Business

Like many of my clients, I am an entrepreneur.  About four years ago I got the guts to leave the large law firm atmosphere, take my few Indiana technology clients and start my own business law practice (what has now grown into Alerding Castor).  I remember dealing with many internal questions at that time about whether it was the correct moment of my career and life to launch out on my own.

There is a good article in this month's Harvard Business Review entitled "Planning a Start-Up? Seize the Day..." which addresses these sorts of questions and encourages entrepreneurial minded people to stop worrying and launch (i.e., "seize the day").  The author, Professor Noam Wasserman of Harvard Business School, suggests that waiting for a perfect time is usually futile as no time is ever perfect, and there are advantages to launching earlier rather than later.  Here are a few:

1.  Long tenures in corporate jobs keep executives from becoming the jack-of-all-trades that new ventures generally require.  A person gets used to having HR specialists take care of HR issues, finance aces prepare reports, and IT whizzes maintain the company infrastructure.  They become accustomed to delegating and distancing themselves from real work - a luxury that just is not possible in a start-up.

2.  Senior people in big companies are successful because they can manage a team.  But in an early stage businesses there is no such thing as a manager.  Everyone is a contributor; there is little room for folks who need a team around them (see my previous blog post entitled Leadership is Not Management)

3.  The biggest advantage of starting young is that being an entrepreur can be a career and not just a stage-of-life project.