Chapter 5: Characteristics of a Successful ’
Daydreamer Entrepreneur
"I wanted to be an editor or journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going." - Richard Branson
This is a question that I am often asked. People are looking for ‘the secret’ to success as an entrepreneur in the IT field.
The literature out there makes it seem that there is something special and mysterious about successful ‘technopreneurs’ with the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs elevated to something of a demi-God status.
But from my perspective, things are rather more grounded.
In this chapter, I’d like to reveal what I believe are some of the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur, whether you are in the field of IT or in some other field of business endeavour. I believe these traits are common and can be universally applied to all entrepreneurs…if you want to be successful.
Skill Sets
It is a misconception that you have to be the best programmer or the best inventor in your field to be a successful entrepreneur. While I humbly acknowledge that I was good at programming, I must say that there were better programmers out there than I ever was, and ever will be.
While I believe it is necessary that you understand your technologies or programming, it would be detrimental to you as an entrepreneur to spend all your time hiding in your room doing, creating and building stuff. This may work when you are in the development phase, but you need to develop other skills if you are truly interested in commercialising your invention or creation.
Here are some of the other skills you should consider developing:
Communication
The first skill I think that is absolutely necessary as you seek to commercialise your product is the art of communication. This is often difficult for many of us that come from an IT background, as we generally prefer to hang out in our labs or be in front of our computers.
However, without good communication skills, it is very difficult to get people to ‘buy in’ to your product.
Without the ability to communicate the true value and benefits of your product, you are not going to get investors. Without the ability to communicate, you are going to have a hard time convincing other key people to join you in your project, to invest the time and effort to get your product up and running.
In my first job at Singapore Computer Systems, I was not contented being just another employee, I was what they call an ‘intrapreneur’. I thought like an entrepreneur but worked within an existing company.
It took good communication skills to convince my CEO to provide me with the funding and resources to develop my idea. It took persuasion to get my first client who was willing to invest thousands of dollars at that time to implement my idea in their business, even though it wasn’t fully developed yet! Good communication was again necessary to lead my small team to build the software that I had dreamed up.
Without good communication your idea is much less likely to succeed, because building a business requires a team and resources. If you think you can do it all on your own and on your savings, there is of course a chance you can succeed. But if you can communicate your vision to others, and the unique benefits of your product and idea, you will have increased your chances of success by many times compared to the solopreneur working alone who lacks good communication skills and interpersonal relations.
In testing and dark times as you walk through your entrepreneurial journey, which will inevitably happen, your ability to communicate and keep your team believing in your vision is critical for success.
Find Your Horse
Authors Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote a book called ‘Horse Sense’ many years ago. The book was all about finding the right person who can help you to succeed.
As an entrepreneur, this is absolutely critical and true to your chances of success. As in my case, my first ‘horse’ in my clinic database software business were the doctors who were willing to support me initially. By having those first doctors believe in my product, I was able to convince many others to buy my product as there had been successful case studies. This gave other prospective purchasers the confidence to buy from a young geeky guy who was still in college.
As an ‘intrapreneur’ in the first company that I worked for, it was the CEO who was my ‘horse’. He gave me the opportunity to develop my idea, and create a whole new division within the company for my product. He eventually gave me the funding and the autonomy to spin off this business into a separate new entity from the main business, and allowed the company to have its own business functions. This gave the new business the opportunity to go international and be free of the constraints and politics that would have otherwise shackled this new business and severely limited it.
Your ‘horse’ may be an investor. It may be a mentor who has been through what you have and done it before. It could even be a potential partner with skillsets and connections that you need for the business to flourish. Your horse could even be a rich relative or your current boss who is willing to support your endeavours by putting in the necessary time or resources to get you up and running.
For others it could even be a spouse that could give you the emotional support that you need to believe in yourself. It might even be someone in a government agency that believes in your product and vision, and who is willing to help you refine your approach to get you the necessary funding. It could also be that first customer who believes in your product and is willing to pay you upfront before your idea is fully commercialised.
It is important that you spend time identifying who are the ‘horses’ in your business that you can ‘ride’ to success with your business and idea. Find the right horse and convince them to support your idea and it can be that shortcut you’re looking for to help make your journey in entrepreneurship a success. If you don’t find that horse, it may be a longer and more painful road.
Virtually all successful entrepreneurs had someone who gave them a huge helping hand that propelled them towards success. You need to identify and find your horse who believes in your dream.
Be Willing to be at the Right Place at the Right Time
Having the right business at the right time is crucial. If you have a great idea or product that’s not the flavour of the month or in the right industry, no matter how good the product is, you will find it very difficult to get funded or have customers buy your product.
