I’ve known that I wanted to start a business for years now, but I had trouble figuring out what was driving me. I constantly jumped between ideas and couldn’t really settle on something that seemed right. After spending some time this summer with other hopeful business owners, I realized that most of them intended to start businesses based on their experience as an employee. In other words, if they worked for Pepsi, they wanted to start their own drink company, or if they worked for IKEA, they wanted to open their own furniture showroom.
This is what I would call bottom-up entrepreneurship. That is, starting with the skills and experience of an employee and building up into the role of CEO. This reminds me of the classic story of a company president who started out in the mailroom and rose through the ranks over a lifetime, learning to do every job along the way. While this certainly has some appeal, I don’t think I am that type of entrepreneur. I don’t mean any disrespect to the bottom-up crowd, either. On the contrary, I’m jealous of the technical skills they can apply to their ventures and their ability to think, “Well, I’m a glassblower, and I like it, so I’ll start an ornamental glass company.” Sadly, that’s just not me right now.
By now you must be thinking that if I’m calling myself a top-down entrepreneur, I must have some business experience or at least studied it in school. However, neither of those assumptions would be true. In fact, I’m a clean slate, a vacuum, but I couldn’t very well refer to myself as a “black-hole” entrepreneur. That doesn’t inspire financial confidence. Rather, I decided on “top-down” not because I have experience at the top, but because I’m going to start there anyway.
You see, I want to start and own a company because it means that I get to make the decisions. I can design the company’s policies to fit my ideas and beliefs. In effect, I want a business that is an extension of me, that embodies what I want as a consumer. Now that I read it, it does sound a bit narcissistic, but I’m not going to deny that’s what’s driving me. It’s all about not being constrained by the skills I lack and knowing that I can learn or delegate the necessary ones. People learn best by doing, and at the top, I can have a hand in everything.