An innocent entrepreneur
- Dec 18, 2008
I'm full of admiration for people who build and start businesses on their own. Whilst we built a good business here at innocent, I've done it with my two best friends and we're doing it together. I think we make a fantastic team and I certainly couldn't have done this on my own. I don't know if the other guys could have but I think we compliment each other really well. Together we have all the skills needed to be entrepreneurs but we don't have them individually. So I think it's really interesting when Richard and others start a business on their own where quite simply they are the man! I hold people like that in hugely high esteem.
So what do you need to be an entrepreneur? You need a huge amount of tenacity in order to get things off the ground. Whatever you're trying to do there are always a million things going wrong, people saying no, people saying it's impossible. To have resilience and that tenacity is absolutely critical.
When the three of us were putting innocent together there might have been two of us feeling absolutely down in the dumps and one of us saying 'this is going to work because of x,y and z'. We manage to play off of each other and when two are down, one is up and vice versa. If you're doing it on your own that's all going on in your own head. Pretty damn tough I think.
Secondly, you've got to be able to get people to do stuff for you. You've got to be hugely persuasive because you're often starting out with very limited resources, even nothing, and creating something out if it. It means getting other people to do stuff for you, not necessarily for monetary reasons, but because they believe in where you're going, they want to be involved and they're excited.
Thirdly, people say it's all about risk taking but I don't think that's necessarily true. If you're taking risks for the hell of it you might come unstuck. If you're playing everything ultra-safe you won't ever get anywhere. There may be a few people for whom it is all about risk but I think that the majority of entrepreneurs would say: 'You know what – this is risky but I reckon this is how I'm going to cover the downside'. So I'm not subscribing to the romantic notion about taking risks in order to succeed as I suspect that you'd get unstuck pretty quickly.
