The Essence Of Entrepreneurship

No smiles. Not one.

I’m in a tram, going down one of the most expensive streets in the world. Beauty and glamour are everywhere.

A smile is nowhere to be found.

We all get out at the tram station. There seem to be more financial institutions around than finfluencers telling you to finally invest in ETFs (and their own meme coin). Every second person I walk by makes more in a month than five families combined. The square meter I stand on is more expensive than the average monthly global household income.

Still: no smiles.

Many jobs in the western world make you feel numb. There’s a simple litmus test if you’ve found some small portion of meaning in your work: ask yourself the question “if I would get up tomorrow and not go to work, would it have an impact?”. If you can answer this question with “yes”, good for you. If your answer is “no”, congratulations: you’ve just joined thousands of people struggling to find meaning in their work.

Of course it’s not just in financial institutions. That’s just one observation I had some weeks ago. But the problem is most apparent when the money problem is solved. These problems plague people from all industries in every profession. Yet they have one thing in common: they like to turn a blind eye to it.

Some people are oblivious to their situation. Or at least they’re not consciously aware of it. Ignorance is bliss in this regard, but wouldn’t solve the problem. Some might say it’s horrible to have this knowledge, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s the foot in the door to find a job that actually matters to you. And there’s a path that will give you the feeling of purpose.

These people love what they do for work. And what they have in common the most is that they’re entrepreneurs.

And the most fulfilled entrepreneur I ever knew was my grandfather.

Growing Up In Entrepreneurville

Growing up, I despised the dinner table conversations about our family business. I wanted to talk about other stuff or hear a story from a land before time. But the conversations were always about the family business. Always.

My great great grandfather had been a wagon smith. My great grandfather imported the first car into our home canton of Grisons. About half a century later, my grandfather had built a car dealership with over 100 employees.

I’ll come clean here: I don’t care that much about cars. Even though I think they’re cool, it’s not a great passion of mine.

But what I loved was seeing how much my grandfather loved what he did for work.

I’ve never seen someone be as happy in his career as my grandfather. He lived and breathed what he did for work. He loved the business he and his late father built together.

Only now that I’m getting older I understand why the business was the hottest topic every waking hour of our lives. As a child, you struggle to understand that the family business also pays the family bills. What you have no chance of understanding is that it pays the bills for many other families as well. Our car dealership had well over 100 employees at its peak. That’s an immense amount of pressure. I mean, do the math:

In the year 2000, the average Swiss family consisted of 2.29 people. This means at least 229 people were dependent on my grandfather being able to make payroll.

That’s also what entrepreneurship gets you for free: sleepless nights.

But why is entrepreneurship so intriguing, then?

It seems that people have this natural necessity for individuality. Entrepreneurship is individuality at scale. You stamp your own essence – what makes you you – on a product or service.

Only now I understand what a blessing it was to grow up in an entrepreneur- family. Some of the beliefs that served me best in life are burned into my subconscious because I grew up surrounded by entrepreneurial thinking.

One of these beliefs turned into hard fact after a time of unemployment: you have to save yourself. My grandfather couldn’t go to someone higher up the chain of command – he had to save himself. Time and time again.

I remember that he sometimes was more of a fireman than a CEO: he always seemed to put out fires everywhere. This seemed so exhausting. But he loved every single second of it.

Into The Entrepreneurial Racing Lane

So, why not start something of your own? It’s one of the greatest challenges one can engage in.

It has never been easier to become an entrepreneur. Especially when you build something digital. The entry barriers are very low. Even if you want to create a physical product I reckon it has never been easier. Most of the difficulties of production are solved for you.

But entrepreneurs aren’t only creating their own ventures. I don’t think the title “entrepreneur” is gatekept by creating a company. It’s more of a mindset. That’s why you also find brilliant entrepreneurs in large corporations, usually called intrapreneurs.

