OOPS. Make that the Top 11. Or is it 12?
My colleague and fellow blogger, Anne Clelland, pointed me to a great post for prospective entrepreneurs. On Read, Write, Start, Bernard Lunn recently complied a list of the top 10 questions you should ask before starting a new venture.
Given my experience with entrepreneurs, the ten questions were all right on target. But one was conspicuously missing, as least from my viewpoint. In fact, I just posted on this vital topic a few days ago. The authors from whom Lunn selected his list apparently failed to value the simplest question of all, "Why?" That has to be Question 11. Or perhaps it should really be Question 1.
I am absolutely convinced that the strength of the answer to the question "Why?" is a dominant factor in entrepreneurial success. Without a clear understanding of the expected payoffs and a powerful commitment to those payoffs, entrepreneurs simply run out of gas. Even the biggest tanks of enthusiasm and perseverance run dry.
Here's the issue - plain and simple. As I posted before...
In a recent post on Inc.com, Joel Spolsky recalls asking Jessica Livingston (author of Founders at Work) to speak about why start-ups fail. "That would be boring," she told him. "They all fail for the same reason: People just stop working on their business."
Spolsky goes on. "The more I thought about it," he says, "the more I realized Jessica was onto something. Why do start-ups fail? As she pointed out, it's usually a collapse of motivation -- everyone wanders back to civilian life, and the start-up ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
Think about that. "People just stop working on their businesses."
Wow. They just plain run out of gas. They exhaust their supplies of MOXIE.
And, as Anne regularly points out at Handshake 2.0, your network is also crucial. "It's still who you know," she reminds us. Or, in my words, Mentors are among the Four Fundamental Factors governing success. So, Question 12 might well be, "Who do you know?"
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