I can’t find a collective term for entrepreneurs, so I’m proposing that when more than three of them are together, we call them a list, a list of entrepreneurs. Why?
Many of you will remember Rachel Bridge, small business editor of the Sunday Times, from when she came to speak to us at the NFEA Conference a couple of years back. Louise Third of Integra recommended her new book to me so I checked it out on Amazon. There it was, “You can do it too: the 20 essential things every budding entrepreneur should know.” And scrolling down the page, I discovered that people who bought this book also bought “My Big Idea: 30 successful entrepreneurs reveal how they found inspiration” closely followed by “How I made it: 40 Successful entrepreneurs reveal all.”
Rachel is obviously onto something, so I looked further and found a huge range of entrepreneurship books with numbers in the title - another 30 (David Lester), 22 (Al Ries), 57 (Sahar Hashemi), 183 (Seth Godin) and the ingenious David Fremantle with 79(crossed out and substituted with 80.) The record goes to another name familiar from the latest NFEA Conference, Robert Ashton with “The entrepreneur’s book of checklists: 1000 tips to help you start and grow your business”.
All of which got me thinking. The entrepreneurs I know are not generally the sort of methodical people who start the day with a “To Do” list on then methodically tick them off. They are more creative and free thinking. The entrepreneurial mind is not given to checklists.
So why are they so obviously attracted to books of lists? I suspect it’s because these books are saying to the reader, through their titles, “You don’t have to sit down for three hours and wade your way through this.” On the contrary, they are books you can pick up, open a page at random and find some little nugget, some gem of wisdom which you can immediately take away and apply.
There is a lesson here, and not just for budding authors. It’s that entrepreneurs want to learn, but they want to learn at their pace, at a time of their choosing, from people they trust. And they want to browse, select and pick up at random information they can easily apply. It’s a lesson that all those who want to foster entrepreneurship in this country should learn.