CHAPTER ONE
True Believers
Why Founders Fall in Love
with Their Ideas
“Following our path is in effect a kind of going off the path, through
open country . . . Out there in the silence we must build a hearth,
gather the twigs, and strike the flint for the fire ourselves.”
—David Whyte, The Heart Aroused
The stories of commitment are as different as the founders who tell them:
Lynn Ivey heard the fear in her father’s voice and realized her mother was slipping into the abyss of Alzheimer’s disease. “I knew at that moment that my career at Bank of America no longer mattered,” she says. “What mattered was my family.” That moment led her to leave her bank job as a regional sales executive to care for her mother and, later, to build The Ivey, an adult daycare center devoted to ailing seniors and their caregivers.
For years, Mark Williams passionately pushed the boundaries of technology, learning, and design. Long before Apple’s iPhone revolutionized the use of mobile devices, the Duke University neuroscientist hacked into his medical students’ iPods and loaded them with hundreds of anatomy pictures and phrases. The students raved about learning anatomy terms while waiting for coffee, riding the bus, or doing loads of laundry. Mark knew he was on to something, so he launched Modality, a developer of premium learning applications for the iPhone and iPad. “I was so caught up in the beauty of the idea and the possibilities around it,” he recalls, “I was not thinking rationally.”
J.C. Faulkner left a senior leadership job at one of America’s largest banks to build a different kind of mortgage company and to create a better place to work. “I had come to grips with the fact that all the money I’d saved over a twelve-year career would be gone in six months,” he recalls. “When I told the bank that I was leaving to start my own company, I offered to stick around for thirty days to help with the transition. They walked me out the next day—with a box in my hand.”
And then there’s Mark Kahn, who tagged along with his boss to a French casino and hit upon a once-in-a-lifetime winning streak. At the $72,000 mark, he turned to his boss and said he was done. “That’s smart,” his boss said. “You should quit while you’re ahead.” “No,” he replied, “I’m quitting my job. I’ve got my seed money, and I’m doing my startup.” He has since founded two ventures, including TRAFFIQ, a leading online advertising platform listed as number fifty on Inc. magazine’s 2010 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
Startups come in all shapes and sizes. Aspiring founders will attempt just about any idea, product, or business model under the sun. If it can be conceived, some dreamer has probably tried it.
Founders take the startup plunge for a dizzying array of reasons: to be free, to change the world, to launch a can’t-miss product, to make buckets of money, to follow in Dad’s footsteps, or to spend more time with the kids. The list goes on and on, limited only by the fact that a surprising number of entrepreneurs can’t fully explain why they do it. They just know that it’s something they have to do.
Underneath it all—beneath the endless variation, the unexpected turns, and the wide range of motivations—a powerful force drives everything forward.
It is the force of passion.
When I first began to study entrepreneurship, I would never have predicted I’d be writing a book about entrepreneurial passion. I’ve always thought of passion as a given in the startup world—a basic ingredient, like salt in food, so common that it would not be a factor in differentiating success from failure. Besides, the topic already gets its share of air time among the great Motivational Media—the hype-driven websites, magazines, books, and videos that have made you-can-do-it success stories into a kind of cult religion for wanna-be entrepreneurs.
But there is no getting around it. Every great venture I’ve studied has propelled itself forward with an unshakeable sense of commitment, a kind of rapturous belief among core founders. The reason is clear. The startup path is not for the faint of heart. Ask successful entrepreneurs to reflect back on their journey, and an unequivocal response comes back: I knew it would be hard, but I had no idea it would be this hard. In the words of technology blogger Dave McClure, “You are going to be embarrassed, ashamed, labeled as an idiot, shunned, ridiculed, and occasionally driven from the village with pitchforks. Get used to it.”1
On such a demanding journey, qualities that breed confidence and resilience, qualities such as passion, courage, hope, commitment, faith, are like oxygen to entrepreneurs, sustaining them through the long hours, the stress, and the inevitable adversity and doubt that are a natural part of the startup process. But just as oxygen cannot protect a person from all forms of danger, passion cannot eliminate risk from the startup equation. In fact, I have found that passion is just as plentiful among failing entrepreneurs as among those destined to succeed.
