Entrepreneurship – Page 13

Take a vacation already!

30 September 20251 December 2004 by Terry Gold

One of the first blogs I started reading was by Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Return Path. His post on Why Entrepreneurship is like Windows made me smile. If you are an entrepreneur you’ll get it and if you are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur make sure you think about what it might be like to be in screen saver mode most of the time. I’m a big believer in vacations, though it took me about five years before I didn’t feel guilty about taking them. (I still do a little)

If you only take a week at a time, I think you’re only getting the mental benefit of about one day off. Think about it – the first three days you’re still thinking about work. You get one good day and then spend the next three days thinking about going back to work. I think it takes two weeks at least, consecutive, with little or no thoughts of work to really recharge.

Your employees could probably use the break too, and they get to prove that they can run the business without you. If you must think about work, keep the thoughts big and bring back a good idea or two.

If you are reading this,

30 September 202525 November 2004 by Terry Gold

If you are reading this, you CAN read, and you probably have food and shelter. This alone makes us fortunate. Happy Thanksgiving!

Carrots or New Products

30 September 202520 November 2004 by Terry Gold

In an earlier posting I warned you to Beware of Carrots. I’m not a big fan of vegetables unless they are in a big bowl of Burgoo, but the carrots to be most wary of are the kind that come in the door looking like new product ideas. It goes like this – out of the blue you get a call and the person on the other ends says "If you build this product I know I could sell/buy hundreds off them!" You ask about their budget and they say "Uh no, I don’t have any budget to fund the effort, so you build it and THEN I’ll sell/buy them."

It’s like the little boy riding his donkey who gets the donkey to go wherever he wants by holding a carrot dangling from a stick in front of the donkey’s nose. The donkey catches on that he’s not getting any closer to the carrot so he just doubles his efforts hoping to catch it. It’s so easy to be a donkey when a new product opportunity shows up unannounced. So how do you avoid it?