In
Wednesday's post I suggested that my next career may now lie in
coaching (a) displaced and disenchanted baby boomers and
entrepreneurial young
people in high school and university on finding meaningful work and
creating Natural Enterprises, (b) teens in a very
progressive school (one where study is self-directed, not taught at a
lectern, and where you learn by doing and by discovery, not by being
told what to do) in critical life skills and/or (c) groups and organizations about how to use complex, adaptive processes to deal with intractable problems.
I do want to pursue this in the way I've outlined in my book -- finding
the right partners, and then collectively with them researching,
designing, and establishing a Natural Enterprise that integrates the
coaching I would do with complementary, needed work that is meaningful
to my partners.
But I also said I would put together a
proposal for an entrepreneurial coaching service (service (a) above)
that could be presented to enlightened governments that can appreciate
that this service is urgently needed, and would help governments do
their job better. This is an outline of such a proposal, that builds on
the business case
for my Caring Enterprise Coach business I produced two years ago.
Before I convert the bullets to a text proposal, I'd appreciate your
thoughts: Who, in what departments of what levels of government in what
countries do you think might be most amenable to funding/buying the
services of the NECF? How big would a 'chapter' of NECF need to be to
provide well-rounded services to diverse entrepreneurial start-ups, and
how large an area would it serve (my view: the more local and
community-based, the better)? How would we credentialize those offering
NECF services? What's missing from the list of needs, benefits,
offerings, and business model (ways of recouping costs)? If this is
such a good idea, why isn't someone already doing it (and I don't mean
chambers of commerce and accounting and legal and consulting firms --
entrepreneurs need real business advice, not advice on administration and paperwork)? Who (BALLE?) would be logical partners for NECF?
OK, here's the proposal:
The Need: Why A New Enterprise Coaching Federation is Needed
- A
staggering number of baby boomers are being outsourced, offshored,
downsized, replaced by cheaper younger workers, early-retired, or are
abandoning jobs that offer only exhausting, thankless, personally
meaningless work for socially and environmentally irresponsible
corporations. Most of these people are ill-equipped to find or create
second careers, and most of them will fail to do so, give up, retire
permanently, and may have to rely on government assistance for the
shortfall in their income.
- A large number of new entrants to
the workforce, from high school and university, are unable to find
non-menial employment, and are staying longer in school in the often
illusory hope that more education will improve their employment
prospects, or are taking two or three jobs unconnected to their skills
just to make ends meet.
- Underemployment in our society is epidemic: More than half of the workforce describe themselves as significantly
underemployed. Their only hope to find meaningful work that allows them
to do what they do best is through creating their own enterprises.
- There
is virtually no effective training for entrepreneurs who want to start
their own businesses, and much of the training that is available is
unaffordable. MBA and other academic courses train people how to be
middle-managers in large corporations, not how to start their own
enterprise. Most notably absent is training on how to start enterprises
that will create significant local employment, larger and more
sophisticated enterprises than sole proprietorships and 'mom and pop'
businesses.
- Entrepreneurial training in classrooms doesn't
work: Entrepreneurs need one-on-one, hands-on, customized, just-in-time
coaching, from experienced entrepreneurs not academics, to successfully
launch and operate a sustainable and effective business.
- The
failure rate of entrepreneurial businesses is horrific (only 10% last
over five years), and these failures carry with them huge social and
economic costs.
- Large corporations, thanks to the economics of
offshoring and outsourcing, now destroy more jobs than they create --
virtually all net new employment creation in North America is in
entrepreneurial businesses.
- Large corporations also destroy
local employment and local economies by displacing local enterprises
that hire and buy right in the community. Local enterprises need help
competing against large corporations in what is an unfair and unequal
playing field.
- Large corporations also are not sustainable.
They rely heavily on government subsidies and incentives, usually
abandon communities when cheaper labour or faster-growing markets are
found elsewhere, and offload the social and environmental costs that
they produce to the communities that they exploit and then abandon.
Entrepreneurs, by contrast, depend on local communities and must be
responsive and responsible to them to be sustainable.
The Value Proposition: Benefits of a NECF to Each Stakeholder Group
- Baby
boomers and youth entering the workforce will get the coaching they
need to assess what kind of business to establish, to research the
market thoroughly, and to develop the business skills (not just
administrative information) they need to launch and operate their
enterprise successfully.
- Governments will be rewarded with
lower business failure rates, healthier local economies, employment
growth, and a workforce with critical entrepreneurial skills that will
keep them self-sufficient and off welfare and unemployment roles for
life. They will also no longer have to offer huge subsidies to large
corporations to entice them to create (often temporary and uneconomic)
employment and local development.
- Retired and semi-retired
workers can supplement their incomes, find meaningful work, and
transfer the valuable skills and experience they have acquired over a
lifetime, by providing their services through NECF.
