Do you have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur?

Dr Ken Blanchard, world-renowned leadership and management expert and the co-author of The One Minute Manager and The One Minute Entrepreneur describes the crucial mindset you must have to make it as an entrepreneur in today’s business climate.

Best wishes,

Marie-Louise Cook
Editor – Daily Marketing Bulletin

Dr Ken Blanchard Explains What Every Entrepreneur Needs

Dr Ken Blanchard is a world-renowned leadership and management expert. He is the co-author of The One Minute Manager which has sold upwards of 12 million copies as well as 40 other books including Raving Fans, Gung Ho! and Whale Done! He and Don Hutson, the CEO of US Learning, wrote The One Minute Entrepreneur.

What attribute do you consider the most important for an entrepreneur?

Ken Blanchard: One of the key things is to be a visionary: to have a vision of a business, a vision of an opportunity, and a vision of what customers need. I had the wonderful delight of interviewing Richard Branson at a big customer service conference in London and I asked him how he decided where to go with his Virgin brand and he said that he chose industries where the customers weren’t being taken care of.

Being optimistic is really important… to feel that you can do it.

It’s very important to have insight into your strengths and weaknesses. If you gather people around you who are just like you, you will just compound your weaknesses. What you need to do is to make sure you have all the bases covered. For example, there are two parts to the area of leadership: one part is the visionary, directional part (What are we trying to accomplish? What do we stand for? Where are we heading? What do we believe in?) I’m pretty good at that. The second part of leadership is implementation (How do we accomplish our goals? How do we live according to those goals?) My wife is much better at doing that.

Why do you think most new businesses fail?

Ken Blanchard: Two main reasons they fail: one they are bad at financial management because the reality is sales have to exceed expenses. Sounds simple but a lot of people forget that and they spend all kinds of money on product development and don’t have any customers.

The second key reason they fail is that they don’t know how to manage people – both their own employees and their customers.

You’ve said that when you and your wife set up the business, neither of you really had a grasp of finances – that neither of you were very good at even balancing a chequebook. How did you manage to create an international business?

Ken Blanchard: That again is about recognising your strengths and weaknesses. We got a good financial team gathered around us and we have had the same accountant for 30 years and we hired a good financial officer right away, somebody who knew about it. Marjorie’s brother came onboard and that’s where his strengths lie. We have been willing to bring in people to cover that strength and we are still not any better at managing finances than we were before but we’re not in charge of that side of it.

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