How can I be a successful entrepreneur?

To be a successful entrepreneur we should probably understand why businesses fail. We all know the statistics about how four out of five businesses fail in the first five years: is this acceptable, or should we be outraged about this?

Imagine you had five children and I told you, “Not to worry… one of the five will be successful!” I think you would Take Me Out the back and shoot me. But we have glibly accepted the notion that people whose work is worship are failing at a very high rate. We tend to blame the wrong culprit. We put it down to the product not being good enough, or the market not being ready, or a failure to specify a target audience, or a lack of capital. All of these can be true, but the more likely scenario is a failure of leadership. By this I don't mean a failure of an individual leader but the failure to put a cohesive leadership team together that adequately represents all five types of leaders. If I ask you where the leaders had blind spots you would agree (unless you have a blind spot in this area) So why do we think that the trifecta of a CEO, CPO and CMO can get the job done?

One of the reasons that we have accepted the idea of having a chief executive officer, lead product person and a marketing person as being adequate is because we still buy into the notion that there are only two types of leaders. In my work, I have found that there are actually five types of leaders, namely, luminaries, entrepreneurs, managers, organizers and networkers. (Hence LEMON Leadership.) Each sees the business differently has a particular penchant when building it, approaches the world of capital differently and is prone to a different type of self-destruction. We can get all the technicalities of entrepreneurship right but if we miss the Who of entrepreneurship we will still get it wrong.

Interested in finding out more on this topic? Visit this page:

1. LEMONpreneur