management paper

Guidelines for Interview An Entrepreneur Assignment

Each student will interview an entrepreneur of his/her choice. The goal is to provide you with insights about entrepreneurship that cannot be obtained from classroom experience alone. Choose an entrepreneur who is on a pathway that’s similar to your intended one (including but not limited to social, lifestyle/family, corporate, franchise, licensing, or growth oriented ventures) and in an industry (such as entertainment, nutrition/food, electronic etc) that is of personal interesting to you.

While you may find it difficult to cold-call an entrepreneur, you will find that most entrepreneurs will be honored to be asked about their experiences and will be willing to meet with you. Entrepreneurs’ schedules are often tight, and your biggest challenge will be to find free time to meet them. Extensions will not be granted due to last minute scheduling.

Each student will visit the company to meet the entrepreneur, observe how the venture operates. The company can be in any type of business, must be at least two years old, and employ three people. If you choose a corporate entrepreneur, make sure that his/her project is at least one year old and has corporate funding and resources as support.

Written Assignment

Write a maximum 3 page, single-spaced paper that discusses what you have learned. Please make use of paragraph headings, sub headings and bullet points. The assignment consists of a draft (20points) and a paper (20points).

· A draft of the interview. Needs to be typed as soon as you finish the interview, ideally within 24-48hrs of conducting it. Submit to the blackboard to the “Draft of Interview” section as soon as possible. (20 points). There is a sample draft of an interview that I did in the Reader under Week 5. The draft can be either very rough or a bit polished.

· The paper itself (20 points) needs to:-

1. Describe the entrepreneur’s background, motivations for starting the venture, and challenges in growing the venture. (~ 1 pages) (5 points)

2. Evaluate the entrepreneur’s personal pathway, which category of pathway does this entrepreneur fall into? How does this entrepreneur start engaging in this pathway? How does this entrepreneur make this pathway his/her own? (~ 1 pages, 5 points)

3. Draw two conclusions: Conclusion 1: What makes the company successful (or not)? Discuss how the findings of the interview apply to or are meaningful to you. Discuss how you are similar or divergent from this entrepreneur? What have you learned about your own potential to be an entrepreneur? (~ 0.5 page; 5 points)

Conclusion 2: What does this interview tell you about entrepreneurial pathway? What type of qualities that entrepreneurs who intend on taking this pathway should or should not have? (~ 0.5 page; 5 points)

The objective is to drill down into the venture and thoroughly understand the entrepreneur and how he or she does business. It is critical that you do not just deal with superficial questions and answers. The key is to probe, to ask why and to delve beneath the surface. What insights can you offer about the person’s career and your own entrepreneurial capabilities?

Tips

1. Interview must be approached rigorously, not casually. It is useful to prepare a list of questions before hand.

2. Do not wait to set up an appointment. Entrepreneurs by definition are busy people and you need to fit into their schedule. The interview should be at least 45 minutes or so.

3. The student should prepare questions in advance. It is helpful to first walk through the questions in a mock interview with a friend.

4. The student should develop an efficient means for taking notes or capturing the key points made by the entrepreneur.

5. The student should attempt to establish a personal rapport (taking the entrepreneur to lunch for the interview might help).

6. Teach the entrepreneur about the concept of pathway and let the entrepreneur explain his/her own pathway.

7. Don’t just dwell on the positive. Try to cut through the bias or propaganda. Ask about the downside and the negative as well.

8. Be sure to examine the effect of the venture on the person’s entire life.

Entrepreneur Interview

Sample Questions

Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurial Pathway

· What type of pathway does the entrepreneur consider him/herself in? (Including but not limited to lifestyle/family, social, corporate, franchise, licensing, or growth oriented ventures). Please see description of the pathway in the appendix. You might need to explain the pathway concept to the entrepreneur

· Why did the entrepreneur choose this pathway?

· What qualities/characteristics does this entrepreneur have that lead to his/her success/failure in this pathway?

Entrepreneur Before They Started the Venture

· What is the entrepreneur’s educational background?

· What is the entrepreneur’s previous work experience (before starting the venture)?

· Did the entrepreneur have any role models when growing up?

