“Last week I couldn’t even spell ‘entrepreneur’, and now I ARE one.”  -- 2,570,000 Americans in 1998.  (Americans formed 3.06 million businesses in 1998 – 84% were started by people who had never started a business before.)

“The more people who own little businesses of their own, the safer our country will be, for the people who have a stake in their country and their community are the best citizens.” – John Hancock

“For the U.S. to survive and continue its economic and political leadership in the world, we must see entrepreneurship as our central competitive advantage.  Nothing else can give us the necessary leverage to remain an economic superpower.  Nothing else will allow us to continue to enjoy our standard of living.” –Carl J. Schramm
 
The third quote above comes from the opening page of “The Entrepreneurial Imperative” by Carl J. Schramm, President of the Kauffman Foundation.  This book was released only a few weeks ago.  I’ve read most of it twice already.  It lays out the importance of small business and entrepreneurship better than I ever could, even though I’ve been trying.

Other quotes from the opening chapter:

• “Technology isn’t the answer, since everyone now either has the same technology or can easily obtain it.”

• “Education will not keep us out in front.  Many parts of the world surpass the U.S. in teaching skills needed for the future.” 

• “…we have largely given up when it comes to basic manufacturing because we simply can’t compete globally on price…when it comes to manufacturing, we must become entrepreneurial.”

• “It is true we possess a substantial edge in finance, but the fact is that all capital markets are now global…”

• “The message of this book is simple:  Entrepreneurship is America’s comparative advantage, and we need to exploit it fully both home and abroad.”

• “Encouraging, managing, and supporting an entrepreneurial economy is central to our place in the world going forward.”

• “Entrepreneurship is not only an integral part of our genius but also the only uniquely American resource at our disposal and we must exploit it fully.”

Enough, lest I get sued for republishing the book.  Two weeks ago, I asked Governor Sebelius if she had read the book yet.  She had not, but she had a copy already.

It is my hope that a lot of Kansas officials will read this book and come to understand what I do – Kansas is not going to start growing fast if we continue to concentrate only on big businesses.  Of course we should continue to concentrate on big businesses, which isn’t hard to do because there aren’t that many of them. 

But we need to do much more to concentrate on the 300,000 small businesses in Kansas.  Forget about concentrating on them individually.  This is an entirely different game than big business.  We must concentrate on making the environment healthy for large groups of businesses.  Forget about micro-managing the small business economy – it can’t be done. 

My concept of entrepreneurship is much more fundamental than Mr. Schramm’s.  His definition of an entrepreneur is “one who undertakes personal economic risk to create a new organization that will exploit a new technology or innovative process that generates value to others.”  My definition is “one who undertakes personal economic risk to create a new business.”

To me, the man or woman who buys a garbage truck to serve an area that was previously underserved is a classic entrepreneur.  No new technology or innovative processes are needed.  Generating value to others is all that is required.  The genius is in the recognition that a need exists.

When I first started my business, I thought the road to riches was in inventing a better mousetrap, so the world would beat a path to my door.  In other words, I would find a product so unique that it would sell itself.

It took me about five years to disabuse myself of that theory.  Then I adopted an entirely new approach:  “Get out of the tributaries and out into the mainstream, and once out there, do it better than the others there.”  It continues to be my method today.  

I’m not saying the “mouse trap” way doesn’t work, I’m just saying it doesn’t work very often.  And when it does, it won’t be long before one has a lot of competitors.

That brings me to another well-learned lesson.  No matter what it is you wish to accomplish, first look for a working example.  Then, copy all the good stuff they are doing and try to figure out how to improve on it with your own ideas.

My latest example is the Topeka Independent Business Association, which a group of us founded recently.  Our model is the Wichita Independent Business Association, which celebrated its 75th anniversary recently.  WIBA is a phenomenal success as an organization and a huge asset to Wichita.  In this case, the model is about as perfect as we can imagine, except WIBA is about 25 times bigger than TIBA at this point.  But we are using everything we possibly can from their model.  Later we’ll start tweaking things to see if we can make them better for Topeka.

I’ll be writing a lot more about Schramm’s book.  There are many valuable lessons to be learned from it, and I heartily recommend it to public officials who wish to learn some new concepts of how to build the Kansas economy. 

Link to the book's web site:  www.entrepreneurialimperative.com.                       

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Kenneth Daniel ( This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it ) is a Topeka small business owner and free-lance writer.  He is publisher of www.kssmallbiz.com, a website dedicated to Kansas small business.

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