St.Louis Business Journal
ENTREPRENEURING RUNS IN FAMILIES

By Anna Navarro

August 2004  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.

Entrepreneurial families tend to breed entrepreneurial kids. Jake's story is a good example of the phenomena.

He went to college during the dot.com craze and launched a business while still in school. Unfortunately, it failed, like so many others in that era. The failure really shook him up, and he vowed he'd never go down the self-employment path again. So he got a job working for someone else. Three years later he was in my office explaining that he felt miserable in his current job, but didn't know what kind of a job would make him happy.

We worked together to analyze what he wanted in an ideal work situation. Independence was high on the list. He disliked reporting to someone else. He understood how to behave as a subordinate but it was a constant irritation to him. He wanted the freedom to innovate. He also enjoyed leading people and was good at it.

The more we explored what was important to him, the clearer it became that self-employment might be a good solution. But whenever I suggested it, he dismissed the idea. Clearly, his early failure was a very painful memory for him.

I persisted gently. Gradually Jake unearthed the details of that experience. We focused on what he learned from every aspect of his travail. Eventually he re-framed the entire event in his mind as a huge life lesson. And as he did this, his entrepreneurial spirit bounced back.

In time, he got clear that he wanted to start a business. But this time he moved forward more cautiously, working evenings and weekends and keeping his other job while he got his business off the ground. Now his fledgling business is doing very well. And perhaps more important, he loves what he is doing. He wakes up every day eager to confront the next challenge.

Part of what prompted me to dig into Jake's early entrepreneurial failure, despite his reluctance to go there, was having explored his family history at the outset of our work together.

Jake grew up in a family that had made its living by self-employment for two generations. His grandfather, an Eastern European immigrant, had brought his family's secret for making fine soaps with him from the old country. He started by hawking fine soaps on the streets of New York and he built the business steadily. When he died, he passed a small soap factory on to his son, who, in turn, built it into a well-known specialty brand with a niche market. When Jake left home for college his father sold the business to a much bigger company, understanding his small firm couldn't compete much longer with the giants.

Jake grew up with a grandfather and father who worried out loud at the dinner table about meeting a payroll, dealing with ruthless competition and being able to obtain needed ingredients at an affordable price. He watched his father struggle and survive after he expanded into a new line of bath products that bombed. He also witnessed first-hand the freedom and financial rewards that came from the struggle.

Despite his shattering early failure, Jake seems to have caught the entrepreneurial bug from his family and he is likely to be happiest when self-employed, despite the downsides. This is a pattern I have observed with many people who grew up in similar circumstances.

Growing up in a successful family business is likely to give kids a chance to observe risk-taking, persistence and recovery from failure. It is also likely to encourage a sense of independence, adventure and a need to "run the show", all characteristics of successfully self-employed individuals, which can be passed from generation to generation.

There are exceptions, of course. Some people who grow up in entrepreneurial families watch the struggles of their parents and choose to work for others rather than wrestle with the challenges of running their own business.

But in my 20 plus years as a career strategist, that choice is far more likely to be made by someone whose parents were security oriented. Families who highly value a predictable paycheck and who prefer the downsides of working for someone else to the downsides of self-employment seem to raise kids who value the same set of tradeoffs.

By contrast, for Jake and others like him, growing up in an entrepreneurial family seems to create an internal drive that propels them to self-employment, despite the hardships they encounter along the way. It seems almost to be in their blood.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.