News Leadership 3.0

September 07, 2010

Bargain Babe: The good, the bad, and the ugly of entrepreneurship

By Julia Scott: Being an entrepreneur is about the good, bad, and ugly possibilities of life. The possibility that you get rich and retire tomorrow (or at least be able to hire a house cleaner and eat organic). The possibility that you will fail again. The possibility that you will spend all weekend re-arranging your home office to maximize efficiency only to catch your dog peeing on the shredder come Monday.

Here are three lessons I’ve learned in my 19 months of being an entrepreneur (a word I can now spell):

1. Fear is good. If none of your colleagues, editors, or partners scare you, chances are you’re slacking off. Why work hard for someone who is always content with your content? I realized I had been doing lackluster work when a new editor, um, inspired me to spend three times as long on my weekly column. Fear indicates you are being challenged.

2. Follow every reasonable lead but realize that some are not going to pan out, especially if they involve students who know less than you do. My conviction that a single meeting with three masters candidates would produce a revolutionary business plan, uncontrollable revenue streams, and overnight fame showed me I had much to learn about evaluating opportunities.

My out-of-control expectations, which were fueled by out-of-control ambitions stemming from out-of-control greed, blinded me to the fact that the situation was not under my control. This was one class for the students. They had an assignment to meet an entrepreneur. They had to make a presentation about who I was, what I was doing, and how I could do it better. While sincere, they had no interest in breaking ground for me. Perhaps the true lesson here is that if you think others will carry your weight, it will end badly.

3. When a partnership fails, it can be ugly. Approach the situation dispassionately and leave the door open to future collaboration.

I worked with a local deal site, even though my money-saving blog has national readership, on four Groupon-like discounts in Los Angeles. The results were non-scintillating.

Instead of cursing them and the hours we’d spent negotiating a contract, I typed a polite note praising the quality of their deals and pointing out that the offers weren’t quite the match that we hoped. If they had national deals in the future, however, I wanted to know. The response was encouraging: they were open to partnering again. It’s unlikely that will happen, but knowing it could increases my possibility of a good outcome.

Confused about which lesson is the good, the bad, and the ugly? Hint: I used the words, good, bad, and ugly in the corresponding lesson. Subtle, huh? I hope people other than my mother think this post is funny.

Julia Scott is a journalist by training, a cheapskate by nature, and an alumna of Knight Digital Media Center’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp, funded by the Knight Foundation. She shares strategies and inspiration to save at BargainBabe.com. We ask her to share insights about her life in entrepreneurship occasionally on this blog. Reach Julia, aka The Bargain Babe, at julia at bargainbabe dot com.

By Michele McLellan, 09/07/10 at 4:25 am
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Tags: knight foundation, entrepreneurship, tips, news entrepreneur boot camp, julia scott

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