A better option to entrepreneurial burn-out

A regular reader wrote on a very interesting concern:

I’m no longer having fun running my enterprise. The magnitude of the business problems has not changed, only its context. I used to have fun addressing them. Nowadays, even the smaller problems look bigger than they really are. Why is this so? Am I in a burn-out situation? What should I do? Sell the business?

Many entrepreneurs experience this feeling at a certain point in time. It is a clear indication that one is losing his/her passion for the business.

Remember that, in the first place, the energy that drives an entrepreneur to achieve the seemingly impossible is passion. Entrepreneurship is the transformation process that moves a mere abstract passion towards becoming a business reality. The passion will, in turn, be the driver towards increased profitability, better productivity, and more professionalism.

In the Master in Entrepreneurship program, these three Ps, as propounded by ME’s architect Professor Ed Morato, are the key elements of entrepreneurial transformation that every guru looks for in student-entrepreneurs who turn master at the end of the 18-month ME program.

Our reader has several options. Selling the business is one. With the passion gone, the pace of growth of the business will no longer be maintained. At best, it will survive. At worst, it will die. For the sake of the employees and the enterprise, selling is a valid option.

However, there is a better alternative. On the suspicion that the burn-out is due to the entrepreneur doing everything by his/her lonesome self, the drained-out feeling is self-inflicted. The very passion for the enterprise did not allow for delegation of responsibilities to other people in the organization.

Before it is too late, our reader must realize that the future profitability and productivity of the enterprise is a function of professionalism. The entrepreneur must create an environment that breeds intra-preneurs or corporate entrepreneurs. If successfully done, the passion and entrepreneurial spirit that grew the enterprise will infect the organization and he/she will no longer be growing the business on solo flight.

There are several critical variables in the process of creating an entrepreneurial organization. Keep in mind that a new business starts from ideas which are then incubated to define products or services that can be matched with market realities. If and when the economic fit is found, the next step is execution or implementation. We refer to this process as the critical three Is: idea, incubate, and implement.

The entrepreneurial organization allows ideas to spawn not as an accident but by design. In some cases, entrepreneurial organizations allow the use of 15% of official time for doing things that are not directly related to assigned tasks. Others have institutionalized the idea-generation process by making the number of ideas generated a criteria in the regular performance evaluation of each person in the organization.

The objective is to create an environment where ideas are allowed to float and then evaluated for further incubation. The more ideas generated, the better. The manner of handling ideas which do not get incubated is quite important so that it does not discourage the generation of more ideas. Feeding on the passion for ownership of ideas is crucial to the generation of new ones. The ultimate act of passionate ownership of an idea is its withdrawal to prevent incubation, not necessarily because it is a bad idea, but just to protect one’s ownership.

The next area is incubation. The organization’s culture must allow incubation of an idea by cross-functional ad hoc teams. This means that the teams naturally join groups that incubate ideas into products and services that have potential market fit. The key driver in this phase is team-ownership. The other key driver is how the teams organize and disband on their own volition. The team must own not only the incubation process but also the decision as to when to start and disband. What is vital here is the incubating teams’ ownership passion to evolve from the idea the resultant product/service and economic market.

Implementation is equally important in the process of creating and sustaining an idea. This is the critical hand-off from the incubating team to the implementing team. In many cases, the incubating team is transformed into the implementation team but, again, it is best to let the teams own that decision. Ownership passion by implementing teams is important.

The concept of creating an entrepreneurial organization is really built upon the ownership of the process, not on the ownership of the business. This process of creating an entrepreneurial organization is also a step towards making the enterprise professional. In many ways, there is delegation of the highest order, not of simple, menial or clerical tasks but of the entrepreneurial or owner’s activities that lead to new products/services.

What we want to point out here is that the better option to entrepreneurial burn-out or loss of passion is not the selling of the business. Rather, it is the challenge of creating an entrepreneurial organization full of passionate owners of the process.

(Alejandrino Ferreria is the dean of the Asian Center for Entrepreneurship of the Asian Institute of Management. For further comments and inquiries, you may contact him at: [email protected]. Published "Entrepreneur’s Helpline" columns can be viewed on the AIM website at http//: www.aim.edu.ph).