For example, when I was setting up my business intelligence business it was critical for us to be in the Silicon Valley, so I uprooted my family and we went there. At that time the business intelligence industry was hot; there were over 100 businesses that were funded by venture capital money at that time operating in the Silicon Valley.
Without being there I would not have my pulse on the marketplace. It’s one thing reading industry journals and looking on websites to glean information on what your competitors are up to. It is a totally different thing when you are on the ground, being in touch with major industry players and having a real feel for what’s going on. In fact, we personally knew many of our competitors and caught up sometimes just to exchange information on the industry.
If we had chosen to be based in Singapore we would not have got the exposure or the funding that we required at that time. I would not have sat in front of Wells Fargo and raised the $4M we needed to get the business up and running. At the same time, this was the 1980s and funding sources for technology firms in Singapore back then was virtually non-existent; hence my business may not have ever taken off.
This is an important trait of the entrepreneur…having the awareness that the world is your oyster, but that you need to be where the money and action is. At the same time, have the awareness of if your product is currently hot or not.
Dream where you want to be, and be where you need to be to make that dream happen.
Seize Your Opportunities
You need to take your chances and seize your opportunities. Remember the IT industry moves faster than others. If you hesitate or procrastinate, there is a good chance that someone else is going to pounce on the opportunity. And if you are not willing to take a risk, then the opportunity will not last long.
When I was at SCS, I saw the market opportunity. Normally as a new recruit in his first year, no one is going to approach the CEO and say, “Hey boss, I have this great idea and see this fantastic opportunity for our company. Would you give me the time, money and resources to start this initiative?”
But I did it, and in hindsight it even sounds crazy to me today that my boss actually trusted me and gave me the opportunity to go ahead with my idea. I guess very few people see the opportunity and are willing to take the risk to seize it.
While SCS was doing well at the time, my CEO had the vision to see that they were merely resellers and distributors of other people’s software and products. He actually liked the idea of the company developing software of our own that we could sell.
Strangely enough, I was the only one with the guts to go and approach him to sell him my idea. There were many other senior guys around, and I’m sure many of them saw profitable opportunities in this fast-emerging field of IT, yet no one else approached him with their ideas.
Of course I risked my new career and being labeled as an outcast or a ‘smart alec’. The CEO could have thought I was too much of a maverick and put me in the mail room where I could do the least possible damage. Worse still, if the idea didn’t take off I would have been risking my job in the company.
But to me, I was bonded to the company at that time, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of working on mundane stuff every day. Once I was given the green light, it dawned on me that I would likely be fired if I didn’t deliver - I just had to do it.
And that’s the thing, are you willing to take calculated risk? Have you thought of the worst-case scenario and are you prepared to live with that? Are you willing to ‘just do it’ even if you know the risks?
Be willing to take immediate action and a leap of faith to seize your opportunity by its neck. Hesitation and procrastination may result in a lost opportunity that you’ll live to regret.
Strategic Thinking
Creating a prototype requires creativity and problem solving. But running a tech start-up successfully requires strategic thinking.
By strategic thinking, I mean you need to be able to daydream about your business on a longer-term basis. Where do you see your business in the next 5 to 10 years? What is the roadmap to achieve your goals? What are the potential roadblocks in your business and how can you overcome them?
It’s critical to have flexibility in your strategic thinking. Back in SCS I had a big debate with the Chief Technology Officer at that time. I was pushing for our software to have graphic user interface (GUI) to work with Windows 2, but the whole world was running on DOS at that time.
So it seemingly made no sense to be developing something that only a very small fraction of computers were using at that time. But I saw that GUI was the way to go, that it was the future.
I guess you can call it intuition or a gut feeling. I definitely did not have the statistics on my side and Windows 2 was a failure. But when Windows 3 came out my point of view was justified and it was the launch pad for further success for the business.
While you cannot rely on intuition all the time, it is helpful to have it. But in your strategic thinking you need to be considering all possible scenarios and developments in your industry. How you will react to mitigate risk and how you can ride those possible trends to success?
Strategic thinking requires that you take time out from working in the business to daydream, to feel and to foresee where things are going, and how your business and idea can innovate to take advantage and profit from them.
Most entrepreneurs are so busy in the doing - fiddling with new gadgets or in front of their computers. My experience however tells me that the more time you spend simply daydreaming about your business, the more you will be able to come up with better strategies and breakthroughs for your business.
