"The government should never be in the business of competing with private business."

Link to Democrat Article:
Audit raises questions over TCC's funding for downtown Starbucks that lost over $200K

Not only did they lose $200,000 they spent over $841,000 to build it out. This is a great example of why the government should not spend taxpayers' money to directly compete against local businesses. The government should create the entrepreneurial ecosystem for private businesses to create goods and services that the market wants. 

As the article points out, FSU has Starbucks as well as two RedEye Coffees, but FSU does not own them or run them they contracted Sodexo to run the businesses and then Sodexo made strategic partnerships with local and national vendors to execute. 

Another great example of the government creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem to thrive is the new South City area. There were empty buildings that were bringing down the neighborhood, so the city created economic incentives in the form of tax credits for private business to come in and risk their own capital. The result? Happy Motoring, Proof, and Catalina Cafe are all investing their own money to revitalize a part of Tallahassee creating jobs and tax revenue. 

Government/Private partnerships as long as they are open, inclusive, and transparent are essential for a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem, but the government should never be in the business of competing with private business. 

Hopefully, this is a good lesson on where the "lines" are.

#business #tax #coffee #investments #government #economics#transparency #partnerships #ecosystem

What are you doing? A Proverb

Are you "The Boss," a manager or a leader? This proverb will let you know.

The Proverb of the WHY: A ancient traveler entering Rome, stops to examine a huge construction project. While admiring the scale of the project, he sees three stone masons, hard at work with their hammers and chisels.

“What are you doing?” asks the traveler.

“Breaking stones,” grunts the first.

“Making a wall,” says the second.

“Building a cathedral!” proclaims the third.

Helping your team understand "the why" is the difference between them breaking stones and building a cathedral. Bosses have people who break stones, managers have employees who make walls, and leaders have partners in building a cathedral. 

Ask your team "what they are doing?" If the answer is not, "a cathedral," you have some leadership work to do.

Entrepre-Villains: The Deadly Enemies of Your Startup

This is the follow-up blog post to Superpreneurs: What's your Entrepreneurial Superpower? you may want to check it out before reading this one. 

You may have heard the statistic that 90% of all startups fail. Actually, this number is a bit misleading and not completely accurate. The real statistics according to bis.gov are about 50% fail in the first five years and only about 20% last more than twenty. Still not great, but at least we are going forward into reality with facts instead of fear.

Throughout my life as an entrepreneur, I have seen too many startups fail to reach their full market potential or just flat out fail because of the following nasty Entrepre-Villains. I hope these are helpful and you take the time to harden your startup against these deadly enemies.

Entrepre-Villain #1: Inauthenticity 
Entrepreneurs often navigate in the grey area between marketing their brand as how they see it in the future and the current reality of what they really can deliver. I have seen many startups fail or not reach their full potential because they lost credibility because their enterprise was all show and no go.

Entrepreneur's Defense: Simply be honest about what you can deliver now and what you are working on. People love to help people just starting out, just don't lie to them about what you can deliver, all that will do is make them mad.

Entrepre-Villain #2: Mission Drift
I get it, entrepreneurs need money and if someone is willing to pay you for something that is not at your core, you want to say, "Yes." Unfortunately, when you say, "yes" to things that are not part of your core, you are saying, "no" to what you are trying to start.

Entrepreneur's Defense: Stratic partnerships are a great way to defend your startup against mission drift. By helping a customer connect with the right supplier you win twice now and have banked some goodwill for the future.

Entrepre-Villain #3: Vehement  
While terminal tenacity is a superpreneur superpower, vehement plodding can be the death of your startup. All successful startups have pivoted as they have learned more about their product/service, market factors, and customers. There is no way you are going to design a product or service and launch it in the exact way you envisioned it at the start and if you try you will fail. Tenacity is an entrepreneurial superpower, but being vehemently opposed to pivoting off your original idea is death.

Entrepreneur's Defense: I have found humility to be the best defense against many entrepreneur's tendencies to be detrimentally committed to their original idea. It is pride that makes entrepreneurs hold on to an idea rather than being able to pivot to the breakout solution. 

Entrepre-Villain #4: Apathy
Apathy leads to a slow an agonizing death for a startup. Unlike other villains, this villain creeps in slowly and is hard to detect. It starts in the mind of your time with thoughts like, "it's good enough" or "it really doesn't matter" and ends with missed deadlines or shotty work. Have no doubt, this villain will attack your startup sooner or later and if you fail to lead your team out of it, you will die (or wish you were dead).