As I studied entrepreneurial success factors, I couldn’t help but notice the high rates of new business failure, and I became intrigued by the seemingly basic reasons most startups don’t make it. The more closely I observed the early choices of would-be business owners, the more clearly I could see the powerful, central role of human emotion. I saw people obsessed with questionable business ideas. I saw founders egged on by friends, family, and motivational speakers. I saw entrepreneurs throwing themselves over the startup cliff without parachutes, sometimes without the merest idea of what they were getting into. I saw impulsive decisions, rigidly held beliefs, wishful thinking, and strategies of hope.
In time, I understood that passion fuels both startup success and failure—not exactly an actionable formula you can take to the bank. In the chapters ahead, you will learn how to cut through this apparent contradiction and dramatically elevate your odds of entrepreneurial success. But the first step is to understand what happens within and around a person who approaches the new venture roller coaster. Why is the startup path so compelling to so many? And what causes new entrepreneurs to become emotionally attached to their new creations, to literally fall in love with their ideas?
The Sparks of Entrepreneurial Ambition
Starting a new business uncorks strong emotions that have typically built up over years or decades. Like the winding of an inner coil, an aspiring entrepreneur’s early experiences pack potential energy around an embryonic idea and lay the foundation for future startup efforts. Early jobs, both good and bad, further seed entrepreneurial ambitions and ideas. All of this builds toward the day when a founder reaches his or her point of no return, where commitment to the new venture becomes ironclad and all the stored passion and ambition is unleashed.
EARLY FOUNDATIONS
Your preparation for entrepreneurship begins on the day you are born, if not before. Starting a business is an intensely personal endeavor. You bring to it the total package of who you are—your personality, preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. These characteristics are largely developed at an early age, shaping whether or not you will be predisposed to the entrepreneurial leap.
Dan Bricklin, who transformed the computer industry with his invention of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, says his entrepreneurial backbone was formed as a kid in Philadelphia, where his father ran a printing business. As a boy, he spent his afternoons helping at the plant and his evenings listening to business chatter around the dinner table. “I suppose you could say the entrepreneurial instinct was in my genes,” he says. “My family’s unspoken dedication to the business gave me a healthy respect for the paradox of running your own business—the contradictory feelings of freedom and responsibility that define the experience of setting out on your own.”2
Our early years not only inform whether we will leap at a startup opportunity, but why we might do so and what kind of founder we will most likely become. Dan Bricklin credits his religious instruction at a Jewish day school with seeding many of his founding values and skills: his early creative drive; his desire to make the world a better place; and his leadership skills learned by guiding services in synagogue and mentoring other students.
J.C. Faulkner, who built Decision One Mortgage from a blank sheet of paper in 1996 into a company valued at $100 million over four years, says, “I have a memory of when I was in the third grade. When it was time to pick teams, the other kids would look to me and ask ‘J.C., who will be the captains today?’ They would ask me to settle arguments and make rulings about whether balls were in- or out-of-bounds. I remember one of the teachers asking me how I came to be the one who ‘ran’ the game, and I said I didn’t know. It seemed like it had always been that way.” Looking back, he recognizes that he had a knack for figuring out what motivated people, and a strong sense of fairness. Thirty years later, these qualities drove his growing ambition to leave his senior leadership role with First Union Corporation and create a new kind of company, one that attracted and unleashed the best possible talent. His venture, Decision One Mortgage, quickly developed a national reputation as a great place to work with a high performance culture.
For most entrepreneurs, time logged working for others significantly shapes their startup aspirations. In a Fall 2005 article in the California Management Review, professor of organizational behavior Pino G. Audia and his graduate student, Christopher I. Rider, noted how early work experience incubates and prepares future founders. “Although some individuals become successful entrepreneurs without related prior experience, they are the exception, not the rule. Entrepreneurs are often organizational products.”3 While working for other people, we develop expertise, serve customers, observe great and awful leaders, and watch untapped opportunities come and go. We appreciate the steady income and soak up the lessons, while our startup ambitions simmer in a semi-conscious stew of hopes and what-ifs.
