Why Established Leaders Should Tap Into Their Entrepreneurial Passion

Emergencies, by definition, throw the alarmingly unexpected at the completely unsuspecting. As we’ve seen with the Covid-19 pandemic, the world that we know and (mostly) understand can change in an instant and become a place that is unfamiliar, uncomfortable and perhaps even frightening to many.  

I would argue that startup entrepreneurs are integral to any disaster recovery. From my perspective, these leaders are uniquely hardwired to engineer new, workable realities when old ones are in disarray — and they often carry the scars to prove it.

Entrepreneurial Adrenalin

When something unpleasant occurs, your survival instinct can kick in and send you into “fight or flight” mode. But in my experience, this can lead us to freeze like rabbits in headlights or make fast decisions without much thought. Sometimes, we need something a little more sophisticated.

This is where I believe “surge capacity” becomes important. This is a more nuanced response that can help you identify the information and actions necessary for survival and ditch anything that’s not. Unfortunately, as one Medium article pointed out, surge responses have a shelf life. Many emergencies are relatively short-lived, so something longer term can quickly exhaust people’s capacity to cope. 

By contrast, I think entrepreneurs have a far greater surge capacity. Any entrepreneur will likely tell you that a new business is one long, rolling emergency. Whether you’re navigating funding, product development, talent acquisition, go-to-market strategies or growth, infinite rows of perilously spinning plates are just waiting to fall. 

And I believe it certainly isn’t money alone that drives entrepreneurs. One study of 500 tech startups (via the Independent) found that many founders work more than 60 hours each week, even without a guarantee of financial relief. There are easier ways to earn a crust, so to me, it’s the entrepreneurial rush that drives us on — the feeling that you’re battling against the odds to create a reality that has never existed before. Entrepreneurship is part euphoria, but it’s also part terror. 

Awakening Your Inner Startup

I think next-generation businesses all need to awaken their inner startup. The startup ethos is based on a fundamental understanding: You can’t assume anything. You obsess about meeting the needs of customers — because their needs are new and evolving. You attune to the business environment — because it’s uncharted territory. You scan the horizon — because the horizon is never that far away.

While the pandemic is an extreme example, I believe its effects are simply a variation of daily startup reality. It’s a spirit I’m determined to keep in my own company, no matter how far and fast the company travels — because it teaches us that the difference between catastrophic emergency and transformational opportunity can sometimes be a matter of perspective.

Often, I’ve found that perspective is decided by something called “vision.” It’s a word that I feel has been overused, so it's lost much of its meaning. But to me, vision is the ability to not simply settle for the present and accept what the future throws at you, but also to employ all the tools you have now to engineer what’s to come. 

The question every business must answer is one that faces startup entrepreneurs every single day: Will a slap in the face knock you down, or will it wake you up?

Passion And Pain

This is a question I had to ask myself a few years ago. Instead of being cowed into failure, I made a promise to the future: to gift a yet-to-exist bottle of my yet-to-be-created luxury whiskey marque to someone I greatly admire. It was the hardest promise I’ve ever had to keep. I was 38 years old and broke. I had to take the biggest gamble of my life — betting on myself — while knowing that failure would not only affect me but also my children. There were months where I simply felt numb and sick — where the enormity of what was at stake would hit me like a physical blow. 

There were no templates, no manuals, no instructional videos for what I was pursuing. It was terrifyingly new, gut-wrenchingly immediate and grippingly intense. It’s been a tumultuous time, but I’ve now delivered on that promise. 

Many people will speak about their “passion” to be an entrepreneur, but it’s worth remembering that the word encompasses suffering and endurance as well.

Harnessing The Chaos

When your whole life is a constantly breaking wave, harnessing the energy of chaos and turning it into something valuable is hard-won second nature.

So, what have I learned from this rollercoaster ride? First, entrepreneurs must believe in their idea, their product and, most of all, themselves. Confidence is our most valuable currency. It’s a reserve of strength — both physical and emotional — to draw on when the yards are hard. Self-belief is survival.

Second, complacency kills. After forming, storming and performing, a business can stagnate. If you look at yourself as an eternal startup, however, you never get that far. When you look at every customer challenge, engagement, product innovation and sales strategy as brand new, you lock yourself into a constantly refreshing cycle of discovery.

Reality Engineers

Fortunately, not everyone is wired to be a start-up entrepreneur. I know, for example, that I can be impatient, obsessive, a dreamer, difficult to manage, myopically focused and easily distracted. But it’s this collection of contradictions, and an inability to accept the status quo, that I believe drives every startup founder to engineer new and better realities.