SME Blog

Great success whilst being a 9-5 person?

Running a SME is a consuming affair.  Have you met anyone who has achieved this with great success whilst being a 9-5 person? 

For most people success requires hard work and effort.  A comparison with the sporting world and we see even naturally gifted athletes have to be driven and put in the extra effort to get to the top.  The same could be said of becoming and being a partner in a firm of Chartered Accountants.  According to the article in the Observer, Scott Cormack, a partner at KPMG, certainly worked hard.  70 hour working weeks were common.  The resulting stress is thought to have contributed to two broken marriages and prostrate cancer. 

It is never easy is to obtain a good work life balance whilst driving for success.  However, I do believe that the workflow and culture of an organisation makes a huge difference.  Good workflow saves time and an open culture means not being chained to a desk to deliver results.  The aim being to achieve more from the effort put in.  In an ideal world this would be enough, but the reality is for most successful SME owners there are times when you are going to have to work painfully hard.  Just try to avoid doing it all the time.

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Social networking and the entrepreneur

For entrepreneurs social networking has enormous potential.  With each technology sea change comes new opportunities.  Small businesses such as Google and YouTube have grown to major global concerns.  Try to think of traditional sectors where this has happened in the last 15 years?

For an insight into social networking I recommend listening to the Standford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast.  It features, amongst others, the key individuals form Facebook, Myspace and Ning in a panel discussion.

I find it hard to think of non technology sectors where this kind of cooperation and openness would happen.  A more cynical view would be that this particular cake is more than big enough to share.  Whatever your view, the expectation is social networking will become part of our lives just like email and mobile phones.

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Podcast - Peter Rogol

It’s easy to add video content to this blog.  All you need to do is cut and paste some HTML code into the blog article to be posted.   Websites, such as YouTube, provide the HTML code. 

The HTML code looks like this:

<p><object width="425" height="350"><param value="http://www.youtube.com/v/SOsWniPgA8M" name="movie" /><param value="transparent" name="wmode" /><embed width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/SOsWniPgA8M"></embed></object>

The same principle applies to the below podcast by Dennis Howlett. The MP3 player and podcast were created using HTML code provided by ClickCaster.  It’s a great method of sharing podcasts. 

This podcast is a conversation with Dennis and Peter Rogol.  I work with Peter and here he shares his thoughts on how entrepreneurs should deal with the mountain of bureaucracy and compliance they face in the 21st century.

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Philip Woodgate

Are you a born entrepreneur? - Part II

I'm grateful to my friends at Small & Medium Thoughts for drawing my attention to a medical study that indicates genes are important part of why some people are entrepreneurial.

The conclusions were found by comparing self-employment in 609 pairs of identical twins, who share all the same genes, and 657 pairs of non-identical (fraternal) twins.  Twins share the same rate of entrepreneurs as in the general population.  Where one twin is entrepreneurial the other twin is more likely to be entrepreneurial if they are an identical twin rather than a fraternal twin.  This leads to the conclusion that genes are important or put another way in soccer world cup terms it's Nature 1, Nurture 0.

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Are you a born entrepreneur?

I've always taken an interest in the nature vs nurture debate.   Like science my views have moved like a pendulum,  but since the arrival of our fraternal twins the pendulum has swung more to the nature side.

I wondered when CNN published "Can entrepreneurship be taught?" if it would show that some people are just born entrepreneurs.  Based on the following quotes from successful entrepreneurs in the article you would certainly think so:

"It's in the DNA."

"Entrepreneurship is about having guts -- something professors cannot teach."

and

"The passion for your business is not something you can learn in a classroom."

The pendulum looks like being very much on the nature side, but is there anything helpful that can be learnt?  Business schools have entrepreneurship classes and these classes also include practical trials where students can make mistakes and learn from them.  Everyone learns by their mistakes and that includes entrepreneurs so these classes should prove useful.  However, most entrepreneurs don't do these classes and invariably learn the hard way.

Personally, I picture it like an individual running. Some people are just better at it than others, but to be successful you need to train hard and have the support of a good team.

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