What motivates entrepreneurs

I was doing some thinking the other day about what motivates entrepreneurs. It had come from a great anthology I got for Christmas (entitled ‘Spending Time in the Loo’ which might give you a clue) where it defined an entrepreneur as ‘someone who undertakes risks to make money’.

Money is clearly a major part of the story. It was certainly the view of the mechanic fixing my car last week. ‘Ah yes, but money doesn’t by you happiness’ I opined lamely. ‘Hmm’ said the mechanic ‘my neighbour won £3million on the lottery and you couldn’t have taken the smile off his face with a spanner’.

OK, so he has a point. But then why do some people just keep going? To me the true entrepreneur is someone who has the house, the Jaguar, the school fees but keeps risking it again and again. After all, how many tropical islands can Richard Branson own before he has enough?

Partly I think it is because they can’t stop. You can see the entrepreneurial spark in some people – they just can’t sit still, they are always looking for schemes, ducking and diving, or more charitably, fulfilling their creative impulses.

I think it is also partly about control. Not so much a need to control your destiny, more a complete inability to take orders from anyone. I admit that there’s a lot to be said for being the boss, particularly as it is the least stressful position to be in. Sure, it is hard work and the buck stops with you but at least you don’t have someone telling you what to do, and who you continually have to impress.

To my mind however, an entrepreneur’s greatest motivation is insecurity. They are driven by a need to prove something, partly to others, but mostly to themselves. I recently sat on an advisory panel of entrepreneurs on how to encourage entrepreneurship at school. A quick straw poll of the panellists revealed we were all, or all felt like, failures at school. I still have the school report that says ‘Caspian might achieve something if he could remember where his books are and woke up for five minutes’. That is why organisations like Princes Scottish Youth Business Trust are so good — they back people who have none of the outward criteria for success, but all the motivation.

My contribution to the field of cod-psychological is that if you scratch any entrepreneur, the greater their success, the deeper will be their feelings of inadequacy.