MARK WILLIAMS VANTAGEPOINT: THE LESSONS LEARNT FROM A SEASONED ENTREPRENEUR
B
ackground The entrepreneurial era of my business life is one which many business people and entrepreneurs can relate to:
• a fast track corporate era • a few business start-ups • the big break with an IT business in the 90’s, the sale and wealth creation
• the new opportunity (seen through rose- tinted glasses), the harsh reality of a dud purchase
• the demise and collapse of the new business, the reality of loss and sureties • the stress of having a judgement against your name and getting it rescinded • picking yourself up and doing it all over again, finding the silver lining to what seemed like a hopeless situation, resulting in • the birth of a new business, new partners, new life, new opportunities and • lessons learnt, personal development, new roadmap, focus, discipline and balance.
All in all, a real roller-coaster life of experiences filled with adventure; spanning the full wavelength of dark depths and amazing heights, with a myriad of life and business lessons that everyone can learn from.
The seeds of experience In the early 1990’s, we started an IT business with four partners, grew it to be a very profitable business and sold it to a listed entity in September 1996. Having made all nine shareholders multi-millionaires, two of us then took that return and invested in a telecoms venture in 2000, expecting to (naïvely) repeat the process with minimal effort. When the South African Rand crashed, with (unpaid for) goods on the water and a myriad of other factors, we ended up losing everything – homes, cars, investments, everything!
The Innovation Journal
Whilst still smarting from the trauma of facing our new-found reality, we decided to analyse what had happened – our first venture had been extremely ‘successful’ and profitable; our next one a clear disaster (at least financially). We mapped out the respective ‘journeys’ we had followed in the form of a mind-map and it slowly dawned on us that we were staring at our next opportunity – using our experiences, good and bad, to create a product set to help aspiring entrepreneurs learn how to start and / or run their own business, with applicability to everyone from scholars through to business owners with established businesses.
What followed was a journey of mapping out our experiences and creating what is now the Vantagepoint product suite – a tool set comprising a business simulation board game, manuals and business templates that enable ‘users’ to experience starting and running their own business, with complementary training programs focusing on sales and finance as essentials to creating a new venture.
Lessons learnt
One of the key lessons during my career journey is that you never stop learning... otherwise we would all run perfect businesses and every business would be flourishing – as we know, reality is very different from the theory. And if you think that you know it all, you are already on the path to destruction. The way we do business is changing at the speed of light, and innovation is now a standard element of everything we do in business today.
Whilst there were many lessons, the most valuable were as follows:
September 2012 | Management Today 43
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