When we think of some of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, they’re invariably people who started their businesses from nothing. Elon Musk was just a student when he began his first software company back in the 1990s. Then, after that, he teamed up with a group of similarly minded geniuses to create PayPal, which he later sold for a cut of a little over $100 million.
Or what about Donald Trump, the only non-politician, non-military person ever to achieve the US presidency? He got a loan of around a million dollars from his father, a property businessman himself in New York, and turned it into a fortune of more than $4.5 billion (according to Forbes).
But history is also littered with people who didn’t climb their way up by going through the gruelling process of starting their own business. Instead, they found alternative routes to the top. Many people tack onto something that already looks good. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the founders of Google, but the public face of the corporation for many years has been Eric Schmidt, a man who seems to know which companies to partner up with. It is Schmidt, not Page or Brin, who has really shaped the public image of Google and transformed it into a corporate behemoth with the personality of a startup.
So if you don’t fancy going it alone, what options are available to you? Do you have to be an archetypal entrepreneur, headstrong and brilliant? Or can you play to your strengths and still get all the benefits of being at the helm of business?
It turns out that you can. Here are just some of the ways you can be an entrepreneur without actually starting your own business.
Build An IP And Then Sell Your Firm
The business press likes to talk about the frenzy of startups in places like Boston, Silicon Valley, London and East Asia. Startups are the green shoots of new economic potential in the economy, promising to deliver massive value in the future. Some startups do (think Google and Apple), but many never actually become businesses in their own right. So what’s going on?
If you look at the data, you soon see that actual startup activity is at low levels at the moment. Despite the hype in the press, the level of innovation in the economy, as measured by the number of new companies seems to be small. Is this because there’s something fundamentally wrong with the economy? Is there less innovation, or is innovation simply getting too difficult? Are people not educated enough to begin profitable new enterprise?
Though all those factors play a role, the main reason seems to be something rather benign: startups would rather sell their ideas before even getting off the ground.
There are, of course, many attractive reasons to adopt a strategy like this. Getting intellectual property might be a long and drawn-out process, but at least once you have it, you don’t have to then worry about all the myriad other things that burgeoning startups do. Getting to the point where you have a demonstrable product, and IP protection makes you an attractive option for investors. Rather than taking your business to the next stage, you can get some other budding entrepreneur to do it for you, bagging the money from the sale in the process. Thousands of startups do this every year, removing the risk faced by the owners and generally making life that little bit easier.
Work For A Company That Does “Intrapreneurship”
Not all companies are corporate straight-jackets, stuffing people into one particular role or another. Some companies do genuinely value innovation. What’s more, they want their employees to be the innovators: after all, who knows the needs of their customers better than they do?
Some companies, therefore, have adjusted their working practices in such a way to promote innovation. This is called intrapreneurship according to www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrapreneurship. Google is perhaps the best well-known company that follows this format. It began pioneering a working practices approach that allowed employees to go off for one day a week and work on products which they thought customers would want. They weren’t supervised during this time, and nobody told them what to do. It was an experiment, but those who were given free reign actually wound up developing some of Google’s best products, like Gmail, worth billions today. In fact, the approach worked so well, that Google expanded it further, hoping to generate even higher returns.
Google, of course, isn’t the only company to promote internal entrepreneurship. Companies like Intel and Dell do it too. Even smaller firms may allow individuals to build their own businesses within the wider company.
Intrapreneurship is also a relatively easy sell, so long as you have open minded managers. Enterprises that experimented with it invariably saw higher growth. Lockheed Martin and 3M benefited significantly from a change in corporate culture in which people were more geared towards innovation than competition. Perhaps your boss’s business could benefit too?
Set Up A Franchise
Setting up a business from scratch, even a business that has massive potential is difficult. Rather than just slipping into the market and doing your thing, you have to build up brand recognition and trust, something which can take decades.
Fortunately, there’s a shortcut, especially for people who aren’t creating dramatically novel or new businesses. It’s called a franchise.
One example of a franchise can be found at www.alphagraphicsfranchise.com/research/. Design agencies rarely do well by themselves. But when they join a larger, well recognised collective, they can shine. Franchises offer a great level of support, but don’t come with many of the downsides of a regular managerial position, like senior managers breathing down your neck all the time. A franchise, like a personal business, is what you make of it.
An apparent drawback of franchising is the royalties you pay to the franchise owner for all their help and support. But is this really a drawback? Probably not. It’s just the price you pay for avoiding all the usual hassle of setting up a business from scratch when nobody knows who you are. In return, you get a recognisable brand and a massive start over your average startup.
Partner Up With Somebody Else
Perhaps you don’t want to run a business, but maybe you want to be at the top of one, making decisions that really matter for its long-term success. In these cases, partnering up with somebody else can be a great solution.
Many business owners have too few hours in the day to get all their work done. As a result, they can neglect aspects of their business, like finance or marketing. You could offer to become a partner and oversee these operations while the owner gets on with selling or developing products. This way you get the best of both worlds: you avoid all the hassle of starting up a business and a lot of the risk, but you also get to do all the fun stuff, like think about strategy and make money.
When partnerships go well, they can go really well, especially if you find that both you and your partner have complementary skills. Perhaps you’re more analytical and your partner more verbal. Great: you’ll probably find that you’re much better able to divide up labor and get work done more quickly.
Put Money Into Other People’s Startups
Even if you’re not that keen in starting your own startup, there are plenty of people out there who are. Why not take advantage of them?
Putting money into startups is a risky, but interesting and rewarding business. As an investor, you’ll still be at the forefront of the entrepreneurial community, putting money where it matters and observing the high level decisions of businesses. But you’re removing from the day to day grunt work, and hopefully, the stress.
Scouting around for startups to invest in can be a lot of fun. There are dozens of resources online for investors, as well as interesting entrepreneurs trying to get a foothold in the market in novel ways. When you’re investigating what startups are getting up to, there’s never a dull day, even if you don’t think their business ideas will work in practice.
The people most suited to being investors in other people startups are those who enjoy long hours of research. To really find out whether there’s a market for a particular startup’s products, you’ll have to invest a lot of time, energy and thought into every investment decision you make. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there who genuinely believe their product has legs, but your cooler head might tell you otherwise.
The great thing about being an entrepreneur is that it is such a flexible concept, involving all kinds of different activities. There’s nothing stopping you from entering the startup community from a completely different angle. For any career to be sustainable, it has to be something you enjoy. So pick a route that fits your personality.