Book Review
David O’Reilly reviews Julie Meyer’s bestselling business book, ‘Welcome To Entrepreneur Country’ - What it is, How to find it and Why you should go there
H
aving worked in several large investment banks during my 20s in London, some painful (and pleasant) memories surged back as I read Julie Meyer’s excellent ‘Welcome to Entrepreneur Country’
recently.
Meyer pulls no punches (rightly) in describing how lonely life can be when you think like an entrepreneur, especially if you are working in a large organisation for others who do not share your boundless enthusiasm. She is bang on the money in including salaried employees as entrepreneurs too (you do not need to own your own business and work for yourself to call yourself one). I smiled as I read about her meeting with the HR director of a business she used to work for, at which she was told her ‘problem’ was that she behaved as if she worked for herself. I view this approach as a plus, obviously a HR department would take a very different view. Meyer’s book will not be to everyone’s taste, because it is optimistic, ambitious and at many times highly personal and focused on her own career/life experiences, unlike a dry, third person business school textbook.
Meyer pulls no punches in describing how lonely life can be when you think like an entrepreneur
Believe it or not, entrepreneurs exist within bulge bracket investment banks, despite every effort made to pigeon hole young professionals into non-client facing tasks until they reach a designated level of seniority. I was one such entrepreneur, and Meyer’s book succeeds perfectly in describing the perils and pitfalls involved with having a highly independent mindset in a large organisation that would prefer it a lot more if you toed the line and slipped quietly into whatever damp, dreary pigeon hole has been allocated to you on their organisation chart. I wasn’t alone either – like Cuban bandits hiding in the hills from Batista’s security forces, other independent thinkers had somehow slipped through the graduate recruitment net (“David, how many golf balls does it take to fill a 747? How many times can you divide 43 into 5,647?” Oh joy...) the moment I decided bulge bracket banks were not for me was when a colleague told me he had found a small treasure trove of up and coming European TMT companies for the bank to market its services to (albeit, at a very early stage, probably
3-5 years in advance of them using our firm to do an IPO or an M&A exit). I said “great, that is a seriously good idea, when do you fly over?”. He told me that he had discussed it for a grand total of twenty seconds with a senior colleague, who said in a nutshell “look, you aren’t here to think, please don’t try stepping outside your pay grade again like this, just go back to preparing those presentations and information memorandum documents like a good chap”. I knew I was destined to leave at that point. I was too unpredictable, too independent, too much of a lone wolf. At my core, I thought several years ahead, almost as if I was working in a Japanese organisation – most of my European and US colleagues were driven forward like rowers under the lash in a Roman galley ship by their annual bonus cycle. If the deal wasn’t going to happen in the next 12 months, it just didn’t swing their dial.
Like Meyer, I have always been perfectly happy working away furiously in the office or on my laptop travelling, entirely on my own, asking for advice and feedback where necessary from others, but fundamentally working under my own steam. During an infamous spat with a much more senior banker who wanted me to pull a lot of unnecessary material together for a French counterpart who got his kicks from pushing us London folk around, I famously told him that only three people in the world at that moment “could give me a direct order which must be obeyed at all times” – (i) Mum, of course, back home in Dublin, (ii) the most
important
lady in my life, my girlfriend at the time (now, happily, my beloved wife), and (iii) my direct boss, the head of the team I was in at the time. Needless to say, colleagues ducked for cover and hid under their desks at this truculent
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