The Williamson County insert in the Sunday Tennessean ran a story about a group of young entrepreneurs gone bad.
They had started a business installing audiovisual systems in people’s homes in the Nashville suburb of Brentwood. As an entrepreneurship professor I love to hear about young folks exploring the world of entrepreneurship. I developed a couple of small businesses when I was young and I know that is part of the reason I caught my life-long passion for entrepreneurship.
However, it seems these young boys were after more than a little experience and spare cash. They got greedy. The profits they made from their work were not enough.
“The alleged robbery happened last week while the owner of a Belle Meade home where the company had done work in the past was out of town, according to Brentwood Police.
“The teens entered the client’s garage and stole a new Mercedes-Benz that was delivered while the homeowner was away. The suspects allegedly returned a second night, broke into the house and took more than $100,000 worth of property including jewelry, plasma televisions, computers and other personal items.”
While I encourage young entrepreneurs to dream about the financial gains they can make as entrepreneurs, it is critical to ground their ambitions, the skills they develop, and the lessons they learn in values.
Entrepreneurs have no corporate code of ethics or even basic rules to follow in their work unless they develop them on their own. That is why it is so very important to understand how to integrate a sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair, just and unjust into your business from the very beginning. You set the rules and you enforce them.
I try to help my students understand the importance of this and how it can be accomplished in every class I teach. Sadly, it seems clear that these kids never got this lesson.
Plants into Plastics
The 2005 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for small business was presented this week to Metabolix, Inc by the SBA’s Chief Counsel for Advocacy, Thomas M. Sullivan. Metabolix is a small business that is turning plant materials into usable plastics for a variety of applications.
The Metabolix web site describes their core technology as applying “the cutting edge tools of biotechnology to create a new generation of highly versatile, sustainable, biobased, biodegradable, natural plastics and chemicals.”
The Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards provide national recognition of outstanding chemical technologies that incorporate the principles of green chemistry into chemical design, manufacture, and use, and that have been or can be utilized by industry in achieving their pollution prevention goals.
Hat’s off to Metabolix for being a pioneer in what may become a major new industry over the coming years. Could they have done it without this award? Certainly, since the company has been working on this technology since 1992 and has entered into strategic alliances with companies such as BP and ADM to apply their technology to different markets.
Seems like the EPA is simply after a little positive p.r. with this one. Maybe we should just keep the overhead that it takes to run an award program like this in the private sector.
Small Business Structure
StartupJournal has a story based on an NFIB survey showing that S-corp is still the most common form of small business organizational structure. Generally, it is still my choice of default, although there are situations where an LLC or C-corp makes more sense.
What is interesting from this study is that small businesses do not really use their legal boards as they are intended, to provide oversite, with 68% saying they have a board only because they have to under the law.
At first glance this may be alarming, but in reality most small corporations choose to include only shareholders as board members. However, given the legal liability that boards now face, this is probably a wise choice.
If the legal board of directors is only a nominal board and not really providing any oversite, it is critical for entrepreneurs to create an informal advisory board. Objective and honest outside viewpoints helps to keep our thinking clear and our assumptions well tested.
Write Your Own Plan
One consulting job I will never take, no matter what the fee, is writing a business plan for someone else. John at new dog old trick offers his take on outsourcing business plan writing.
“Even more importantly, the entrepreneur must own the process of planning. The plan document is an artifact – an output of the planning process. Nobody can own the content, the substance behind the planning process, except the entrepreneur. That’s where all the time and energy need to be focused. On the process of planning, not on the document itself. Yes, the document is important, but confusing the plan with the planning process is a triumph of form over substance that too many entrepreneurs fall victim to.”
Well said!
Coffee Shop Update
Jason is moving ahead with his coffee shop in Bozeman, MT. If you haven’t visited his blog site in a while make sure to stop by and see his progress.
Small Business Rocks On
Anita at Small Business Trends tells us that business start-up activity is alive and well in the US. While the numbers are somewhat below the peak of the dot.com days, they are still strong and reflect more true entrepreneurial activity. Most dot.com corporations generated very little revenue and even fewer had any profits. Most were simply financial gimmicks and in some cases financial scams.
“…18 million people in the United States are actively engaged in startups (versus 31 million engaged in startups and established small businesses.)”
Virtual R&D
Ben Cunningham sent me a link to an interesting blog post on collaborative R&D through the Internet when I was away in Washington last week. Scientists are becoming free agent entrepreneurs with their intellectual capital.
European VCs get Restless
The European venture capital market has been touted recently for its success in doing deals. But now Red Herring reports that European VCs are finding that they do not have a ready public market to serve as a vehicle to exit the deals they are funding. Watch the deal flow in Europe slow to a trickle until they sort this issue out over the next year or two.
Employment Up, Growth Healthy and Inflation Moderates
The Congressional Joint Economic Committee has released a very positive economic report this week. Some highlights:
– Payroll employment rose by 78,000 in May. The unemployment rate edged down to 5.1%.
– GDP growth was 3.5% in the 1st quarter, following 3.8% growth in the 4th quarter of 2004. Forecasters see a continuation of healthy growth.
– Inflation in the ‘core’ consumer price index, which excludes volatile energy and food prices, moderated to 2.2% in May on a year-over-year basis.
– Markets expect that the Fed will continue to raise its target for overnight interest rates, which it has raised from 1% in late June 2004 to the current 3% in a sequence of quarter-point increases.
Many Still Fighting Bankruptcy Law Changes
There are many groups still fighting the recent changes in the bankruptcy laws, including (no surprise) several law schools. So how are they continuing the fight for their cause? Why by confusion through statistics, of course.
While the percentage of small businesses failing may be dropping, the number of failures is increasing. Given the fact that the number of business start-ups per year has grown from 200,000 in the mid-1900s to over 3.2 million today, it is no surprise that the number of bankruptcies is up. And given the improvement in preparation that many entrepreneurs are now able to receive in the form of training, education, counseling and support materials it also is not surprising that success rates are up.
However, that is not even the point. Bankruptcy is a social issue as well as a legal issue. Business failure is traumatic and unfortunate. But, how the owners approach their obligations after a failure speaks volumes about their character. The increasingly casual attitude so many have toward financial obligations signals the deterioration of a key part of our culture and our social contracts we share with each other. A free culture is built upon the collective characters of its citizens. When we abdicate more and more of what was once the domain of our character to the law, we drift away from our freedom.
A free society is built upon trust. The lawyers do not create the increases in litigation and bankruptcies. They are just those who come behind our parade and clean up the mess we leave behind. If our society is sound and just there will be less for the lawyers to scoop up. When we defer to lawyers and the government and do not take responsibility for our own messes, we enter the spiraling decline we now see in our society and our culture. Legislation, litigation and the courts should never be the foundation of culture. That should be the stuff of our character and our shared values.
Our freedoms are vanishing. And through our actions, and more importantly our inactions, we are hastening this process.