Entrepreneurs

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 558.

How to make a million

Trying to make your first million? Then forget about drive, initiative and ingenuity. And don't let anyone tell you it's about putting in an 18-hour day, having a sudden stroke of genius or beating the system as you work your way to the top. For statistically speaking, your chances of making a fortune will largely depend on how fortunate you are in the first place. According to all the surveys, here are four sure-fire ways of getting rich:

1. START OFF RICH.

It's depressing but true that half of Britain's 95,000 millionaires were born into wealthy families, and so were a quarter of those who head the country's largest corporations. When you're rich already it takes a special kind of person not to get richer.

2. DO BADLY AT SCHOOL.

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, is the classic case, leaving school at 16 to start a mail-order record company and ending up running his own airline, publishing, broadcasting, construction and holiday empire. He's not alone. Almost two thirds of the UK's top earners finished their education early. And the studious graduate is less likely to be found staying at the Hilton Hotel than applying for a job in its kitchens.

3. LOSE A PARENT.

Amazingly, only 5% of successful entrepreneurs had both parents present throughout their childhood. Perhaps a lack of parental control gives you the toughness, resilience and independence you need to make it on your own.

4. BE BEAUTIFUL.

Silly as it sounds, good looks really do get you places, both in terms of career and marital prospects. If you are too pretty, however, people may tend to assume that you're nice but stupid and pass you over for promotion.

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes - the dynamic, the cautious and the greedy. But all of them hold an equal fascination for us. How do they do it? What's their secret? Some of the world's biggest corporations would like to know too. For entrepreneurism is in. And these days everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.

But an entrepreneur is not what you are, it's what you become, and real entrepreneurs exist only in retrospect. At first, nobody takes them seriously. They're crackpots, dreamers, unemployables. And by the time they've finally earned the respect of the business community, they've already made it. So cancel the classes on entrepreneurship and throw out your business plan. For the road to entrepreneurial success can't be mapped out in advance. You get there one sale at a time.

In the beginning only entrepreneur needs to see the goal, nobody else. And the goal is quite simple: you get an idea; you identify your customer; you make a sale. Then you make another and another and another until your office in the spare bedroom has turned into the tower block in Manhattan you always wanted. Forget about marketing strategy at this stage. What you need first is a steady cashflow. Bide your time. Focus on the little things. That's how it works. Big companies are just small companies that got bigger.

Take Richard Branson, for instance. For the founder of Virgin, the first ten years were a struggle, with his company suffering some cashflow problems until as late as 1980. By then the Virgin Group was running 80 different operations, none of them making large amounts of money and some of them losing money hand over fist. Yet in 1992 Branson's music business alone sold for £560 million.

Or take Nicolas Hayek, the man who invented the Swatch and brought the Swiss watch-making industry back from the dead. Hayek took on Japanese market leaders, Seiko and Citizen, and beat them on quality and price. Today he sells 28 million Swatches a year and has built a £ 1.6 bn company in the process. The Swatch is a 20th century icon. And, incredibly, though the price of a new one has never increased, some of the highly collectable early designs are now classed as art and fetch more than £20,000 - not bad for a plastic watch!

So what is it that makes a good entrepreneur? Clearly, not the same thing that makes a good manager. For good managers tend to come from fairly conventional backgrounds. They're the bright kids everyone knew would do well, born organizers, who rise through the ranks to reach the top of large corporations. But the budding entrepreneur is more likely to be an outsider, a troublemaker, a rebel, who drops out of college to get a job, discovers a flair for building companies from nothing, gets bored quickly and moves on. Most of all, they'll be a master of risk-management. For risk doesn't mean the same thing to the entrepreneur as it does to the rest of us. The king of corporate raiders, Sir James Goldsmith, sums it up best: "The ultimate risk," he says, "is not taking a risk." And that's probably how he got to be a dollar billionaire.

Find the words and expressions which mean:

1. popular, fashionable
2. looking back
3. mad or eccentric person
4. succeeded
5. losing money rapidly
6. revived
7. fought against
8. a classic image of the time
9. climb the corporate ladder
10. the would-be entrepreneur
11. a natural skill or talent
12. a person who launches hostile takeover bids

Put the following entrepreneurial qualities into what you consider to be their order of importance.

To be an entrepreneur you need:

a. drive

b. intuition

c. determination

d. ingenuity

e. dynamism

f. initiative

g. dedication
h. guts

i. faith

j. the killer instinct

Which five of the above can you express by using an adjective?

To be an entrepreneur you need to be :

1………….

2………….

3………….

4………….

5………….

Now match the other five with the definitions below:

1. To be an entrepreneur you need to have energy and motivation.
2. To be an entrepreneur you need to have courage.
3. To be an entrepreneur you need to come up with ideas and make decisions on your own.
4. To be an entrepreneur you need to be prepared to destroy your competitors if necessary.
5. To be an entrepreneur you need to believe in yourself.