Who’s Really an Entrepreneur? You? Me? A Franchisee?

Happy New Year to the Golf Entrepreneur community.  I hope everyone had a happy and healthy holiday season.

Over the past few months I’ve found myself in numerous conversations around the central theme/question of – “Is someone who owns a franchise really an entrepreneur?”

I’ve heard several schools of thought with the most common response being “no” under the pretense that “entrepreneurship is about having that big idea and then doing something great with it, whereas franchisees get the idea and everything else they need handed to them.”

What strikes me about this sentiment is how it highlights for me in a highly personal way the differing perceptions and opinions about what “entrepreneurship” is.  Many folks fall within the camp of believing it is “idea” based, which makes sense because all new companies and products start with a central idea.

However, I offer a different perspective, one that defines entrepreneurship as “execution-based with risk.”

Let me tell a story that highlights what I mean.  I co-founded a company called GLinks in 2010 after winning a business plan competition and some seed capital.  My partner Joshua Jacobs created the original idea for GLinks, and it was to host events for singles at the golf course where they switched partners each hole in a modified speed-dating format.  I liked this idea because it captured the inherent socialization of golf – the concept that you can learn more about a person in four hours on a golf course than in four years in an office.  I brought the idea into a business school program, put it through the feasibility funnel and developed a formal business plan. 

The end result for GLinks was “a social golf network for young professionals who want to play golf, meet other like-minded people and learn a valuable business asset.”  This final concept included elements of Josh’s original idea while also incorporating my own ideas plus the ideas of many strangers that we learned through market testing.  As a result, the landing point for the “idea” of GLinks cannot be claimed by any one individual as it was a living, breathing thing with countless contributors.  Just as TGA started as an overnight camp for teenagers and is now a school-based program predominately for kids under the age of 10. 

This is why the definition of entrepreneurship as an “idea” doesn’t sit well with me.

When I talk about entrepreneurship being “execution-based with risk,” the first part refers to the ability to succeed in a highly unstable environment over a long period of time.  The second refers to having significant personal risk tied to the outcome. 

Let me expand by reverting back to the GLinks example.  Josh and I made the tough decision a few months ago to close down GLinks after two years of stagnation.  The reality is that we didn’t execute at a high level over a period of time.  There are valid reasons for this but we also made a lot of mistakes along the way.  The bottom line is that we didn’t accomplish what we set out to do and that’s a humbling thing.  Were we entrepreneurs?  Absolutely, we took an idea, risked our personal capital and launched a company.  But in this case we failed because we missed the “execution” part.  And that’s okay.

The question is – was I any more of an “entrepreneur” with my GLinks experience than one of our TGA franchisees who has risked their capital – often including home equity, 401k’s, savings accounts, etc. – to start and succeed with their franchised business?  Absolutely not.

We as the franchisor may provide the idea and business tools, but a sales/marketing strategy (and everything else in a franchisor’s “operations manual”) is meaningless if not executed at a high level.  We provide a lot of things, but we don’t (and can’t) provide the grit it takes to wake up every day determined to successfully navigate the roller-coaster of worrying about cash flow, overcoming naysayers, hitting sales targets, leading a team and everything else a franchisee is responsible for.  Because if they don’t accomplish these things, they may not have the funds to make their next mortgage payment. 

That’s entrepreneurialism, and it’s “execution-based with risk.”

I’d like to leave you with this article that discusses similar themes and features several folks in the golf industry, including myself and one of our new franchisees and Master Developers up in Canada, Joe Barnes.

I wish you all the best in 2014 and hope it’s a year of big dreams, big accomplishments and lots of happy entrepreneuring…

What Kind of Entrepreneur Are You Going to Be?

I was talking to a serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist in the Bay Area recently and he had an interesting take on entrepreneurship.  This was his comment:

There are three types of successful entrepreneurs:

1. The young and dumb kind who work tirelessly and fearlessly until they find something that sticks
2. The technical experts who solve a specific problem that only a handful of people know exists and how to fix
3. The authentic kind who have domain expertise, industry experience and the infrastructure needed (relationships, etc.) within a market to exploit its inefficiencies

Barring you being a technical expert, what kind of entrepreneur are you going to be?

When I look at my career, we were definitely in the “young and dumb” category when launching and building TGA Premier Junior Golf.  But, thankfully, we succeeded due to a great concept and a decent amount of luck.

When we launched GLinks in 2010, we were sort-of authentic entrepreneurs.  We knew through our experience in the golf industry that there’s a real pain point for young professionals to learn golf in a fun, convenient and cost-effective way.  However, we came to realize that GLinks is mostly a marketing company and this is not where our expertise lies.  With TGA, the marketing is easy because our partnerships with the schools give us direct and open communication channels with our customers.  With GLinks, we had to get word out to the broader community…. A task that requires a greater investment in time, resources and capital.  We ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth it (right now) when our main focus is on building TGA.

Last year, we launched TGA Premier Youth Tennis again as sort-of authentic entrepreneurs.  Through TGA, we knew the youth sports market and franchising industries well, but we lacked experience in the tennis industry.  This concerned us.  So, we formed a founding partnership with the governing body of the tennis industry, the USTA.  The combination of our expertise with the USTA’s gives us all of the tools we should need to be successful.  If we could go back and redo GLinks, we would’ve used the same strategy and added a promotions guru to the founding team or partnered with a marketing/promotions group before launching.

The lesson in my friend's comment is that most entrepreneurs are either the young and dumb kind or the authentic kind, and you definitely have a better chance at success if you're in the authentic camp.  As my MBA professors used to say, always entrench yourself in an industry before trying to start a company in it.

This advice provided me with clarity and I hope it gives you food for thought as you put your ideas through the feasibility funnel.  And, for those of you aspiring entrepreneurs who don’t want to worry about such matters, the franchise industry has thousands of proven business models for you to explore.