Why it’s good, every so often, to be a beginner again.
To any small business owner or professional who works with entrepreneurs, I have one piece of advice: be a startup again, if only for a weekend. Try to find out, or remember, the feeling associated with a business idea at its earliest stage. I guarantee you that feeling will reenergize any efforts under way or kick-start some that you’ve yet to begin.
I had the opportunity to experience such a feeling earlier this year at Kansas City’s Startup Weekend. It’s a 54-hour competition where hundreds of entrepreneurs, both seasoned and aspiring, form teams and try to build a business in a single weekend.
The weekend began on Friday night, with each “idea person” having 60 seconds to pitch his or her concept and convince enough “reality people”—people with expertise in development, design, marketing and more—that it was cool enough for them devote their entire weekend.
I was talked into pitching an idea of my own, and it was one of the 10 lucky projects (out of 50) that sounded interesting enough to convince several people to work on it. And so we labored tirelessly all weekend—each of us putting in 40 hours from Friday night to Sunday night—with the hopes of creating a minimum viable product to present to a panel of judges.
The Big Takeaway
The team charged into our workspace each day, backpacks and boxes full of computers and papers and inspirational items related to the task at hand. White boards filled up with logic-flow doodles for the website and statistics about our target market. Each team member embraced specific tasks, threw on a set of headphones for some tunes, and went about designing, developing and researching. At some point, probably in the midst of the chaos late Friday night, I realized I had put together a small business—I really was an entrepreneur.
My idea wasn’t some world-changing masterpiece, but that couldn’t have been of less importance.
The most amazing takeaway from the weekend came in a form that no written words can fully describe—the feeling I got when a team believed in my idea Friday night and showed up to “work” for me the next day. It was the feeling I got every time my original idea changed because I trusted that the team had a better idea, the feeling of urgency when we faced tight deadlines. It was the feeling I got when I worried I had let my team down with a less-than-spectacular final presentation— and then realized they had worked so hard because of a selfless spirit of entrepreneurialism.
Just Do It
An “entrepreneur” isn’t just a description of a person who starts a business. It’s also a lifestyle of doing and encouraging others to do. But those words don’t even do justice to the feelings from that experience—it’s just something you have to do. Literally, go do it.
If you work with small business owners or have been a small business owner for a while, don’t let complacency consume you. Force yourself to feel those feelings again, and remember why your company does what it does, why your clients do what they do, and how your entrepreneurial spirit can improve the experience for both of you.
That glimpse into a world of urgency and passion has made me a better entrepreneur and a better resource for entrepreneurs, and I’m sure it will do the same for you.
