The successful entrepreneur is rarely a one business person. Think of Richard Branson: while the brand Virgin is a constant, and Virgin Group gives him a useful top down control over everything, it’s actually made up of more than 400 different companies.
Spreading yourself like this means the security of multiple revenue streams, and the chance to innovate: with more than one company under your belt, a failed experiment doesn’t have to be the end of the world, even if it’s the end of a business. Virgin Cola failed to successfully compete with Coke, and the Virgin East Coast Mainline franchise has just been renationalised by the UK government, but despite these individual failures, Branson himself is a still successful businessman!
It’s obvious that being a serial entrepreneur has big advantages, but that doesn’t mean it’s without it’s downsides. You never settle in to a company: with your eyes always on the horizon, you don’t really get to know the people at your feet. Its also a temptation to take more and more onto your own shoulders: you’ve been responsible for lots of company’s success and with each one it gets harder to let go of the responsibility. This can lead to a few years or a decade of incredible achievement, before you burn out spectacularly, and simply cannot go on.
That’s the problem we’re here to help with today: we’re recommending some of the people who can help share the expertise and responsibility, and extend your life as an entrepreneur by twenty years or more!
Research
As a serial entrepreneur you’re a one man (or woman) research machine, with the insights gathered from each success or failure fed into the next project. That doesn’t mean you don’t need help though. When you depart your comfort zone, you might find yourself beyond relevancy of your experience, and all at sea!
Work with a market research firm to learn more about your market before you launch into, supplementing your own experience with objective facts and figures. Find out more and decide if it’s the right move for you.
Lawyers
As you move from company to company, you need not just expertise to ensure you’re getting things right, but points of continuity. You can’t take your trusted managers and execs with to future companies without gutting the ones you leave behind, but finding a trusted lawyer can change that.
As they work on articles of incorporation and check initial contracts over the course of multiple businesses with you, your lawyer can become a trusted collaborator, someone who knows your way of working and has the confidence and nous to ground you when your plans are getting more optimistic than realistic. Professionals like lawyers who you work with across the course of your career are the people who can really alleviate the loneliness of the serial founder and keep you going longer than the competition.