Are Entrepreneurs Making Too Much Money?
How do we decide?
My senior year of college, I managed the desk assistants for my dorm. Timecards were filled out by hand. They had to be accurate and were paid down to the quarter hour. I was told the problem was that someone would arrive late and write down a time a few minutes after the hour and the previous guy would put down the something different. Bookkeeping was a mess. It would be my job to keep track of those minutes.
I came up with a solution. If you were one minute late for your shift, you lost your first 15 minutes to the person before you. If you were 16 minutes late you lost the first half hour. Remember the cards were filled out by hand. The assistants would cover for each other. I didn’t care. I just wanted my records to be clean. It worked great.
During summer break, I was offered the job of interim director at the same dorm. The dorm was the only one open during the two-week break between sessions. I was told by the previous director that the job would be a mess. The Dean’s office would call and assign someone a room. They would not know whether the room was smoking or not, male or female, already occupied or not. It would be two weeks of confusion.
In 1977, there were no such things as computer spread sheets. I spent about 36 hours straight creating spread sheets by hand. When the Dean’s office called to assign a room, I knew immediately what the situation was. I could tell them if the room was already full, non-smoking, male or female. I could also suggest a different room. Soon the Dean’s office was just calling me before assigning the room.
A friend is writing an autobiography. I asked him who his publisher was. He wasn’t that far. I told him my story. I wrote a book and couldn’t find a publisher. I saw an advertisement for a machine that would create a paperback book. You just downloaded your pdf into the machine and a book would come out. I called the company. A man answered and said they had won a $20 million lawsuit against Lightning Source and were not going to make the machines.
I called Lightning Source. They weren’t making the machines. They just did the printing. It was on-demand. I could get as many copies as I wanted. I asked how I could get my book printed. I was told they only work with publishers. So, I asked what I had to do be a publisher. I was told I needed ISBN numbers. What is an ISBN and how do I get one? I was told to call Bowkers.
I created a company. I called Bowkers and got ISBN numbers and became a publisher. Then, I returned to Lightning Source and got my books printed. Now they are available through Amazon. My friend was wide-eyed as he said, “You’re awesome.”
Those are examples of problem solving in business. That’s what we entrepreneurs do. Most people would be stopped before they got started. Most people would not know how to create order out of chaos. Many think they could be entrepreneurs. They think it is easy to be in business.
Why aren’t more people in business? Why don’t more people start businesses? Why aren’t more people wealthy?
The answer is most people don’t have what it takes to be problem solvers. Most people are followers not leaders. A relatively small percentage of entrepreneurs make big bucks. It is because they can do what many of us cannot. I’m not one of them, even though I am an entrepreneur.
I had an employee say, “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Don’t ask me to be creative.” Creativity is where the big money is. We should honor the creative geniuses and be thankful for their contributions.