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Entrepreneurship: It takes outrageous optimism

It takes a lot of optimism to start a new company. It takes more than optimism. When you consider the odds, the barriers and the almost daily obstacles to success, it takes outrageous optimism. More optimism than your average, reasonably bright entrepreneur has any right to possess. So where does it come from?

By:
Jack Roseman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

An entrepreneurial father? If so, I am a very unlikely candidate.

I grew up in poverty in Lynn, Massachusetts, in one of the poorest ethnic ghettos within Lynn. Among our neighbors, I did not know of anyone who was less well off than we were. Our apartment was so small my brother and I shared the same bed through high school and the only place I could find the quiet to do my homework was in the john (which made me very unpopular).

It so happened that my father was an entrepreneur — a skilled tailor. But he had a problem with price point. He had gotten $14 a week in Europe but the going rate in America was $12. Feeling that he deserved $14, he didn’t work most of the time.

When he did find work, it was primarily during Easter and Christmas when the workload was such that they just needed him and paid his $14. This taught me a lot about sticking to my principles, but nothing much useful about entrepreneurship.

A mentor? A neighborhood entrepreneur? They were always being broken into, so I did not admire them.

Friends? They were always doing the breaking-in, and I saw no long-term business prospects in their strategy.

An entrepreneurial mother? I lost one of my brothers and his whole family in Nazi concentration camps before we could afford to bring them to the U.S. And it seemed to me that my mother’s sadness or guilt over that was forever in the background of our lives. It’s hard to remember times when she wasn’t crying.

The one exception was when she went shopping. She would always look at the price tag and immediately summon the owner. "This price," she would say, "is for rich people. We are not rich people. How much is it for us?" And the owner would be amused by this and give her a break.

My adversaries? What sometimes gets lost in the horror of the Holocaust, is that life for Jews in America at that time was not as easy as some people think. Anti-Semitism was widespread. Older kids in school would catch me between floors and ask if I was a Jew and then punch me.

One time I asked if it mattered if one of my parents was a Jew and the other one wasn’t. These thugs were momentarily befuddled by this defense, but quickly decided it was splitting hairs and gave me my beating. Another time I had a gang of them put a cigarette out in my hand. This is hard on your self-confidence and does not build optimism.

When I try to tell my own children how it was in those days, they say, "We know, Dad, you had to walk barefoot two miles to school in a foot of snow, and it was uphill both ways."

So let me cite more contemporary examples of optimism working wonders.

Some years ago, I came home from CMU where I was teaching to find Alan lying on the couch, munching crackers and watching TV. I also noticed that he was looking somewhat dejected. He had recently earned his MBA and most days was busy sending out resumes or interviewing with companies. Seeing him home in the middle of the afternoon was a surprise.

So I said, "Alan, what’s wrong? What are you doing here in the middle of the afternoon lying on the couch watching TV?"

He said, "Dad, I’ve been everywhere and companies are just not hiring people. So I don’t know what to do."

"Look," I said, "If you can’t find a company to work for, buy a company. There are little companies all over Pittsburgh where the owner wants to retire, maybe they want to go to Florida, or they had a fight with their partner. But it’s now for sale. Go find one of those and buy it.’"

He was dubious, but the next day he got dressed up in his one and only suit and went looking. And what do you know, he finds a company on the North Side that’s for sale.

It sold paper goods to department stores and supermarkets and whatnot, and it was owned by two older ladies who had inherited it from their father. But they were not salespeople. They didn’t know how to sell this stuff and as a consequence, they were not getting any new clients. So the business was going downhill. But the company had some assets. It had inventory and owned its building free and clear. And they were only asking $300,000.

So Alan thought about that and figured that maybe he could go to the bank and get a $300,000 mortgage on the building and use that to buy the company. He went to the bank, they looked over the building and sure enough, they said they would be willing to give Alan a $300,000 mortgage on it.

He came home quite happy with himself, and as fate would have it, waiting for him in the mail was a job offer from a company in Boca Raton, Florida. In the end, he took the job, but the story illustrates just how far optimism can get you.

They say an optimist sees a glass of water half full instead of half empty. An entrepreneur looks at that same glass of water and because he or she is an outrageous optimist, sees a crystal goblet of wine.

Without that kind of confidence, entrepreneurs would not have the underlying hopefulness to leave what they know behind and set off into new and unknown territory, inventing the road as they go.

So if you ask me where outrageous optimism comes from, I’d have to say it’s confidence that you have the imagination and determination to fulfill a need in the marketplace. You may not know exactly how the glass becomes crystal or the water wine, but you somehow know you can get it done.

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

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