· Did the entrepreneur do entrepreneurial things as a youth?

· When did the entrepreneur know he/she wanted to be an entrepreneur?

· Did the entrepreneur have parents that were entrepreneurial?

Entrepreneur at the Time He/She Started the Venture

· What was the entrepreneur’s primary motivation for starting a business?

· What were the factors that led him/her to start the venture?

· What were the entrepreneur’s goals at the time they started the venture?

· What sort of beliefs did the entrepreneur have (e.g., about employees, partners, debt, etc.)?

· Did the entrepreneur seek to establish a “lifestyle” business, a “rapid growth” business, or what? Did their growth orientation change over time?

· What sort of resources (not just financial) did the entrepreneur have when they started the venture? What sort of network did they have? Were there any especially creative things they did to come up with the needed resources?

· How concerned was the entrepreneur with control when starting the venture? Explore their need for control (of the venture, of people, of decision-making).

· What was the entrepreneur’s risk orientation when they started the venture?

· Did the entrepreneur write a business plan?

· Did the entrepreneur feel prepared to start the venture at the time he/she started it?

· How long was a typical work day and work week when the entrepreneur first started the venture?

Entrepreneur as She/He Grew the Venture

· How have the entrepreneur’s goals & values changed since starting the venture?

· Did entrepreneur’s risk orientation change as the venture grew?

· Did entrepreneur’s need for control change as venture grew?

· Did the typical work week change as the venture grew (in terms of how much time the venture required and in terms of how the entrepreneur allocated his/her time)?

· Did entrepreneur make assumptions when they first started out that subsequently proved to be wrong? What sorts of insights were gained?

· What key mistakes did the entrepreneur make along the way? What were some of the key lessons learned? (ask about their greatest moment and their worst moment)

· Were there some critical points in the development of the venture when the venture almost failed, or when the entrepreneur found himself/herself at a critical crossroads in terms of some vital decision or issue that had to be addressed in a certain way or the venture would have failed?

Entrepreneur Today and Tomorrow

· What would the entrepreneur do differently if they had it all to do over again?

· What key personal characteristics does the entrepreneur see in himself or herself that were especially critical for achieving success with this particular venture?

· What are the entrepreneur’s plans for the future in terms of the venture?

· What is the entrepreneur’s “exit strategy” or do they have one?

· What advice, based on his/her own experience, does the entrepreneur have for a student interested in starting a venture today?

Value Proposition

Product/Service

What products and/or services are provided? What are the major features?

· Describe the environment (size, décor and layout, etc.).

· Where is it located?

· How is the product/service produced and delivered?

· Collect copies of brochures, menus, price lists, advertising and promotion material

· Do your observations confirm the owner’s description?

Target Market

Who does the owner consider to be the target market? Why?

· Demographics (gender, sex, age, race, education, occupation or profession, income, location, etc.)

· Psychographics or life style (attitudes, beliefs, opinions, interests, values, etc.).

· Social status: infers certain behavior (e.g. middle class values education, family activities, etc.)

How are buying decisions made?

· Who makes the decision?

· Who influences the decision?

· Are buying decisions based primarily on price, quality, service, convenience, or other?

· How frequently is the product/service purchased?

· Do your observations confirm the owner’s description?

Unique Benefits

What does the owner consider the major benefits to the target market of the product/service? Why?

How are these benefits unique? What company does the owner consider

to be the major competitor?

Do your observations confirm the owner’s description?

Appendix

What is an entrepreneurial pathway?

Congcong Zheng

SDSU

For the next one minute, consider yourself at the foot of a mountain, the mountain maybe as small as the Torrey Pines Reserve in San Diego, as big as Mt. Shasta in Northern California, or as huge as the Mt. Everest in the Himalayas. You may be a novice, a middle-school student, who has never done this before and this is your first hiking trip with your teacher and friends. Or you may be an expert in mountain climbing and this is another journey to the summit that you have climbed previously. Even if you have done this a few times, the mountain is different now since the weather conditions may have changed and you yourself are different. For example, your personal fitness level or your companion’s fitness level may have changed from previous climbs. No matter who you are, you have set your goal to hike the hill/climb the mountain/or conquer the summit. What will you do? In some instances, you may want to follow others and see what they are doing/or have done. In other instances, you may decide that that you would enjoy staying a bit further away from the well-trodden path and explore the mountain on your own terms.

