Entrepreneurship: It pays to keep on plugging- Urgency, persistence and follow-up. Three important traits of entrepreneurship.

The other day I called up a young attorney I’m impressed with, and while we’re talking I can hear him trying to stifle a yawn. It was 10 a.m., so I said to him, "What the hell are you yawning about? You’re too young, and it ain’t that late yet."

"Jack," he said, "I’ve been here since 2:30 a.m."

By:
Jack Roseman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Now that’s why I like him. He’s got a job to do. He’s got to get it out. So he gets here at 2:30 in the morning. I call that a sense of urgency, and it’s an important trait for any entrepreneur.

The entrepreneurs I respect, the ones I really feel good about, are the ones that when they say they will get back to you tomorrow, they get back to you tonight. They have a need to get things done now because they know something else can come up in 10 minutes, and they might have to take care of that.

It also makes an impression on your customers. When you get a job, the faster you get it done the more it impresses people. If you think it’s a two-day job, do it in 1 1/2 days. I’ve always been that way. If I can get something out of the way now, let me do it.

With one company I’m working with, I don’t think we’re any closer to a product than we were a year ago. There are good reasons — they don’t have the money to hire programmers and so on. But I really believe I could have found programmers to do the work. But instead, things just go on and on, and I have to wonder: When will we have a product? When will we have a contract? It is easy to let time slip by — that’s why you need a sense of urgency.

Persistence … and follow-up

There is an aspect of persistence that I want to stress. It may surprise you to know that some entrepreneurs are shy, sensitive and don’t want to make pests of themselves. That’s fine. But how do you know where the pest line is? How do you know when your efforts to reach somebody will be considered pesky and when they will be welcome?

For example, a company I was once helping pitched a venture capital firm for backing and got rejected. So they tweaked their business plan and sent it over again. It came back. This exchange occurred four times before I started working with them. So the first thing I did was look at their business plan, make some changes, and send it in unknowingly for a fifth time. I’ve written and read a lot of business plans, and I personally thought this one was pretty impressive. Three days later it comes back with a note: "Forget it. No thanks."

I know it wasn’t gone long enough for the VCs to have even read it. So I happened to know one of the these guys and called him up.

"Off the record," I said. "Do you remember getting a proposal from these guys?"

"Yes," he says.

"Well, I really believe in this company, or I wouldn’t be helping them. They have a solid value proposition."

"Jack," he says, "this time we didn’t even give any thought to that."

"Why?" I asked.

"They submitted a proposal five or six times, and not once have they come in and worked with us on how to improve their business plan. They apparently think so little of us that they did not want us to work with them. Our concern was, once we invest in them they wouldn’t listen to us either."

Now, I know my client, and he is a sensitive guy who did not want to bother these people. That’s a fact. But how do these people know that? So they took his sensitivity as the statement: "I don’t care what you think; you can’t help me." And then they reasoned: "If we can’t help you now, we won’t be able to help you when we put money into your project either. You won’t call us when you need help. It’s a good thing we found that out now."

One of Pittsburgh’s most successful entrepreneurs was invited to speak to an MBA class at CMU when I was teaching there. At the beginning of his talk he held up a batch of letters and said, "I was here last year and I brought the letters that you guys and gals sent me to apply for a job to work with me."

He paused and held up the thick bundle so everyone could see it.

"You know how many I responded to?" he asked.

Nobody raised a hand.

"Zero. And you know why?"

Another pause. "No one, but no one called me and said, ‘Hey, I submitted a resume and I haven’t heard. Would you mind telling me what you think and can we meet?’ "

"Well," he went on, "if you don’t have time to call me, I certainly don’t have time to call you."

Urgency, persistence and follow-up. Three important traits of entrepreneurship.

Jack Roseman, who taught entrepreneurship for 13 years at Carnegie Mellon University, is director of The Roseman Institute, a subsidiary of Buchanan Ingersoll, and founder of two computer firms and president of a third, On-Line Systems.