When discovering a business opportunity that you want to follow, it’s always wise to look for partners with skills that you don’t posses, but that can help you to fulfill those necessary tasks for the correct execution of the project.

For small internet business this is very common. Somebody has an idea and then she looks for partners between his/her friends. Now, if you are into this and you are a newbie to partner searching this can be a little tricky.

I’m sure that when looking for a partner you will mainly considerate those people that you know are responsible, talented but mainly that are more able than you in the skills you need in your team.

But there’s another factor you must considerate: entrepreneurial mindset.

Some people were done to be entrepreneurs. Others not. Those with the entrepreneurial mindset are willing to work for many months without seeing a dime from their effort, they are willing to work as many hours as necessary, they can lead themselves and they feel real passionate about their job.

Those who are not entrepreneurs can be extremely talented and skillful but if they are not in an employee role they feel lost and unmotivated.

So how do you separate the right ones from those that won’t help you? Well, you will easily identify people that don’t own an entrepreneurial mindset when they just don’t accept to be your partners because “it’s too risky”. But there are occasions when non-entrepreneurs accept entrepreneurial propositions for a couple of factors, resulting in a long-term damage for your organization because, although at first they are motivated, when time goes on and they see that being an entrepreneur it’s very very hard they lose motivation and start failing in their positions.

Surely you are asking yourself what are those factors that can make a non-entrepreneur accept an entrepreneurship position? Well during the years I have worked as an internet entrepreneur I have identified 3 of those factors:

• Your charisma: You’re such a good leader that you motivated them to do it, although they will lose that sensation very soon, usually when facing the first problem.
• They love you: Maybe you recruited a relative that wants to help you because she loves you instead of because she believes in you and your idea.
• They are your friends: As the song says “friends will be friends”, and even more when some friend looks for help from another one. Maybe they will help you at first but they will start failing once they start doing any other thing. That’s a sign that they wanted to help but didn’t believe your idea can be accomplished.

When people that accepted entrepreneurial positions start failing you feel sooo terrible because it seems that the problem is in you. You are seeing that the team doesn’t meet the desired goal but you also know that you can’t ask them for more help because you are not paying them, then you don’t have the right to ask for more of their time. So when that happens the better you can do is let them go remembering that it’s not a problem in your character: it’s just that they are not in the entrepreneurial mindset, which is completely valid.

I’m sure some persons are so good leaders that they can turn even non-entrepreneur people into entrepreneur ones just because their leadership power. I’m not that good leader so I have had more fails than successes when facing that kind of problems.

I hope that knowing this in advance will help you choose the right people from the beginning ;).

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.