I spoke at the Startup Weekend last Friday night on building valuable networks, but got asked by three people before the event – “who is the target audience of the Churchill Club?” The simple answer is entrepreneurs, but the real answer is unsurprisingly, a little bit more complex, so I normally talk about the spectrum of entrepreneurship first.
I see basically five classes of entrepreneur, regardless of whether they are social entrepreneurs or commercially focused.
Aspirational entrepreneurs are normally students or people in the early stages of their career. They like to attend events with inspirational speakers, can quote from entrepreneurship books written by Steve Blank , Rob Ryan and Michael Gerber and are forever refining their business plans and asking for opinions. They are searching for a foolproof plan, and resist launching their business until they accept that failure and evolution is inevitable and to be embraced not avoided.
Hobbyist entrepreneurs are normally academics, software engineers or marketers that have built a small business on the side. They generally label themselves an entrepreneur rather than their day job. Their businesses rarely grow though until they fully commit themselves and depend on its income to feed themselves.
Entrepreneurs are generally ex-employees who have taken an opportunity that their employer didn’t want to run with. They come in all shapes and sizes but there are two things they have in common over someone who is just a small business owner. One is they identify themselves as an entrepreneur, the other is that they are growth focused.
The serial entrepreneur an entrepreneur that starts, builds and sells a series of businesses. They are seen as just fascinating projects, rather than their life’s work. They are passionate about what they are doing, but at the same time emotionally detached, ie. they would sell any business tomorrow if the right conditions were there.
The dealmaker is a special class of entrepreneur that is actually more likely to come from the ranks of large corporates than from a traditional entrepreneurs background. Their skills set involves buying and selling businesses and securing finance. They are interested in undervalued assets, emerging opportunities or unrecognised synergies. They make their income from single digit profit percentages off very large transactions, not operating the businesses.
So who is Churchill Club’s target audience? Well I see the entrepreneur class being split into two. Those running job businesses and those running asset businesses. With an asset business you can take three months off and still have a business, plus you can sell all or part of it. If you don’t have an asset business, you just have a job business, regardless of how many employees there are. The Churchill Club’s target audience are the entrepreneurs with job businesses that want to convert them into an asset business. A worthy objective.
Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.
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