ONE OF THE things that makes the TV show Undercover Boss so entertaining is that most of the chief executive officers (CEOs) are terrible at doing their employees’ jobs.
So, it has to be said that one of my all-time favourite episodes in this show is the one in which Todd, the entrepreneur from Mormon country, went undercover at his company Vivint.
Todd was so terrible at everything that he even introduced himself to one of his employee minders for the day as, well, Todd, followed by a big “Oops” and a long, awkward pause. It was TV gold, I tell you.
Of course, I binge-watch these shows on YouTube, not on the network they appear on, which I believe is CBS.
Yes, there is a point, I think, to all this preamble: Todd started his business two decades ago as a summer job installing burglar alarms, and made so much money that he quit college. The narrator said he had just sold a stake in the company for US$2 billion, but stayed on as CEO because he wanted to be part of Vivint’s future.
He almost fell off a roof. He caused gridlock in the dispatch office. He was the most unhelpful call receiver at the security call centre. He had trouble screwing in a wall mount for a motion sensor. And I thought he was just great, because he was caring and totally admitted his shortcomings.
So, I kept asking myself: how did he build a $5 billion revenue-earning company?
The only answer I could come up with is that entrepreneurship is a state of mind. Sometimes it is based on the entrepreneur’s intrinsic talent, out of which grows a larger business, and then that talent turns out to be just a small part of the larger operation, or may even be an unneeded skill as the company moves on.
All these thoughts coming rushing in as I read the sad state of today’s efforts to seek out the entrepreneurs lurking in our midst, as it were.
For example, five Caribbean businesses just got US$25 000 from a Canadian-funded programme called LINK-Caribbean, which is administered by Caribbean Export.
That money is to be used to help them get their businesses together in a way that they can make winning presentations to, ah, investors.
See, the full name of that initiative is the LINK-Caribbean Investment Readiness Grant programme.
Its purpose is to support the development of “an early stage Investor eco-system within the region”. Which seems an appropriate term, because eco-systems are about which animal eats which insect.
So far, it seems most of the creativity for these ventures is coming not from entrepreneurs themselves, but from the clever bureaucrats who dream up these lofty-sounding programmes. They can be epic. I really mean that.
For example, this LINK one is an initiative of the World Bank Group’s Entrepreneurship Programme For Innovation In The Caribbean. Did you get it? Yes, the programme’s name was designed so that its acronym would spell “EPIC”.
By the way, there is also the Epic Hotel in downtown Miami where I am told, weekends are truly, well, you know . . . .
Anyway, EPIC is a seven-year $20 million programme that “seeks to build a supportive eco-system for high-growth and sustainable enterprises throughout the Caribbean”.
Except that they are having a hard time finding actual entrepreneurs.
The five firms chosen this time around were Carepoint and Caribbean Transit Solutions from Barbados; Bluedot Media and Innovative Menu Solutions Ltd from Jamaica and SystemIz Incorporated from Trinidad and Tobago. Note: All of these entrepreneurs’ products and services appear to be Internet-based. None of them is manufacturing hot sauce.
Quoting from the epic press release, Barbadian Shannon Clarke of Carepoint said the grant as well as the guidance from the so-called business angels that came with it “would help push the adoption of ICT in the delivery of healthcare throughout the Caribbean”.
And, still paraphrasing here, Khalil Bryan of Caribbean Transport Solutions, developer of the BeepCab ride-hailing app, said both the World Bank and Caribbean Export had been catalysts to improve the investment climate in the region – from building angel groups to disbursing grant funding to prepare entrepreneurs for investment.
You learn to talk the talk when you are looking for investors, I guess. I have met Khalil and he is a great guy who told me all about using your phone to get a taxi via BeepCab. We did not discuss improving the investment climate.
Chris McNair, manager for competitiveness and innovation at Caribbean Export, however, touched upon the stark reality of looking for entrepreneurs in this part of the world.
According to the release, he said the firms were selected from 134 applicants across the region, only seven of which were afforded the opportunity to pitch their businesses to a panel of judges in the hope of securing an investment-readiness grant. And only five got the initial funding.
So, what do you have to do to get some sort of angel to see your potential? And why would you want to sell a good piece of your business to a bunch of private investors who might force you out in two twos if you let them get enough of your little company?
Why is allowing investors all up inside your business being touted as the path to success?
Unless you need so much capital for expansion, or you are approaching the time you want to retire and want out, I say build your business yourself.
Having to earn that actual profit will make you a better businessman. There are so many online tools now, including easy-to-use accounting programs, social media, online newsletter services like MailChimp and Constant Contact, that you can do most of that work in-house.
You don’t need an office if you have a bedroom, a spare room, a garage or a basement (sometimes a coffee shop for a working lunch).
And instead of spending so much time trying to prepare your business for sale to investors, spend that time building a small but reliably profit-earning venture.
In this way, you will use the lack of other entrepreneurs out there to your advantage, because the only people coming to steal your lunch are the investors to whom you serve it up to on a dish called a business investment proposal.
Then you can be like Todd, a great boss who is lousy at every job others do in his company.
