The entrepreneur: a solitary runner who knows how to surround himself with the best
At the end of his book "The Art of the Start", the famous business coach Guy Kawasaki, searching for a sporting metaphor to illustrate entrepreneurship, makes the following observation: "The decathlon would come closest, but it is not a team sport. Entrepreneurship requires a team that does ten things at once. Here is one thing the decathlon and entrepreneurship have in common: it is an endurance contest."
In search of a trusted person
This metaphor is nonetheless fully applicable to the company leader. Indeed, the company founder, despite being surrounded by collaborators and co-founders, is often confronted with solitude — from the creation of the company through to its eventual transmission. The metaphor of the decathlete entrepreneur is therefore not exaggerated. Like the decathlete, the founder must excel in several heterogeneous trades and have a multidisciplinary vision, while the members of the team must concentrate on a single area of expertise. And like the decathlete, the founder can never stop and must move from one event to the next.
This imperative requires genuine endurance. At every moment they must give their best; but where the comparison reaches its limits is at the level of training. Unlike the athlete, the entrepreneur never leaves the competition and can never say they are going to follow a training programme to improve their performance. The challenges follow one another and are never alike, and competition is constant. While the athlete can rely on a coach to help them progress, the problem the entrepreneur faces is finding a "partner" in whom they can confide. Yet there is no equivalent of the "sports coach" in the business world — a kind of alter ego who would be there to help the entrepreneur open up during periods of doubt, to push them, to help them surpass themselves when necessary, to improve their performance at every moment, and to question themselves when there are objective reasons to do so.
The right advisers and the right mentors
The right entrepreneurial attitudes are not learned at school, and even if there is no shortage of books on the subject, all the art of the company founder lies in the capacity to surround oneself with people who will be able to advise them in order to succeed on their journey. Who then can these "advisers" be, and what are their "required competencies"?
There is of course the co-founders' team, which remains the closest source of inspiration. For the advice exchanged between partners to be of any real effectiveness, a very high degree of transparency is essential. But the company leader cannot rely solely on the exchange between partners to make decisions — the risk is of quickly falling into a closed circle where information circulates in isolation. An external contribution is necessary.
Very often during their creation phase, start-uppers surround themselves with mentors. These are most often also the business angels who will help close the first funding round — but not exclusively. One also sometimes finds mentors who are academics or seasoned entrepreneurs, there solely to advise and assist the young company in its future structuring. This type of figure plays an essential role. The experience and know-how of company mentors should be inscribed in the capital of every company wishing to progress. Choosing a trusted person to play this role seems obvious. And consequently maintaining a good relationship with them is an advantage that must not be overlooked.
Service clubs and mutual support networks
Suppliers and clients can, in certain circumstances, also contribute to the effort and help the entrepreneur make the right decisions when in doubt. For this to work, it is fairly simple: the entrepreneur must permanently maintain the capacity to listen and remain open to the approaches of all the company's partners. We are in an era where the best innovations are the fruit of co-creation, and this is made possible through contributions from clients and suppliers.
Finally, there is one last source of advice for the entrepreneur: service clubs and mutual support networks. These represent for entrepreneurs wells of often untapped resources — a growth relay of inestimable value that will allow them to emerge from their solitude and continue to give their best in order to pursue the competition. All these considerations placing this paradoxical notion of "entrepreneurial solitude" in serious perspective — which is not really solitude at all — one might conclude with John F. Kennedy: "The art of success consists in knowing how to surround oneself with the best."