In any case, you step out the first step, which can turn into a path. A path that may or may not take you where you would like to go; a path that may take you to a place where you have never imagined before; a path that, by the simple fact of your taking it, is your own.

I like us to consider entrepreneurship like climbing a mountain and there are multiple pathways of getting there. So what is an entrepreneurial pathway? It is a way that leads you to your personal goal in entrepreneurship. Pathway itself is not a goal - it is how you can achieve that goal. For instance, your goal may be to achieve success in food industry or entertainment industry. A pathway is how you can start a venture, or an initiative or a movement to get there.

There could be different entrepreneurial pathways that include but are not limited to 1) social, 2) lifestyle/family, 3) corporate, 4) franchise/licensing, or 5) growth oriented ventures and each of them will allow you to reach your goal of success, depending on what your definition of success is. These five fall into two general categories, commercial entrepreneurship (family/life-style, corporate, franchise, licensing, or growth-oriented ventures) and social entrepreneurship. Commercial entrepreneurship, the term loosely defined, has profit making as the primary goal of the venture, for people involved. They may serve social goals such as increasing happiness or personal fulfillment level for the employees, but generally those goals are secondary to profit making. One example is Zappos. Even though Zappos’s founders aim to deliver happiness to customers and to employees, those goals are secondary to profit-making. In my opinion, that makes Zappos a commercial venture.

Social entrepreneurship is different in that it serves the goal of satisfying social needs as well as the needs for profits, and the former is more important than the later for people involved. So for someone who is interested in eliminating world hunger, that person may start tackling that goal by setting up a shop in the direst economic zones in a city and serve the disadvantaged group there. He/she may make a tidy profit, but that’s secondary to the goal of eliminating hunger for the disadvantaged.

Categories within Commercial Entrepreneurship

In terms of commercial entrepreneurship, there are several pathways within this category. Family business/life style caters to the owners’ basic family needs, of survival and aspiration. For survival, life-style entrepreneurs create employment for themselves, their family members and others. For aspiration, entrepreneur may want to build a family wealth and passing it on to the future generations. Mom-and-pop shops usually fall into the former and Johnson and Johnson could be the later.

Franchise is a great, if non-traditional way of entrepreneurship. It relies on a format-able idea, an idea that not only could be done in one location but could be relocated by more or less the same format across different locations. So naturally a franchis-able idea taps into a certain level of universal needs of food, safety etc. etc. An idea that not only cuts across geographical locations in a city (think of U-haul in Chula Vista and Scripps Ranch) but also countries.

Corporate entrepreneurship yet starts from another perspective. These are the entrepreneurial projects that are started within a big corporation, which already have existing systems, histories, people, documents and artifacts (such as wall décor, mottos, mission statements) within the corporation. A corporate entrepreneur has to work within the existing frameworks of the corporate while simultaneous purposing the tough task of starting something new. A dance between the old and new. Think Nokia innovation fund.

Growth-oriented ventures, the start-ups in the most traditional sense (Think Google in the US or Alibaba in China), is the ultimate American Dream, or Chinese new dream or dreams of people in a lot of different countries. They are the ones that we are most familiar with, the startups the rapid growth, the expansion, and sometimes the rapid demise. Think about Facebook or Facebook wannebes.

But many growth-oriented ventures do not start that way. Google was started as a pet project for Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they wanted to see whether it is possible to download the internet to a computer. GoPro was started as a side project. So that is another thing about pathways. They do not always go where you would like it them to be and sometimes you have to detour, go on another pathway, or have to make your own in order to go where you would like to be. But always for the great ones, you bring others with you, for companionship, for support, or just for the enjoyment of the journey.

References:

Some of the questions are based on work done by:

Professor Jeffrey Timmons

Babson College

New Venture Creation, 5th edition

Irwin McGraw Hill

Professor Michael H. Morris, Ph.D.

Witting Chair in Entrepreneurship

Syracuse University