three faces of ‘e’
The Overseer sees the parts of the business as the spokes of the wheel, with her in the middle.
The Doer has all these parts, which she mentally collects as the whole, but she can, generally, only work on one at a time.
• CONTROL The Entrepreneur is seriously into control. She creates systems to establish control in her business world. Control allows her the freedom to think, innovate and disrupt.
The Overseer maintains order. If she is in a team with an entrepreneur, her order comes from the entrepreneur’s control. On her own, she is not in control beyond what she can manage herself.
The Doer does not worry about control. She is doing it all herself anyway. There is no reason to control herself. Her world is limited to that which she is doing. There is plenty to do.
• TENSE The Entrepreneur lives in the Future tense. Everything is an opportunity. Tomorrow.
The Overseer lives in the Past tense. What she does today is determined by what she did in the past. Yesterday.
The Doer lives in the Present tense. Everything she thinks about is right in front of her. Today.
• PSYCHOLOGY The Entrepreneur is the dreamer. Anything is possible.
The Overseer is wary. Anything can happen. The Doer is the worrier. Anything can be trouble.
Perhaps you recognize yourself as one of these three “faces”. Clearly the majority of business owners today are Doers. Sizable chunks, perhaps 25 percent, are Overseers. Relatively few, somewhere in the range of five percent, qualify as Entrepreneurs.
There is no expectation that a Doer will wake up an Entrepreneur. There is the absolute probability that the Doers or Overseers, will themselves dramatically change the way they do or manage things, if they have a clear understanding of what an Entrepreneur is. Picking up a dozen tips, and shifting their strategies accordingly, will move any business owner much closer to the objective of freeing him or herself from the daily grind, and growing the business to a point where it is less dependent on the owner to make things run.
As you review the descriptions of the Three Faces of ‘E’ above you will see a pattern. The Entrepreneur takes an expansive and inclusive view of the business. The Overseer runs the business without much view of the past or future, all the while keeping the train on the track. The Doer simply does. And, does. And, does. Anything other than the task at hand is a distraction.
The Entrepreneur integrates the elements of the business into her vision. The Overseer manages the elements for which she is responsible. The Doer sees the elements as her job to get done.
The challenge is to move up the chain of thinking, from doing or managing, to visioning and planning. Only when the owner can see the business, as separate from herself, can she ever hope to be free from the daily responsibility of running it. Only then will the freedom that all business owners seek, be possible.
Want to find out more? This summer and fall, the Creative Retailers of North America will host a series of seminars on this (Entrepreneurial Insanity) and other business growth topics. For more information,
www.crnaonline.org.
Roger McManus has spent most of his career as a marketing research and strategy consultant for two dozen companies in the family memory business. They called it the photo industry back then, but his unique view of monetizing family memories at retail adds a new perspective to the traditional scrapbook retailing point of view. He was the publisher of Photo Imaging Entrepreneur magazine, was an elected delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business and served on the State Board of the North Carolina Small Business Development Centers. He obtained his BA and MBA degrees from Wake Forest University.
70 scrapbook business
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