- Local
communities will benefit from a more resilient, entrepreneurial,
productive, self-sufficient and happy local workforce, where workers
stay in the community, create local jobs, buy from local producers, and
hence contribute to the economic prosperity of the community. Local
self-sufficiency also means less wear and tear on roads, less
automotive pollution, healthier and more dynamic communities with
everything in walking-distance, and even lower levels of alienation and
crime.
The Offerings: What NECF Will Do
- Provide
counseling and coaching to help prospective entrepreneurs identify
appropriate businesses for them to create (suitable to their talents
and interests, and which meet a genuine need in the community). This
could also entail helping downsized workers deal with the 'grief' and
terror of unemployment, and getting them past the learned helplessness
that 'I could never be an entrepreneur'.
- Provide a 'matching
service' to help prospective entrepreneurs find business partners whose
skills and interests complement theirs, so that larger, more
sophisticated entrepreneurial businesses (with an inherently higher
likelihood of success) can be created.
- Provide guidance in how
to establish a new enterprise. This would go far beyond the superficial
administrative, regulatory and paperwork guidance most accountants,
lawyers, consultants, chambers of commerce and even government business
and economic development offices currently provide -- and staffing
would necessarily be experienced entrepreneurs who can provide
context-specific coaching for the specific type of business the
entrepreneur wants to create.
- Provide training in
entrepreneurial sustainability. Where many small businesses are just
tide-me-over until-the-next-job temporary jobs, or are created with the
expectation of selling out for a profit as soon as possible, NECF is
dedicated to creating work that lasts. That means smashing a lot of the
pervasive myths about entrepreneurship, teaching entrepreneurs about
how to do thorough primary and secondary market and other research
before launching the business, and teaching entrepreneurs innovation
skills and the innovation process so that they can adapt to changing
circumstances.
- Providing group networking and training events
as appropriate, so that entrepreneurs can build their networks and so
that where training does lend itself to group and collaborative
activity it can be offered in this format.
- Facilitating
peer-to-peer continuous networking among users of NECF services, both
within the community and with other NECF chapters, so that not only do
entrepreneurs learn from NECF's experienced staff, they also learn from
each other. These networks would be pure peer-to-peer networks, not
accessible to the hangers-on and exploitative sellers that plague most
existing business networks. The key would be free exchange of knowledge, information and experience, with no 'selling' allowed.
The Business Model: How NECF Would Cover Its Costs
- NECF
is designed to be a not-for-profit foundation. It would not have any
shareholders or other stakeholders whose interest is making a profit
from its activities.
- NECF would recruit (mostly retired or
semi-retired) experienced entrepreneurs, not academics, consultants,
accountants or lawyers. It would appeal both to the altruism of these
entrepreneurs (giving back to the communities that supported them) and
the normal zeal of successful businesspeople to talk about and share
their success secrets. NECF staff would include both full-time and
part-time people, organized in chapters each focused on a local
community and knowledgeable about that local community. Staff would be
paid a modest, flat rate for their services (perhaps $75/hour).
Chapters would be self-organized, with no back-office or administrative
overhead.
- Users of NECF services would be 'charged' the same $75/hour rate, but all charges would be deferred and forgivable on a successful-efforts basis. In other words, users would pay NECF only when and if they could do so comfortably and
acknowledged that they had received substantial value from the
services. This discretionary mechanism of user-pay-for-perceived-value
will also serve as a definitive measure of the value that NECF is
providing.
- In return for the aforementioned benefits,
sponsoring governments will pay NECF the $75/hour for all services
rendered, write off the interest (from the time the user receives the
NECF services to the time they can afford to pay for them), and write
off the costs that users can never afford to, or (for whatever reason)
determine they did not get value from. These write-offs should be
considered an extremely modest and focused investment in workforce
education, employment creation and local economic development.
- Group
networking and training events would provide 'profit' to the extent the
coach:entrepreneur ratio was greater than the usual 1:1, and these
'profits' would be either returned to sponsoring governments or used to
fund other approved NECF activities.
- It is to be expected that
the peer-to-peer continuous networking activities that NECF facilitates
will provide deep and long-lasting value and relationships for
entrepreneurs. This will allow the charging of annual network dues, the
proceeds of which could alsobe either returned to sponsoring governments or used to fund other approved NECF activities.
- Finally,
some entrepreneurs may be so grateful for the 'hand-up' they received
from NECF that they may want to become sponsors in their own right. As
a foundation, such sponsorships will be accepted with pride and
acknowledged as indication of the value that the foundation provides.
It is not inconceivable that some NECF chapters might become entirely
self-funded by such private sponsorships and donations, to the point
that no government sponsorship or funding is needed.
Well, that's all I have so far. What do you think?
PS: We're hosting the big annual neighbourhood party tomorrow, so Links for the Week will be on Sunday. |
MADE IN CANADA
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