But how do we cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset? I’m in the process of building something of my own. Yet I haven’t made enough experiences yet. If you’re in my position, it might be tempting to look at what entrepreneurs say. But it’s not what they say, it’s what they do that is important.

What Did Grandpa Do?

Know Thyself (Delegate)

People underestimate what kind of an impact their personality has on their ability to be great at a part of a job. Entrepreneurs tend to want to do everything at once, all the time. The problem is you end up doing nothing this way. That’s why you have to know yourself. It’s not enough to know what you’re good at, though. It disregards an overlooked factor: joy.

What do you enjoy doing? I can only speak for Western working culture, but there seems to be this stigma that an activity turns into work only when it’s accompanied by suffering. How dare you enjoy doing something and getting paid for it?

My grandfather was phenomenal with people. He also knew that nature decided on giving him no talent for accounting whatsoever.

The prerequisite of a successful entrepreneur is a successful business. Do you think it’s better for the business if you focus on the things you enjoy and are good at or do the things you don’t have any talent nor interest for? Of course it’s the former. So when you focus on what you enjoy and are good at, you minimize suffering for yourself while creating a positive impact for the business. A win-win scenario.

There’s one caveat to it, especially if you’re the founder and CEO: It might be beneficial to do an activity in your business once or twice for the purpose of understanding it better. For example, if you don’t enjoy accounting, it’d still be a good idea to do it a few times so you understand how this process works in your business. A successful business is in part reliant on a successful system. If you want to build a system, then you better know the cogs and screws. That doesn’t mean you have to be phenomenal at every single part. Just know how it works, and you will be better for it.

With the advent of better and better artificial intelligence tools, it might be possible to get a lot more done with less people. But this doesn’t mean you get a free pass for not having to do the inner work. This is basically coherent with George Mack’s idea of Founder-Market Fit. George argues that instead of Product-Market Fit, the focus should be on how your personality fits the market you’re trying to enter. This factor might be much more decisive in succeeding with your venture than the solution you’re proposing to a problem. You need to know not only what you’re good at, but also what you enjoy doing. Everything else: delegate.

Pick a problem you really care about

My grandfather loved what he did for work. As an entrepreneur, caring about your work isn’t a luxury, but a necessity. I can remember some of the difficult times the family business went through. In the end, somebody ran the business who didn’t care about it at all. That’s why we sold the business in the end. Because if you don’t love what you’re creating, you won’t walk through the night when it’s darkest. And dark times always come.

Understand finances

This one flies under the radar, but it’s probably the one thing that most people neglect because it’s not that interesting to them: you have to understand finances. If you understand finance, you can understand where your business earns and loses money.

Even though my grandfather wasn't the Michael Jordan of accountants, he understood finance well enough. Otherwise, he could not have been as successful as he was.

A business is a system at the end of the day. And that system uses money as fuel. Understanding this system from a financial perspective allows you to find out where it leaks and where it earns this fuel. In the world we live in, money is a necessity. That’s just reality. And if your venture doesn’t make any money, it’s not a business. It’s a hobby.

That’s the practical part of money. Yet there’s also a philosophical obstacle to overcome. My generation has demonized money and wealth to a certain degree. But that’s counterproductive. Money is inherently neutral – it’s the concepts we spin around it that knits it a fast-fashion ugly sweater of meaning.

What worked for me is to look at money as a form of energy. Just like energy, money has no moral component to it. It’s what happens with it – how it’s used and what causal effects this has – that then gives it moral pseudo-value. So it’s the interpretation (which is always subjective) that gives it the flag “good” or “bad”.

“If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.”
– Naval Ravikant

But money is the fuel for creation as an entrepreneur. Without it, you can’t power the engines building what you want to see in the world. Speaking of building…

Build

Time to do some design thinking! This is one of the most fun parts of the whole process. How are you going to solve the problem you picked?

You can only learn building by doing. This means establishing a feedback loop early on. This feedback loop will look very different from the final product you’re trying to create.

