Fuel your entrepreneurial fire #4
Always looking for fresh thinking? Here’s what our entrepreneurship faculty recommend…
Life as an entrepreneur is fast-paced and ever-changing. You have to explore new opportunities, face new challenges – and make decisions that could change the future of your business – every day.
You know what it’s like when you find that nugget of inspiration? The one that sparks an exciting idea? Or that helps you to approach a difficult challenge in a totally new way? This series is your one-stop-shop for fresh thinking. Our expert faculty regularly share books, articles, blogs, podcasts and videos that inspire them. So dive on in – and find fuel for your entrepreneurial fire.
Your ‘bottleneck’ resource should dictate your growth pace
Veroniek Collewaert, Professor of Entrepreneurship, recommends How fast should your company really grow? Published in Harvard Business Review, this article describes how to achieve sustained growth.
She says: “Growth is a much-debated topic with entrepreneurs, investors and boards, as it’s not easy to achieve and hard to sustain. The key message of this article is something we often tell our entrepreneurs – that growth should be paced, with effort taken to build capabilities and capacity along the way.
Often, we see entrepreneurs making the mistake of focusing on the top line and forgetting about building the necessary infrastructure to support growth. So it’s necessary to think beyond financial resources. For example – can your people meet the increased demand? What about your operations? In amongst all the resources your business needs to grow, there will be one critical component that growth cannot happen without. This is your bottleneck resource. It’s crucial to delivering your value proposition – which means you can only grow as fast as you can build it. So it’s this bottleneck resource that should dictate your pace of growth.”
Learning to transform your relationship with failure
Andreea Gorbatai, Professor of Entrepreneurship, recommends the book Right kind of wrong: The science of failing well by her former teacher, Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. It won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award 2023.
Andreea says: “The book focuses on three different kinds of failure – basic, complex, and intelligent. It shows you how to fail fast and often, so you can grow. It offers guidance and case studies on how to best pursue smart risks and avoid harm on the way to success, whatever that may look like. And while it doesn’t specifically target entrepreneurs, it speaks to the lean start-up, entrepreneurial mindset we teach here at Vlerick.”
Why building teams is harder than building tech
Frank Goedertier, Professor of Marketing, recommends the Harvard Business Review article 3 Management Myths that Derail Startups. It’s based on the book The Bonfire Moment by Martin Gonzalez and Josh Yellin.
Frank Goedertier says: “Martin and Josh are the driving forces behind Google’s Effective Founders Project – part of Google for Startups. Based on work with more than 10,000 start-up leaders across 70 countries, they pinpoint one factor that determines new ventures’ ability to succeed in the long term. It’s not about having the right product, technology or financial resources. Instead, success is linked to having an organisational structure that nurtures talent acquisition and retention – as well as promoting collaboration. In other words, if a start-up wants to become a scale-up, it needs to acknowledge that some big-company mechanisms have positive and efficiency-increasing elements, too. The authors say that as start-ups grow, they may need to let go of some of the loose, egalitarian company culture – and integrate some more traditional management processes to successfully make the scale-up jump.”
Is entrepreneurship in your veins?
Then come and bring your spark to the Vlerick Entrepreneurship Academy! Here you will learn the tools to take on challenges and expand your business sustainably. And you will find here a community of like-minded people who will inspire and support you at every step of your growth journey.
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