New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

Good advice from a professor in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School...

Are you one of the many executives who'd love to leave the corporate battleship to skipper a speedy, nimble start-up? And are you using a variety of rationales for why it's not yet time to go? Reasons such as: I need to work on my résumé, acquire more credibility, learn to manage better, figure out how financing really works, maintain stability at home while my children are young?

Those are legit reasons, of course, but while you're waiting for everything to fall into place, you're acquiring big-company habits that can hurt you if and when you ever make the move. Long tenures in corporate jobs keep you from becoming the self-reliant jack-of-all-trades that a new venture requires. You get used to having HR specialists take care of HR issues for you, finance aces prepare reports for you, and IT whizzes maintain the company infrastructure. You become accustomed to delegating and to distancing yourself from "real work" -- a luxury that just isn't possible in a start-up.

Senior people in big companies are successful "because they can manage a team," Barry Nalls told me. He was the founder and CEO of Masergy, a Texas-based telecom company he started after working for GTE for a quarter century. But "in an early-stage company, there's no such thing as a manager. Everyone is a contributor, including the CEO." The backers of his start-up coached him not to hire people "who can only be successful if they have a team around them." Another founder-CEO, when describing his own first hire from a big company, complained, "He wasn't comfortable creating something from nothing. It's like if you have a crank, he can crank, but he can't actually build the crank. Building something from nothing requires a different skill set."

Entrepreneurs are more effective at building ventures from scratch once they have attained a certain level of maturity and self-knowledge, but they can achieve this without spending most of their working lives in corporate jobs. In my research on thousands of founders of high-potential ventures that had succeeded in raising capital from professional investors, 76% of founder-CEOs had worked for 20 years or less before founding their first ventures -- they had made the leap by the time they were in their early 40s.

Waiting for the "perfect time" to make the jump is usually futile, for there's no moment that's truly perfect. So even if you're early in your corporate career, when a winning new-business idea comes along and sparks an entrepreneurial passion in you, carpe diem.

By: Noam Wasserman

Source: Harvard Business Publishing