Our family business didn’t build the cars. We distributed them and made repairs when necessary. The complexity of the core business was already taken care of. The core business is the missing puzzle piece for the problem you’re trying to solve. It must fit perfectly (or a very close approximation to it). The main customer problem that the car manufacturer had already solved was “I want private mobility – the possibility of going wherever I want to when I want to”.

But there is much more to a business than the products and services themselves.

As stated before: a business is an amalgamation of systems. The system “products and services” might be the core, but many support systems are necessary to keep the core system up and running.

And it’s exactly these support systems that get underestimated, even though they are the greatest differentiators.

If I had to break down my grandfather’s value proposition, it’d be: “phenomenal cars for the best price with the greatest customer experience imaginable”.

With the focus on “greatest customer experience imaginable”, because I’ll let you in on a little secret: we weren’t the only car dealership on the planet. The competition was fierce, especially in the automotive industry. Where you can set yourself apart is with the experience around the car buying experience.

That’s why pre sales and after sales are so important. This deserves a blog post on its own, but never forget your support systems – they might turn out to be even more important than your actual products and services.

Sell

The best selling cars we ever sold were Toyotas. They had great four-wheel drive, which is essential for the mountainous terrain of our canton. But they had one thing about them that made them almost impossible not to sell: they were indestructible.

My grandfather used to joke Toyotas are the worst cars for us: once you sold one, you didn’t see the customer for ten years.

But we also had brands where there was a lot of persuasion needed. For our business it was impossible to put all eggs in one indestructible Japanese basket. That’s when the art form of selling comes in.

If you think you’re above selling, you haven’t been paying attention. Like one of my former supervisors (and now dear friend) used to say: all of life is a sales show.

At this point, there are these rare geniuses who like to remind me of certain products that sell themselves. True. But these products are such a statistical anomaly Gauss would turn in his normally distributed grave by mentioning them.

The main problems in a business arise because sales are not where they should be. Or at least that’s what breaks the business in the end. Because without money, there is no business. Sales is the life blood of any business. No matter how great or altruistic your product or service is, don’t kid yourself: you can’t keep producing it if you don’t have the necessary financial resources to do so.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a great carpenter, phenomenal nanny or have just cured cancer: learn to sell.

Technology

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you must become a technologist.

Technology is one of the – if not the greatest – lever when it comes to entrepreneurship.

My great great grandfather was a wagon smith. My great grandfather learned all there is to know about wagon smithing. But during his lifetime, there was this other weird carriage on four wheels. It was out of different material. The wheels looked different. But the weirdest thing of all was that this carriage didn’t need horses to get from point A to point B.

During a time when my family’s livelihood depended on people riding carriages, the car was born.

Innovation can be like a tidal wave. It starts out slow, but then it floods the unsuspected market. But true innovation – when someone really hits a home run – is like a Tsunami. Nobody knows what’s going on. Everything you seemed to know is usurped by the tides. That’s when you have only two choices: tread new waters and thrive, or get swept away into the abyss of yesteryear.

Just like the quote that is attributed to Henry Ford says:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Thank god my great grandfather didn’t wait for faster horses to come around. He saw the writing on the wall and the new dawn of personal transportation.

Always stay up to date with the newest trends in technology. Technology (and by extension science) is one of the factors improving human welfare the most. If you use the right technology for the right problem, it will also enrich your business in ways you’ll never expect.

Enter The Entrepreneurship

Even though I was brought up in an entrepreneur family, I haven’t built anything myself yet. That must change, otherwise you’re not an entrepreneur.

But don’t think you don’t belong in this prestigious club called entrepreneurship. I’ve had some calls and interviews with startups in the last couple of weeks, and let me tell you one thing: they’re all human.

There’s nothing extremely special about these people but one monster of a differentiator: they took action.

It’s time to do the same: take the leap. Because if there’s one thing my grandfather did an awful lot, it’s going to work smiling.