While studying neuroscience as an undergraduate at Davidson College in the early 1980s, Mark Williams took a summer job to help one of his professors build interactive teaching tools. Their goal was to help students “see” how neural impulses (e.g., auditory or visual signals) traveled through the brain. Using one of the earliest Macintosh computers, Mark worked in a dark basement for months, painstakingly building images. “These were very simple, very crude animations,” he says. “We had a 16 color card, and I would zoom these images up and literally move pixels around to create additional colors and make something that looked remotely realistic. I think at the end of the summer we had, maybe, ten seconds of animation that we could control. It was an interesting idea, and we were very passionate about it, but in 1983 we were way ahead of the technology available to us.” That summer job was Mark’s first taste of how technology could bring together his passions for art, learning, and neuroscience—seeds that eventually gave rise to Modality, his Durham, North Carolina–based mobile learning technology company.
DISSATISFACTION
Whether thinking about retirement, a sabbatical, or a dream business, most working adults fantasize from time to time about the day they will be free to pursue some deeper calling. This yearning, while hard for many to articulate or even admit, can be frighteningly strong, because it springs from a place close to our core. As poet and organizational consultant David Whyte observes, “While we think we are simply driving to work every morning to earn a living, the soul knows it is secretly engaged in a life-or-death struggle for existence.”4
Most executive coaching clients with whom I’ve worked over the past two decades are living out their personal versions of this struggle. They are talented, ambitious, and successful—through a corporate lens—but essentially dissatisfied with their professional role. Something else is stirring inside. In working with hundreds of these clients, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern over the years—the unrelenting pace and compression of their lives, the politicization of their jobs, and the diminishing light in their eyes.
Although he was a fast-rising senior leader within First Union Corporation during the early 1990s, J.C. Faulkner felt increasingly frustrated in his role. “There were some negative things percolating inside of me,” he says. “We had an inefficient management team. There was a political sense about us that hurt our ability to compete—too focused on the inside and not focused enough on the competition.”
One night, while working late at the office, J.C. helped himself to coffee in the break room. He’s not normally a coffee drinker, but needed the boost to get him through a pressing pile of work left by a colleague. He returned the next morning ready to pick up where he left off and was greeted by his boss’s executive assistant. She asked if he had been working late, and although he didn’t want to admit it, he was kind of glad that somebody noticed.
“What I need to know,” she said, “is whether you drank a cup of coffee while you were here. If you did, you owe twenty-five cents for the coffee.”
“Well, I drank two cups,” he replied. “So I guess I owe you a half a dollar.”
The money, of course, was not an issue. What caught him off guard was the bad taste the assistant’s response left in his mouth, a familiar feeling of disappointment, disengagement. He was sure that hundreds of employees throughout the division were feeling it as well. “At that moment, I made a promise to myself,” he says. “When I create a company, people will never have to pay for spending time at work.”
THE EUREKA MOMENT
When he stepped into his evening bath more than 2,200 years ago, Archimedes had grown tired of searching, racking his mind for a foolproof way to measure the true volume of the king’s crown (great Greek mathematicians of antiquity were assigned such things). As he absent-mindedly lowered his body and watched the water level rise, something clicked: Any object lowered into water will displace an amount equal to its volume. As the story goes, this thoroughly rational man leapt out of his bath and into the streets of ancient Syracuse—naked and ecstatic, shouting, “Eureka!” (“I have found it!”).
Archimedes’s story is an apt metaphor for the emotional journey of most first-time entrepreneurs. Before their eureka moments, they puzzle over possibilities, question whether to move forward, wonder how to pull it off, and hope for the right break. They have yet to step into the bath.
Then comes a moment of clarity, a defining event. The future founder is seized by a brilliant startup idea. The puzzle pieces come together with perfect clarity. Things will never look the same again.
Mark Williams recalls the jolt of intensity and excitement he felt as his medical students embraced his first iPod-based learning tools. “A student came up to me and said, ‘Dr. Williams, I learned five new brain terms while waiting in line for my latte this morning.’” He said, “And this really represented a eureka moment for me. I saw the opportunity to think bigger and more broadly across all types of learning.”
To understand Lynn Ivey’s eureka moment, we must go back to the most transformational month of her life, January 2004. One evening, while having dinner with a fellow manager from Bank of America, she learned that an employee had been missing in action for two days, not showing up at work, not returning calls. The woman was single, like Lynn, and lived in the same neighborhood. Within an hour, Lynn and two others had pushed through the open front door of the woman’s home. Minutes later, Lynn found her in her bed, dead of an apparent aneurysm. She was forty-seven years old—Lynn’s exact age.
