Think like an entrepreneur
I co-authored this book with Robbie Steinhouse, a successful serial entrepreneur. Robbie initially got in touch with me because he enjoyed ‘Beermat’; when we met I found we shared interests in drumming, France and therapy, as well as business. He is a particularly creative therapist, devising his own techniques as well as using standard ones.
The resulting book is a mixture of therapy and psychology. Such a mix may seem odd to some readers, but remember the adage ‘business is about people’. It is an adage I believe in very strongly. Both business success and failure are in the end about personal qualities, of the business’ leader(s) and its people in general. This is especially true in the start-up or small business.
I followed the principles I’d used in Beermat Entrepreneur, and took a ‘narrative’ approach, starting with the decision to go into business for oneself and ending with the sale of a successful business. Robbie came up with two basic kinds of advice, practical and psychological, and the challenge was to meld them together so they supported one another.
One way I achieved this is by having a ‘Change Yourself’ exercise at the end of each chapter. The chapters themselves are essentially chronological, so the question was, of all the techniques Robbie has described (most of which come from NLP or Transactional Analysis), which fits which part of the entrepreneurial journey best?
The book begins at the very earliest stages: generating an idea and testing it as quickly and effectively as possible. Issues that arise are often about permission to succeed, fear of failure, and perfectionism. Robbie has a great technique called the Permission Pattern that is ideal here.
If the idea has ‘legs’, it then needs to be turned into a genuine platform for success. Entrepreneurs need to understand the full range of business skills they will have to deploy at this point. The Beermat notion of cornerstones came in handy here, though with a different slant - for Robbie, you have to be your own cornerstones. Beermat is essentially about building a team to do a job; for Robbie, the entrepreneur has to do all the important stuff him- or herself, while the company is young, anyway. You take cornerstones on later, when you can afford them.
As the business grows, entrepreneurs need to develop ways of separating the business from their own ego and needs. The Seven Parallels is a technique, based on Robert Dilts’ ‘Logical Levels’, for achieving this. It can also be used as a personal development tool, to ensure ‘congruence’ between various aspects of our personality.
We dedicated a chapter to sudden changes in fortune, both good and bad, as these are crucial to building a business. Corporate fortunes may go in straight lines (though many don’t), but for the small business this is never the case.
Many entrepreneurs say that taking on people is the hardest part of their job, so there is a chapter with material on assessment on ‘Games and the Drama Triangle’. The last two are concepts from TA, that I have known about for years and found incredibly useful - it was great to find Robbie thought the same, and to write these up in a book.
If all the above has all handled done well, the business should enter a period of rapid growth, which we call ‘the Jetstream’. Many entrepreneurs find this an exciting but stressful time: under this stress old psychological patterns can emerge - if these are not dealt with, the business can be unconsciously ‘sabotaged’. For others, work addiction can become a problem.
Finally, we address the questions that come with success: how do you know when you’ve really won, and what do you do after that? Without answers to these, success can be surprisingly hard to deal with.
This was a great book to work on. It’s packed with good stuff: the mixture of business and therapy really does work!
