, to stimulate some debate, so I thought carefully about what annoys me most about entrepreneurship. I have certainly known some very difficult characters and seen some strange goings-on in my time, but if there is one thing which really gets me reaching for the metaphorical shotgun, it is the television programme Dragon's Den.

Why oh why do they only make programmes that seem to revel in the humiliation of entrepreneurs? Answers on a postcard to the usual address, please....

By Mike Southon

This article is © Mike Southon 2008. All rights reserved.
The article originally published in the Financial Times www.ft.com/mikesouthon
Mike Southon can be contacted at mike@beermat.biz www.beermat.biz