The experience reminded Lynn that life is short and brought her face-to-face with something she hadn’t wanted to admit: She wasn’t happy with her work. She was far more fatigued than inspired. Within a week, as if on cue, Bank of America announced a plan to lay off 12,000 employees. Two hundred of these were on a national service team Lynn had just spent a year building. The company expected her to shut down the department over the next two months and then transfer into another operational role.
One afternoon, about a week later, her father called. “Your mother has had another episode,” he said. “She’s really confused, and I don’t know what to do.” Lynn hurried to her childhood home in Wilmington, North Carolina, on a quest to help her family find comfort and make sense of her mother’s deteriorating, unwinding life. Soon she learned that she was eligible for three months of personal leave under the Family Medical Leave Act. She filed for those three months, plus an additional three months of accumulated time off. On her last day with the bank, she cleared out a decade’s worth of files and papers from her office, filling a large, two-wheeled, recycling bin to the brim, thinking her banking career was most likely over. “When I walked out, I had my lamp in one hand and a few pictures in the other,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, is this all there is?’”
Over the next year, Lynn sought solutions for her mom’s complicated medical needs and her dad’s pain. The more she learned about existing services, the more she was convinced of a gap in the market, a need for a comfortable and clean—even luxurious—daycare facility for seniors with memory loss. In addition to her mom’s needs, she saw her dad’s burden, felt her own, and thought the right care center would bring relief and comfort to family caregivers as well.
Lynn never found the perfect care center for her mom, and as she began to think about what her next career step might be, she inched toward a radical idea. What if she started an adult daycare center herself? Although she knew what the experience should provide—comfort, safety, and stimulation in a warm, nurturing, luxurious environment—she couldn’t visualize the component parts. She talked with industry experts and visited site after site, but saw nothing remotely close to her ideal center. Most facilities seemed poorly managed and maintained, lacking even the basics of compassion and comfort.
By the time she visited a center in King’s Mountain, North Carolina, she had been searching and puzzling for many months, looking for a model that made sense. She drove up a long driveway to the facility, stunned by what she saw. “It was awesome, on a huge piece of land, with a huge new building,” she remembers. “After taking the tour, talking with the director—just seeing the place, the newness and the cleanliness of it—I looked at her and I said, ‘This is it. I’m going to do this.’” For the first time, Lynn could visualize her facility: how it would look and feel; how staff and guests would move about; and how struggling families would find relief within it. Although she had a number of compelling reasons to pursue her concept, from honoring her mother to addressing what she thought to be a gaping hole in the senior care market, this was the moment when all the pieces first came together into a workable whole.
THE POINT OF NO RETURN
Like Archimedes leaping from his bath, there is a point in every startup journey when hesitancy melts away and there’s no turning back. This might take the form of a high profile, catalytic event, such as Mark Kahn telling his boss in a French casino that he was quitting his job or Lynn Ivey buying a piece of land on which to build her future center. But this is not always the case. Sometimes, the corner turned is a psychological one.
Eleven months before J.C. Faulkner left First Union to start his new company, he made a fateful decision while sitting in the office of a trusted mentor, Doug Crisp. Doug, who had hired J.C. into the bank twelve years earlier, was trying to lure him into joining his leadership team in a new bank division. J.C., however, politely turned him down. He said that he appreciated the offer but didn’t think a move was right for him at that time. “I haven’t accomplished everything I need to do in my current job,” he recalls saying.
“Really?” Doug asked. It sounded fishy. He pressed on, asking question after question, refusing to take no for an answer.
But J.C. wouldn’t say yes.
Finally, Doug said, “Jay, there’s something here I don’t know. This is a good promotion for you. Hell of an opportunity. More money than you’re making now. And I know you’d love to work for me. What am I missing?”
J.C. paused.
“I’m going to tell you something, and I hope you won’t use it against me,” he said. “I’m going to leave the bank and start a new company in eleven months. I can’t commit to anything new. You need somebody who’s going to stick around.”
