Where do you, the entrepreneur, get the ‘inspiration’ to build a business from and why it might affect its success? - Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we made several big assumptions, like the entrepreneur’s ‘inspiration’ motivates her election of the method to build her business, or the critical effect of this method in the business final success. Every assumption we make on your entrepreneurship context and abilities must face your asking ‘why is this so’, because entrepreneurship is a complex game, and sometimes precision and clarity are difficult to achieve, and suggestions lack actionable or explanatory power.

A second thought here is related to the biggest challenge of all to our research and to whatever we say. This might be posed by a well-known variable: time. More specifically, speed and tempo (drumbeat or pulse, if you want). We will address their influence in another post, but for now, just try to imagine any of our earlier assumptions under a stressed time limitation, and you will see the difference.

Thirdly, why should we speak about your ‘inspiration’ when building your business? Because we argue this ‘inspiration’ is first in the process of building a business. ‘Inspiration’ is though a behavioral consequence of multiple parts, that drive your decisions on how to build your business or which steps you would follow (or unfollow) in that process. And probably, it might be one of the major influences on your business final success. But before you get lost in my jargon, please, let me recap: if we want to help you putting on some light in how you eventually achieve success with your business, we need you to understand that your ‘inspiration’ might be driving that success. Therefore, its importance. The problem here is that ‘inspiration’ is a tricky animal, because you cannot directly observe it. So, your ‘inspiration’ might be a sum of several parts and we cannot measure it as a single entity or concept. So, we first identify those parts and then measure each to understand how they combine into ‘inspiration’ to make it controllable or actionable. This series of posts show our results, so you do not have to perform these analyses yourself.

A fourth insight is using ‘inspiration’ entrepreneurs move to a next step, which is the (un-)conscious decision on how to proceed further after ‘inspiration’ leads them to “build this business.” This ‘how to proceed further’ is what we call a method. Here, a method to build a business is any combination of goals, activities, tools, metrics, steps that tells you what to do next. Even if you don’t use a formal method, often you will find yourself following your own or someone else’s. And our empirical study has helped us learn which elements form your ‘inspiration’ to choose one method before others.

I need to warn you! What follows is not easy. The elements that shape your ‘inspiration’ may be these: Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence, Facilitating Conditions, Hedonic Motivation, Habit, Costs, Speed, Funding, Security and Behavioral Intention and Usage. I told you! Apart from each element definition (which we’ll cover in a later post), the complexity here is that there are twelve variables!!! In plain words, if we are right, your ‘inspiration’ might be formed of up to twelve parts. Crazy!!

But what’s in this complex group of variables for you and your future business? First, if someone offers you a simple, straight idea for the success of your business, map it against the twelve elements. It may affect one, two or more. If there are any left, critize that idea asking why?, and try to complete it using the left-out parts. And you will make it sounder. Second, who said entrepreneurship is complex, difficult human activity? Whomever she was, she was right. And here might rest further evidence. Third, ideally you should map yourself against these twelve elements, as you may have chosen a method being influenced by only a bunch of them, inadvertently leaving out some relevant others. Fourth, what we know now is that each of the twelve are not equally weighted. And speed and tempo modify those weights along time. To choose the right method to build your business you should pay more attention to some elements before others. All have a role, but not of equal importance.

Lessons learned

• The entrepreneur’s inspiration is a sum of parts that might be the only driver to start a business
• What we now know is that the ‘inspiration’ can be deconstructed in a series of major factors, that interrelate with each other
• These all-mighty factors are: Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence, Facilitating Conditions, Hedonic Motivation, Habit, Costs, Speed, Funding, Security, Behavioral Intention and Usage
• These factors and their relationships clearly show the complexity of building a business

In the next post, I will discuss the importance of each factor when speaking of choosing and following a method to build a business.

Please, let me know what you think about this post and keep the conversation going.