Entrepreneurial Questions.
I write a blog post every day. One of the most annoying things about doing this is that often I will write about something that I’ve been thinking about during the day, yet once I’ve finished I will think of more to write on the subject, or I’ll think of a better way to write something.
Yesterday, I wrote about competitive advantages. I wrote that nobody would give away their competitive advantages, and even if they did, they wouldn’t really be worth much because a competitive advantage is built into a business.
A simple explanation eluded me throughout yesterday’s article. In this article, I’m going to hopefully clarify what I meant by the article on competitive advantages, whilst also bring up an interesting and important point for anyone who wants to go into business; entrepreneurship is all about asking entrepreneurial questions.
What Is An Employee Paid For?
When you are an employee, you are for the most part tasked with certain procedures to follow and a task list of things to do. Unless you are a CEO or other top of the food chain idea generator for your firm, then you’ll be given that list of tasks to accomplish by your boss, who will be given a task to accomplish by their boss and so on.
Because of the structure, very few employees ever see the “big picture” of the company they work for. Somebody who serves you a burger at McDonald’s probably doesn’t know much about the McDonald’s supply chain. The accountants who work for McDonald’s probably know next to nothing about how to serve a burger.
For the majority of companies this is perfect. It works for two reasons. The first is that each employee is a replaceable cog. That’s not to say that they’re not important, or that employees can’t be immensely valuable, but it is to say that should one person leave the company for whatever reason, the whole system won’t fall apart.
The second reason is that the secret that I talked about yesterday will always remain intact. There is no one person at McDonald’s, or any other company, that can completely replicate the overall system and set of processes that any one business consists of. If your business can be replicated, you have the problems that I also talked about yesterday.
Essentially though, from the point of view of an employee, their job is about repeating a task. It’s about fulfilling the answer to a question. (More on this in a moment.)
Let’s put the shoe on the other foot and talk about what an entrepreneur is paid for, or what a business aims to do.
An Entrepreneur Is Paid For Asking Entrepreneurial Questions
An entrepreneur or would-be business owner is paid in a completely different way. You can be an entrepreneur and go through a specific set of tasks that will gain you absolutely no money whatsoever. You can fill your day with fourteen hours of button pressing and other things that an employee might be paid for, and it won’t help your business one bit. In fact it would probably be a detriment to your business.
That’s because if you want to start a business, you will be paid in a completely from my. The measure of your work will be taken completely differently. The work of an employee, as I stated above, is about fulfilling the answer to a question.
Essentially the list of tasks is an answer.
- A social media guy improves the profile of his client by doing X.
- A doctor helps their patient by finding what’s wrong with them.
- An engineer solves the problem of how to do X with Y.
Your company-and your employees, if you have them-will answer an entrepreneurial question. The question is essentially, “how do I solve a particular problem for a particular market?”
Your job as a business owner is to find the entrepreneurial questions to ask. This, to tie it in nicely with what we talk about yesterday, is where your competitive advantages will be found. It’s also where most people who want to go into business fail before they start.
Most Would-Be Business Guys Ask The Wrong Entrepreneurial Questions
If you’ve read any business self-help books, they’ll all say that you should start by asking something like, “What do people need?” as opposed to “What’s the business I want to build?”
That’s a good yet obvious start. However, the entrepreneurial advice the books give you beyond that almost never amounts to much more.
There are a lot more entrepreneurial questions that are relevant to your success than just “What need do you solve?” (Although, obviously answer that one first.)
- Where are the target markets?
- What does the target market think they want?
- How do they want to receive the solution?
- In what form do they want to receive the solution?
- Where are the logistical issues?
- Where do the other companies serving the market go wrong?
- What could be better about the products that serve the market?
These sorts of entrepreneurial questions are the backbone of a successful business. They’re also the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur. They’re also key if you want to scale your business in anyway in the future.
Once You Have The Entrepreneurial Questions, Your Business Is The Answer
If you think about the above questions, you’ll see why the guy from yesterday is probably not going to do so well. Any business that does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way as other companies has no competitive advantage.
That’s because they haven’t thought about the entrepreneurial questions to ask; instead, they’re copying a solution. Or developing an answer.
You aren’t an entrepreneur because you give a single answer. You’re an entrepreneur because you find and ask the questions. You ask the questions, your business is a set of answers.
Scaling Your Business- It’s All About Divorcing Question From Answer
If you are an entrepreneur, then you ask the entrepreneurial questions and your business is a set of answers. I feel like I’ve written that a hundred times today.
It’s essential that this process is done in two steps if you ever want to scale your business. That’s because you, business owner, need to concentrate on the questions that your company needs to ask.
When you scale your business, you’ll need to hire employees. As we wrote about in the earlier sections, your employees aren’t there to answer the questions. That’s your job.
Your employees are there to fulfil the task list that you give them.
That’s not to say that employees can’t have creative control. You’re not going to hire an engineering team to create an engineering widget that you, a non-engineer, have designed. You’ll give them creative control in most cases.
But the big entrepreneurial questions – Who are we selling this to? And why do they need it? – are questions which you need to answer, no matter how technical the product.
Remember, you have to design your business so that your employees are replaceable parts.
Final Thoughts
When you build a business, the value that you provide – and source of all the selling points that your business has over your competitors – comes from asking and solving entrepreneurial questions.
No employee can do this for you. Employees execute a plan created in response to the above entrepreneurial questions. When you scale a business, you need to think of your employees as little robots (though much-loved robots) that are tasked with processing the answers to the questions you’ve found and solved.
Even if you’re a one-man band, you need to split the processes between the questions and the answers your business solves.