In two minutes, J.C. Faulkner had violated two fundamental rules of corporate success: Don’t turn down promotions, and don’t share your exit plans with a higher-level leader. But one of the bank’s top executives had flushed him out. “I had a trust level with him,” J.C. later remembered. “He’s the only guy above me that I would have told about my plans.” Looking back, J.C. remembers this as his point of no return, the moment that he knew for sure: He was going to risk everything he’d earned over the past twelve years and leap into an uncertain future as an entrepreneur.5
Fanning the Flames of Commitment
Few things in life are as packed with emotion as hurtling down the startup path just beyond the point of no return. Even the most contained entrepreneur feels like he or she has a tiny Archimedes inside, running with happy abandon. There is much to decide and do—hundreds of tasks and questions, large and small. Underneath these practical matters, the founder’s growing commitment to the venture is helped along by a set of gathering forces. These forces have been in play all along, like breezes blowing over the first flame of the founder’s idea to keep it alive. But now that the point of no return has been reached, they are like winds blowing in from all directions, oxygenating and heating the growing fire.
THE BONDING POWER OF CREATION
Leaders all over the world wrestle with the challenge of getting their team members to care deeply about the goals of a larger organization. They don’t understand how employees who are disengaged and apathetic at work can show fanatical passion in their personal lives, organizing citywide fund-raisers on weekends or maintaining Facebook pages with thousands of friends. A core principle is at work here: We authentically commit to those things that we have a direct role in creating. Whether it’s a product prototype or a new client account, I own what I create.
The same principle applies to your entrepreneurial venture. As you move from idea to action, creating something that can be read, seen, held, tested, or enjoyed in the world, your commitment naturally strengthens. Whether lines of code, a new bank account, a business plan, or a napkin sketch, every new work product puts extra wind in your sails and amplifies your energy and ownership.
Lynn Ivey’s dream was becoming more tangible throughout the summer of 2006, and her optimism was contagious. Everyone she encountered came away with a clear, positive picture of The Ivey. They could envision the future building and its staff; they could see a hundred satisfied clients and their relieved families. As a result of her enthusiasm and communication skills, Lynn successfully raised $2.6 million in seed money from investors and secured $3.6 million in loans to finance construction of the center. Groundbreaking was scheduled for October. In late July, she sent an e-mail to several of her supporters, writing, “The money’s raised and in the bank!! The loan’s approved and closing is at 9:30 a.m. this Tuesday!!”
About that same time, Lynn’s father called and asked her if she would make the four-hour drive home to Wilmington. “He’s putting Mom on oxygen,” she wrote at the time. “He says she is really winding down and thinks she’ll be getting worse soon. It’s ironic… my mother is the whole reason I started down this path to create the center. If she shuts down now, it will be as if she knows that phase one of my creation is complete and that it really will happen. I’m a believer that when God shuts a door, he always opens a window.”
BELIEFS MADE REAL
Why do we commit to certain business ideas and not others? How do our beliefs become so rock solid that they are virtually impossible to dislodge? Most businesspeople think of commitment as an intangible force. They know it when they feel it, but don’t see any underlying mechanisms to explain how something so “soft” actually works. But research into how the brain works sheds considerable light on the fact that such mechanisms not only exist at a neurological level, they exert great power as well.
In a 2007 study, neurologist Sam Harris and two collaborators investigated the role of various brain regions and structures in mediating our beliefs. They measured how long it took people to judge written statements as “true,” “false,” or “undecidable,” and they scanned their subjects’ brains during the process using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They found that people assessed statements as believable more quickly than they judged statements to be false or undecidable, and that the different types of statements were processed in distinct regions of the brain. In short, new information that matches our existing perceptions gets an “express lane” treatment, whereas contradictory information takes a longer, more tortuous processing path. “Because the brain appears to process false or uncertain statements in regions linked to pain and disgust,” the researchers wrote, “this research supports [the seventeenth century philosopher] Spinoza’s conjecture that most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity and that belief comes quickly and naturally, whereas skepticism is slow and unnatural.”6
Researchers have also found that deep levels of passion create significant changes in the brain, changes that, in turn, reinforce the very beliefs that created them. Andrew Newberg, M.D., director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the brain’s role in spirituality and written extensively about the topic. He and his collaborators have scanned the brains of hundreds of religious practitioners (Franciscan nuns engaged in prayer, meditating Buddhists, Pentecostal followers speaking in tongues), documenting how beliefs become neurologically real in the minds of practitioners. He even scanned the brain of an avowed atheist, who was asked to attempt to pray to God, and concluded that when a person is asked to adopt beliefs contrary to his own, the brain often applies the brakes, so to speak. “If the pieces don’t fit well together, a neurological dissonance is created that sends an alarm to other processes in the brain.”7
With each passing day, Lynn Ivey found more reasons to believe. In November 2006, a month after her mother passed away from complications related to her dementia, she received an e-mail from a woman who had read about The Ivey in a local magazine. “You do not know how much I have prayed for someone like you,” the woman wrote, going on to share that her husband was declining due to a recent, massive stroke, and she was entering her own battle with breast cancer. “Please tell me that you will be open soon and that there is some availability. Could you send me some information? Lynn, you are a GOD SEND! I had always thought a higher-class daycare would be a great thing to do. If you need any help at all, I would love to help out, but first I need you to OPEN!”
