Business Corner
STRATEGIES & ANALYSIS
BY PHIL PHILLIPS, PHD
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
PHILLIPS@CHEMARKCONSULTING.NET
The entreprenuer’s narrow part
of the hour glass
What is
the true
defintion
of an
entreprenuer?
Chemark analyzed 120 closely held coat- ings and adhesives businesses ranging in size from $5 million to $150 million. For
arguments sake, we initially defined those heading these privately held companies as “
entreprenuers.” We understood there are those who
would argue that entrepreneurs exist within
traded corporations as well, but we chose to focus
on the former in this case.
Our research observations basically told us
in conclusion, that these entrepreneurs wanted two contradictory satisfactions in their
business life:
• Free time to do what they “really” wanted to
do; while concurrently
• Wanting to control almost everything, and
enjoying the confusion.
The “hour glass” analogy is a very straightforward thesis we tended to prove in our
research. Stated simply, therefore, our conclusion was that the typical entrepreneurs within the group we studied wanted more time
away from the day-to-day business environment while at the same time enjoying being
caught up in the somewhat chaotic minutia of
it all. Yes, they even crave returning to what
brought them into this business in the first
place. Like going back into the lab or the
plant and just “tinkering.”
WHY WAS THIS HAPPENING?
To answer this question we first had to revisit the definition of the term entrepreneur
itself. Wikipedia defines an entrepreneur as:
...a person who has possession of a
new enterprise, venture or idea and
assumes significant accountability
for the inherent risks and the outcome. The term is originally a loan-word from French and was first
defined by the Irish economist
Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in
English is a term applied to the type
of personality who is willing to take
upon herself or himself a new venture
or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist is
believed to have coined the word
“entrepreneur” first in about 1800. He
said an entrepreneur is “one who
undertakes an enterprise, especially a
contractor, acting as intermediatory
between capital and labour.”
So, to reassure ourselves that we were defining and describing our efforts correctly, we had
to reanalyze our interview pool group and
determine how many of the 120 entrepreneurs
were currently managing a business that had
reached equilibrium—an up and running
business—versus, as the Wikipedia definition
states, a person who has possession of a new
enterprise, venture or idea. The emphasis on
“new” in the definition forced us to cull out 115
of the 120 interviewees, leaving only five true
entrepreneurs by this strict definition.
The question then arises, “If the only reason
we entitle heads of closely held businesses entrepreneurs, who have not, by definitional contrast,
