What makes a person set up on their own & why some succeed and many others don’t, is a fascinating subject in its own right.
Before we start though, I don’t like the term ‘entrepreneur’ or more to the point, it’s so overused that it’s lost some of its meaning and impact.
Everyone who runs their own business claims to be an entrepreneur. The guy who leaves a steady job and goes solo only to work primarily for one or two clients, without employing anyone else. Is he really an entrepreneur? Are sub-contractors entrepreneurs or just people who in another life would still be on the payroll.
Even working solo but with many clients, does that really qualify him to wear the entrepreneural badge?
But in the absence of a better word, we’ll stick with it.
Like many people of my generation, you didn’t come across entrepreneurs on every street corner during my formative years and early career. Such people were rarely in the media and those that were often had something ‘odd’ about them.
For normal kids, like myself, getting a steady job, a career was the option. Maybe my parents were unadventurous & passed that on but looking at my contemporaries at school and college, I can’t think of anyone who didn’t at least start safe. Accountants, management trainees, lawyers, IT gurus – all collected their wage at the end of the month.
So I blame the parents!
No not really, I think it was just a reflection of the times and the importance still attached to security, university and taking things slowly. Plus the money to launch an idea was not as accessible as nowadays.
So I did the right thing. Graduated from college, joined a management training programme with a large financial services company and life was sweet.
But change was on the horizon. Margaret Thatcher, the Internet & ‘greed is good’ were just around the corner.