YOUR FEEL-GOOD GANG
The entrepreneur’s path can be crushingly lonely. New founders must find and haul their own motivational fuel, building their store of inner resources. At the same time, nearly all successful entrepreneurs find support and encouragement from their social network of friends, family, colleagues, and advisers. One of our earliest instincts during the incubation phase is to share our idea with trusted friends and colleagues, people who can act as sounding boards and who might caution us about unseen obstacles or problems. Mostly, we hope they will reinforce our idea, confirm the rightness of our path, and cheer us onward.
On this last hope, the news is all good. Studies investigating the impact of social networks on the formation of new ventures suggest that when a founder seeks support and advice for a new venture, he or she taps a small number of well-known, trusted, and like-minded individuals.8 And social psychological research has confirmed again and again that we are an unfailingly polite species when asked for any kind of evaluative feedback. In one intriguing study conducted by psychologists Bella DePaulo and Kathy Bell in 1996, test subjects were put in the difficult situation of critiquing an artist’s paintings for which they had already privately expressed a dislike. They had never met the artist or known of the artist’s work. Nearly everyone was hesitant to say anything that might discourage the artist or give rise to hurt feelings; the most blatant white lies coming from people who had been told that the artist cared deeply about a particular painting.9
The upshot of this and other studies is that the more openly we share our passion for our new venture, the more likely it is that we will receive support and encouragement, not only from the usual suspects—trusted friends and family—but from just about anyone who can see our enthusiasm for the business idea. Lynn Ivey talked with hundreds of people within and outside the senior care industry as she formulated plans for The Ivey, and she found nearly universal support for her concept for an upscale daycare center located in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area. With a few exceptions (to be explored in later chapters), “Your center will fill up in no time,” was the common refrain, she heard from industry professionals, investors, and old friends alike.
THE WIDE WORLD OF MOTIVATION
It’s Saturday morning. You’ve decided to finally do something about that gnawing feeling of settling for someone else’s dreams. Today is the day you seize control. Coffee in hand, you flip open your laptop and Google the word entrepreneurship. The first featured link at the top of the page catches your eye. It reads “Easily Started Businesses.” You click on it and see, in forty-point font:
RENEGADE PHYSICIST DISCOVERS 57 SECRET IDEAS
THAT COULD MAKE YOU RICH!
Welcome to the Motivational Media. If you haven’t fully convinced yourself that your business idea has potential, or if you doubt you can pull it off, just turn on the TV, open an entrepreneurial magazine, or surf the Web. You’ll find a thousand smiling entrepreneurs, posing in front of swimming pools and Maseratis, eager to tell you how they did it and bring you into their startup fold. You will be amazed at how happy and proud they are, and how many there are. You can watch the Y.E.S. movie (by the Young Entrepreneur Society), starring white-toothed motivational speakers. You can surf entrepreneurial comment boards, where fellow dreamers decry “negative and unsupportive people.” You can peruse a Start Your Own Business magazine with a hundred get-rich-quick schemes. And you can read a recent book encouraging the younger generation to go ahead and make the entrepreneurial leap, offering advice like, “Don’t worry if you don’t know what you’re doing. Nobody does!”
Plenty of worthy information does exist for aspiring entrepreneurs, if you can cut through all the noise and clutter (I have included a listing of my favorite sources in Appendix B at the end of the book). It seems, however, that the following themes dominate most of the startup content floating around these days: (1) Starting a business of your own is the surest way to happiness and wealth, (2) Everybody’s doing it, or will, (3) Ignore nay-sayers who don’t support your dream, and (4) The only thing holding you back is . . . you!
