Few things make me crazier than watching people practice the ready-fire-aim approach to entrepreneurship. These are the people who get excited about a business opportunity or personal passion and boldly go where angels fear to tread, starting companies without any real business planning, little or no market research, no involvement in (or even knowledge of) industry associations, or any kind of relationship or interaction with people with more experience in their business area. These are the people who, despite their entrepreneurial passion, don’t see the value of attending business events such as the Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference. These are the people whose heads I tried to get into with one of my earlier blogs, “Memo to Entrepreneurs: Learn Before You Launch.”
Well, veteran business columnist Marcia Pledger has written a book that underscores my point: While you can’t eliminate all risk when starting a business, trial-and-error entrepreneurship is not only costly, unproductive and more than a little stressful, it is totally avoidable. Smart aspiring entrepreneurs–and new business owners who’ve taken their lumps and are willing to change their ways (my mom taught me that hard heads make soft behinds)–will make reading My Biggest Mistake…And How I Fixed It: Lessons From the Entrepreneurial Front Lines a top priority.
Pledger’s book, like her column in The Cleveland Plain Dealer that inspired it, is based on a simple proposition: Suppose you could get successful, established entrepreneurs to talk about the biggest
mistake they ever made while launching or managing their business, and how they survived that misstep? The result is ample proof of the proverb that the best teacher is not experience, but other people‘s experience. The entrepreneurs profiled in My Biggest Mistake… provide invaluable lessons to entrepreneurs who have figured out that there’s no need to stick their hand in the fire to know that it’s hot–they can take the word of established entrepreneurs who got scorched and lived to tell the tale.The lessons cover every area from start-up (for example, an embroidery company owner details the high price she paid for launching her enterprise without a business plan), to marketing (a shoe company owner
wastes money advertising in the wrong media), to technology (the owner of a design business learns the hard way the cost of foregoing a data back-up system), to family (the owner of a personnel services firm who had to fire his father–the company’s founder). While not every profile is compelling, and it’s hard not to notice that all of the businesses are in Ohio, most of them drive home unflinchingly honest, tough and even revelatory lessons that blow away the romantic pixie dust that too often clouds the entrepreneurial experience. Moreover, the book is a quick and easy read, made more so by the fact the stories come directly from the entrepreneurs themselves. The most valuable part of the book is how each entrepreneur solved their problem or recovered from their error.If you want to start a business and find the land mines and booby traps all on your own, feel free. Your entrepreneurial experience won’t lack for excitement, though it will likely be short-lived–or worse, it might linger like a terminally ill patient, draining all of your resources as it dies a slow and agonizing (for you) death. My advice: Talk to the people who have already conquered the territory you want to claim. Entrepreneurship will be just as exciting, and when you make your big mistake, at least it’ll be an original. Maybe Pledger will want to share your story in her next book.