Conviction and Tenacity
When I was a rookie entrepreneur, in hindsight I may not have had the best ideas. I definitely could not write good business plans either. I definitely had no track record of successful start-ups; neither did I do the best and most comprehensive market research reports.
So how did I convince people to invest their time and money to support my ventures? One word: conviction.
At the start, no one is going to believe in your idea except you and your dog. In order to convince other people to buy into your idea, you need to have conviction. It means that you believe in your mind, in fact to the very core of your being, that your idea will succeed.
When you believe it, naturally your belief, enthusiasm and energy will be picked up by others, and they will want to join you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Some people might call it good luck or good timing, but if you don’t have conviction then no matter how much luck or great timing you might have, you are going to have a hard time convincing anyone apart from your dog that your idea is going to work.
Without conviction, you are not going to take that step of faith on your ideas. You are not even going to take the next step to make your idea reality. Your idea is going to wither and die at the first signs of difficulty and hardship. In essence, without conviction you might as well forget about being an entrepreneur, stay at your day job and play with your idea as a weekend hobby.
I know that may sound harsh, but it is going to be much harsher if you quit your job, jump into your start-up and crash just after the starting line.
How did I have the conviction that my ideas would work? Yes, you guessed it! By daydreaming.
The thing is, most entrepreneurs never spend enough time daydreaming about their ideas, so when they present their ideas it lacks conviction because the entrepreneur himself is not fully convinced in his own mind that his idea will work.
By daydreaming, I have run through dozens of alternatives to find the best version of the product. I have imagined all the potential roadblocks to my product and how I can handle them. I have imagined how the customer would be using my system and how they would feel about it.
So by the time I am in front of potential investors, I am 100% convinced in my being and in my mind about my product. There is not a hint of doubt and others can sense that, which makes it easy for them to buy in.
What goes hand in hand with conviction is tenacity. Having the tenacity to keep going on despite various setbacks, and despite the financial and social costs, is not easy.
Having the tenacity to continue as an entrepreneur if your first start-up crashes, that’s the ultimate test of your conviction and tenacity as an entrepreneur.
One of the toughest things I’ve had to do as an entrepreneur was to close down my business intelligence company. It was a tough decision to make at that time and due to a variety of factors, many beyond our control, we decided to wind up the business. It was tough as I had spent 3 years in North America to get this business going. It was like losing your very old child and baby.
But having the conviction and tenacity meant that I was getting my next venture incubated a few months afterwards, starting up a content integration software business for the B2B marketplace, to aggregate big data. This became a successful business that I sold off years later.
Leadership and Vision
As an entrepreneur, one of your key roles is to be the visionary of your business - to have that clear vision of where you want your business to be, and what it’s going to look like in the next 5 to 10 years.
Subsequently, your role is to dream up ideas and innovations for the company, to continuously develop and improve your ideas so that your business can come up with the solutions that the market is looking for.
Generally, as an entrepreneur, you are not the type who is good at operating a business; you are more likely good at dreaming up new ideas. But ideas and innovation alone are not going to be sufficient if you want a truly successful business.
There are a whole lot of other considerations in place that could kill your business if neglected. Considerations such as finance, investor relations, marketing, sales, management, operations, administration…any of these, if not run properly by the right people, could be detrimental to the very survival of your business.
That’s why you need a team, and you need to be the leader of that team.
As a leader, you need many of the traits I have mentioned before. Traits you need to possess include conviction, tenacity, vision, and strategic thinking.
You will also need to be the person who provides direction to your team. As a leader you need to communicate and inspire them to perform at their best. You need to be the general who rallies the troops and charges in front ahead of your army.
You need to keep morale high when times are tough. And you need to know when to cut your losses and make the hard decisions. Once you lose team morale, you lose the business.
With my content integration business, I decided it was time to sell the business when my board was not willing to take further risks and they were contented to get paid good dividends each year. We stopped innovating. I wanted to change the world and create more innovative products. In fact, I was talking to the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft about selling a new idea.
I ended up having an interested party from Europe wanting to partner with us on the deal. But the rest of the partners, understandably, were not willing to risk the golden goose, as it meant risking a substantial amount of money to develop this new software.
I felt there was no point to simply maintain the business and collect dividends as I stopped enjoying it and we had lost the spirit of innovation and invention. We sold the business and parted amicably.
There will be tough decisions like these you will have to make as a leader, and sometimes your stakeholders may not agree with you. But you are responsible for the business, the staff, shareholders and yourself. You have to be willing to make decisions that are sometimes unpopular.
Hopefully this chapter has given you some insight into what it takes as a person to be a good entrepreneur. In the next chapter I will move on to cover another critical part of your start-up: your team.