There is one more theme. Most of these sources of encouragement have a strong commercial interest in your taking the entrepreneurial plunge. Their mantra: “You can do it—we can help!” My favorite example comes from a 2007 promotional campaign from Intuit, maker of small business accounting software. Its stated purpose was to move aspiring entrepreneurs from saying, “I wish I had just started my own business…” to saying, “I just started my own business!” It was called the “Just Start” campaign and hosted at www.IWillJustStart.com. The campaign was Intuit’s response to survey data, collected from a paid vendor, suggesting that four out of five working adults in the United States dream of starting their own business some day (with no mention, of course, of the high percentage of startups that fail). It’s not clear how many aspiring business owners “just started” a business as a result of the campaign or how many software products were sold as a result, but the campaign surely stoked the startup fires among thousands of founders in waiting.
AND NOW, A WORD FROM THE UNIVERSE
Students of religion, philosophy, or self-help will note that the motivational atmosphere around entrepreneurship has a familiar ring. It mostly parallels historical traditions that encourage self-discovery and self-improvement. Celebrated U.S. mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell reminded us that the powerful theme “Follow Your Bliss” resonates through ancient stories and myths of all cultures.10 Likewise, adherents of The Law of Attraction, a positive thinking concept popularized in 2007 in the movie and book The Secret—and one that proliferated quickly through the you-can-do-it blogosphere—dates back to the world’s earliest societies.
One of the most well-known passages ever written on the topic of commitment was attributed to the nineteenth-century German writer Goethe, who wrote “Whatever you can do or dream, you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”11 I was influenced by this passage during the 1990s, as I prepared to quit my salaried position (as a husband and a father of a six-month-old girl) to start an independent consulting practice. And I’ve shared similar materials with my clients from time to time, bringing relevant historical wisdom to the challenges of today.
The point here is that optimism travels well, and it has done so across the ages. It’s as if some god of startups has been active all along, century after century, provoking fervent belief and bold action among merchants, traders, dreamers, and adventurers of all stripes. If you are looking to find encouragement and further stoke your passion for your new venture, material is readily available from all directions, all centuries, day or night.
If You Build It, Will They Come?
Lynn Ivey’s unshakeable commitment to her cause has come down to this. Three and a half years after she has left her bank job, she and I are sitting in the high-ceilinged main room of The Ivey, her sparkling $4.5 million adult daycare facility. Although it is midday, we are nearly alone in the center. Only a couple of staff members are around to care for the two clients who have signed up so far.
We’re taking a break from another tough meeting about The Ivey’s dire financial situation. Lynn, two key investors, her attorney, her accountant, and I have worked through the morning, playing out various revenue and expense scenarios. Although the fire has not left Lynn’s eyes, it’s been a morning of grimaces and long faces. With virtually no sales after nine months of marketing to prospective members, she is in danger of running out of money within six months. Her expense base is weighty, due to the high-end nature of the facility, her passionate attention to every detail, and the fact that she must keep a minimum professional staff on board to meet regulatory requirements.
We talk about what has been learned over the past year. Lynn had projected a sold-out center at this point in time and had invested significant resources into promoting the facility—direct and indirect marketing campaigns, including reaching out to referral sources like geriatricians, in-home care services, assisted-living facilities, and the like. While the pipeline of interested prospects has buzzed with activity, the number of families scheduling tours has amounted to a trickle.
“Oh my god. I almost forgot,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. “You won’t believe what I did this weekend. My nurse, Betsy, rented my favorite movie of all time, Field of Dreams, and I must have watched it three or four times. I had forgotten some of the scenes, and I couldn’t believe how perfect it is for what I’m doing here.” I ask her what scenes were most on target.
“Remember James Earl Jones at the edge of the baseball field, his speech to Ray when the bank’s about to foreclose on his house? It’s perfect.” She peels back a few pages on a worn white legal pad and begins to read aloud from James Earl Jones’s famous speech, only this time he’s talking about The Ivey. He’s describing how customers will come for reasons they can’t understand; how they will drive from miles around and knock on the front door; how they will hand over their money, innocent as children, in search of peace and comfort, and hungry for the past.
As I listen, I feel a gut-wrenching mix of admiration for Lynn’s resilient faith and deep concern for the facts on the ground. I’m thinking about all that is at stake here, quite a few jobs and lots of money, but mostly Lynn Ivey’s dream of taking care of families in need and her attempt to honor the mother who had taken such great care of her.