There’s no ‘I’ in Team
Solo entrepreneur vs. teams: why teams are important when building a successful business.
Frank Sinatra was famous for singing “I did it my way”. We all know the song and as young aspiring entrepreneurs, I am sure many of you relate to the theme. Many of you have ambitions to change the world, to bring something new into the market and more importantly to ‘do it your way’.
So, let’s look at the power of the “I did it” versus the power of “We did it”.
The NEF programme culminates in June each year with a series of pitching days, where our ‘NEFers’ pitch their business ideas to a panel of investors. The judging panels are always very interested in the teams behind the ventures: was there a team in place? If not, what would the team look like? Who would be the individuals within the team? What would be the structure of the team? What were their key skills? Was there a co-founder?
Which led me to ask: why do we hear so often that a successful business is about teams? How can we have one entrepreneur’s vision and ambition succeed in the mix of a team?
Again and again, from the insights we hear at the various workshops and speakers events we organise each year, there is one clear conclusion: the secret is to identify, from a very early stage of your start-up, what your personal strengths and weaknesses are. As you try to build your business, you need the humility to recognise that you don’t know it all and that you will need to build a team of complementary skills around you.
Trying to do it all by yourself can have its downsides as it will certainly require you to devote all your time to completing key tasks and, depending on the idea you are working on, time could be of the essence in making your business a success. In his recent book “Empathising with the Ego of the Entrepreneur” Robert Frith surveyed a sample of entrepreneurs who agreed that one key skill required for the successful entrepreneur is “to have a great team around you.”
Indeed, one of our workshops, held in partnership with UCL, involves a group of Angels, VC and crowd funding platforms representatives divulging how and why they decide on which business to invest in. And, maybe surprisingly to some, before investing in a business idea, they all evaluate the team presenting the business idea. What they looked for, above industry knowledge and the idea, were the people within the team and the following key ingredients:
- Energy of each individual
- Enthusiasm the team can show towards the business idea
- Interactions between the team: do they work well together?4
- Drive and (long term) vision of the founder(s)
- Complementarity of the team
- Capacity to work under pressure and through hard times
So, if you are building a team it makes sense to check that the chemistry is there and the above ingredients have been put to the test.
Throughout the NEF programme, we recognise that working with or in a team can be challenging for young aspiring entrepreneurs, who have never worked in teams before or are just coming out of University and are used to going it alone. That is why we:
- organise team building exercises at the onset of the L&D programme to help create strong relationships
- match candidates with their personal executive coach so they can work on their resilience
- ask them to work with different colleagues to get familiar with different personalities, skills-set and points of view
- recruit them from different walks of life to stimulate knowledge sharing and peer sharing
To conclude, the importance of building successful teams cannot be ignored within the entrepreneurial journey. As Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart used to say: “Individuals don’t win in business, teams do.”
Veronique Rapetti