Entrepreneur's Defense: I'm sure you have heard the saying, "hire slow and fire fast." This is a very difficult lesson for entrepreneurs to learn and it is more costly every day you let an apathetic team member stay. Apathy is cancer and you either kill the cancer or it will kill you. 

Entrepre-Villain #5: Discouragement
You are going to have setbacks in your startup, it is just the reality of the startup game. How you lead your team through the discouraging times will determine the success or death of your startup. Setbacks, losses, and obstacles are obvious and quickly grab your team's attention and without the right leadership, they can pull your team down into deadly discouragement. 

Entrepreneur's Defense: A scoreboard that tells the companies story will help keep the setbacks, losses, and obstacles in context. Determine key metrics, put them in a public place, and celebrate the wins and milestones in order to keep the setbacks in context. 

All of these Entrepre-Villans remind me of Walt Kelly's long-running cartoon strip, Pogo. The strip to the left shows Porkypine and Pogo walking through the forest, having trouble navigating through trash and pollution when Pogo turns to Porkypine and says, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Entrepreneurs are often times their own biggest enemy by being inauthentic, having lack of focus, refusing to pivot, allowing apathy on the team, or by losing sight of the overall progress and succumbing to the discouragement of the current situation. This is why smart investors like to invest in entrepreneurial teams and not an entrepreneur's idea. Ideas are not special, people who make ideas a reality are special and in order to build something great, you need a team. 

Superpreneurs: What's your Entrepreneurial Superpower?

Being a successful entrepreneur requires superpowers that most people do not possess. The following six superpowers are needed for today's entrepreneurs to have victory over the entrepre-villains (next blog post) who are trying to kill their brand.

Relentlessly Resourceful

The fact is as an entrepreneur you are never going to have all the resources you need in the way you initially thought. Superpreneurs are relentlessly resourceful in finding what they need through nontraditional channels or are able to figure out a completely different way of getting the job done.

Terminally Tenacious

I've met a lot of smart people with clever ideas who hit one roadblock or another and were never able to bring their idea it to market. To me, the best entrepreneurial superpower is not intelligence, connections, or money it is terminal tenacity. Why? Because as my Mum used to say, "persistence wears resistance" and the best entrepreneurs in the world are the embodiment of that axiom. Investors I know will bet on an entrepreneur who is terminally tenacious every time over someone with a great idea or polished business plan.  

Preeminently Passionate 

The etymology of the word 'passion' is from the Late Latin word passionem meaning “to willingly endure suffering.” If there was ever a superpower, an aspiring entrepreneur is going to need, it is preeminent passion because the life of an entrepreneur is hard. It is early mornings and late nights. It is celebration dinners that are marked by adding an egg to your ramen then getting back to work. It is watching your friends house while they are vacationing in Europe. If a person is not "willing to suffer" they should go find a nice office job somewhere. 

Overtly Optimistic 

I've never met a successful entrepreneur who is a pessimist or a "realist" which pessimists like to call themselves. In fact, the best entrepreneurs have the superpower of overt optimism (not to be confused with overoptimism). Investors, team members, and customers need to be inspired and believe they can create the change they want to see in the world. The entrepreneurial superpower of overt optimism is the strength your team relies on to keep moving forward when the times are tough. 

Enthusiastically Evangelistic  

No one sees or believes in the future you see or believe can be a reality. They're not against you; they are just busy living their life doing the things that make sense to them. Every successful enterprise has a lead evangelist who is out "sharing the good news" about how your product or service can make life better. Without an enthusiastic evangelist, you may discover a cure for cancer, but if you don't have someone who can shout it from mountain tops, it will never save one life. 

Serendipitous Solver 

I was recently on a local NBC station being interviewed with one of the best serial entrepreneurs I know, Matt Thompson the Managing Partner of For the Table. During the interview, Matt was asked, "What his main duty was as an entrepreneur?" And he said, "Solve problems." That's it! The primary duty of an entrepreneur is to solve problems. Entrepreneurs solve a problem with the product or service they create, they solve problems along the way to bring it to market, and they solve problems when it gets out into the wild. If an entrepreneur cannot solve a problem, then their investors, team, and customers suffer.  

Let me leave you with a quote from George Bernard Shaw, who said, "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people persist in trying to adapt the world to them. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable people." Entrepreneurs are by nature "unreasonable people," they disrupt the status quo and create a new world in which they want to live. Pretty presumptuous, huh? I love it.

What's your Entrepreneurial Superpower? 

Up Next: Entrepre-Villains: The Deadly Enemies of Your Startup