Spoiler Alert: It’s NOT ‘have a good idea’!
I was recently at the University of Essex Innovation Centre delivering a pitching workshop to student entrepreneurs, all hoping to win a £5,000 prize for the best idea.
All the ideas had real merit, and the criteria for success provided by the University were straightforward and practical. I gave them the benefit of my experience, but explained that having a good idea, while an excellent start, is not the ultimate destination of their journey.
The challenge for early-stage creative ideas is aptly described in William Goldman’s book Adventures in the Screen Trade. He was famous for originating or adapting some very successful, well-reviewed and award-winning movies, including Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men and The Princess Bride.
He explained that you can have all the expert preparation and focus groups you like, but you only really find out if a movie will be a success when you ask someone for $10 for a movie ticket. Hollywood can be a graveyard of expensive disasters. Some movies were beset with problems during filming, and everyone involved were convinced they would fail at the box office, Somehow, they became classics, such as Casablanca.
It is no different with business ideas. Many entrepreneurs assume that the merit, and especially the complexity of their idea will be the deciding factor in their ultimate success. They plan to solve a real-life problem and often tell me that their next stage is to build a mobile application, believing that process is simple and straightforward. If only!
A scalable and resilient prototype application can easily cost £500,000 and the cost of the final version can run into millions. This is the dilemma facing every provider of significant investment. Shall we give these people a large amount of money?
I have done thousands of free face-to-face mentoring sessions with aspiring entrepreneurs and the majority left with a real ‘spring in their step’. But I always get a good feeling about a potential mentoring session if their request includes “can I bring my business partner?”
Entrepreneurship is a team sport, so my first advice to any aspiring entrepreneur is ‘Find a Foil’.
A Foil is someone with the opposite set of personal attributes to yourself. If you’re an extrovert, they are an introvert; if you’re creative, they are down-to-earth. If you’re an optimist, they are a realist.
My favourite instance of two Foils achieving spectacular success are John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles. Paul is the ultimate showman, still touring well into his 80s.
Sadly, John is no longer with us, but back then he hated going on stage, often being sick just before the show. He was much happier in the studio, having another go at remixing Strawberry Fields Forever and other technical masterpieces.
The ‘yin and yang’ of John and Paul’s working relationship is described perfectly in their co-written song Getting Better on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul starts optimistically with “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time”
John retorts with a cynical “can’t get no worse!”.
Our book The Beermat Entrepreneur uses the same ‘Foil’ model, begin credited to both ‘Mike Southon and Chris West’.
Some people ask me if Chris is an expert ‘ghost writer’. Of course, he has that skill, but this book was unambiguously a 50%:50% team effort, powered by our personal friendship since 1967. He used his skills as an expert philosopher and successful novelist to turn my real-life experiences and anecdotes into a book that someone would actually want to buy.
The book was first released in 2002 and in 2018 we went through it again for a new edition, line-by-line to see if we still agreed with all the content. We changed very little, but each point was rigorously argued from two different perspectives.
Mine was: “will this point create intellectual attraction?”, his was: “does this point make clear, logical sense?’” We had to both agree on each particular item of content for it to make it into the book.
Finding a suitable Foil is both the most basic and also the most difficult task in entrepreneurship. Autocratic sole entrepreneurs will always be limited in scope, finding it hard to scale their businesses. And, of course, the history of entrepreneurship is littered with the personal tragedy of two Foils ultimately falling out with each other.
But if you do find a Foil, then you will represent the two pillars of ‘strength’ and ‘establishment’, suitable for the building of a stable and long-lasting edifice.
They key to finding a Foil first starts with your understanding yourself. I will be talking about how to do this in a future article Mike Southon is Editor in Chief of the World Communications Forum Association Davos (WCFA) https://www.wcfaglobal.com
More details: www.mikesouthon.com
