2008 Woodie Awards
The keys to entrepreneurship
By Jake Rezac
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"To be an entrepreneur, you must be willing to take on a new venture and accept full responsibility for the outcome," JP O'Brien said last Tuesday to a room full of Colorado School of Mines' (CSM) students and faculty, as well as people from the community. "I've been successful because my risk-taking has been based on knowledge." O'Brien is the Executive in Residence in the Division of Economics and Business at CSM and the CEO of SageFire, Inc., which, according to their website, "Provides financial management solutions and services to help entrepreneurs and small business owners get the most from their businesses." His lecture, called "The Spirit of Entrepreneurship," focused on what it means to be an entrepreneur, as well as the common mistakes which go along with entrepreneurship, and how to avoid them.
He began his lecture, to which about fifty people eagerly listened, asking what they thought it meant to be entrepreneur. Answers ranged from "Somebody that starts something on their own" to "Someone who is self-employed." O'Brien commented that it comes from a French word which means "To undertake." To undertake a venture, O'Brien intoned, as well as to undertake risk. According to O'Brien, the best question he has asked his clients has been "What are we going to undertake together?" He continued, presenting the listeners with a list of eleven traits, and asked them to rate each trait as being positive or negative for entrepreneurship. These traits ranged from being motivated to achieve to being a compulsive gambler. He also asked them to rate themselves on each of these traits.
Then, the group went over their thoughts on the traits. Some of his responses were surprising, challenging the commonly thought of traits of entrepreneurs. For example, O'Brien gave the opinion that high risk taking was a negative trait. He said that "Undertaking certain responsibility for an outcome" was important, but taking too high of risks was bad. On this topic, he also said that "The problem is the person won't give up - a person thinks they'll change things by doing the same thing in the same way." Later in his talk, he returned to the subject of risk taking. "You need to have, as an entrepreneur… high risk tolerance."
After discussing the traits of entrepreneurs, O'Brien talked about his factors of success. These include "Vision, passion, leadership, innovation, communication and resilience." He focused particularly on passion, "I like to look to people who like to set goals and have passion behind them."
These factors of success having been discussed, O'Brien moved on to the pitfalls which are common among entrepreneurial ventures. Most important among these is what O'Brien called "The valley of despair." This is the time in a venture when revenue of a company is well below what the entrepreneurs are expecting - it's an occurrence which happens to all ventures, according to O'Brien. However, given enough time and effort, a good venture will come out of the rut. "This feeling [associated with the valley of despair] affects you so deeply at your core… I can't say anything but to tell you it's okay… you need to recognize when you're in the valley of despair, and it's not the end of the world."
O'Brien ended his lecture by discussing different types of entrepreneurs. These include entrepreneurs, who measure success in terms of revenue; intrapreneurs, who measure success on organizational change and social entrepreneurs, who measure their success in terms of social change. In regards to the latter, O'Brien said, "I think it's very difficult for a company that has a requirement to make money for its investors to make social change."
To sum up, he mentioned that someone once asked him, "Do you see the world simply as opportunity after opportunity?" This, along with the factors of success he mentioned, which he thinks he possesses, makes him a good entrepreneur - someone who has started three of his own businesses. He asked to listeners to try to think of the world this way, and in doing that, they might become entrepreneurs too.
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