A Jack-of-All-Trades is Master of None
Entrepreneurship makes renaissance men of us all.
Whether you are starting a virtual currency trade marketplace or a street-corner hotdog stand, chances are you will find yourself doing things that are way outside your field. A decade of food preparation experience probably didn’t prepare you for patching up the drywall behind your oven after an electrical fire. Your MBA provides you with not one applicable lesson for addressing the problem your business is having with moths nesting in your server rack.
Yet, that is how business is. Without a boss to pass the buck to or specialists to call in: there you are, paintbrush in hand, removing obscene spray paint from your high quality jewelry store façade. Who else is going to do it?
In service to my current business, a music school on Roatan Island, Honduras, I have just spent the last several days bending pipe. The custom-built, iron stands that hold our instruments during play were rapidly disintegrating into rust. Purchasing replacements was prohibitive (after shipping costs). So there I was, turning rolled steel conduit sheathing into instrument stands with main force and a vise.
I made more than my fair share of mistakes getting these stands put together. A half dozen more tools were purchased than were actually used the in stands’ assembly, as we went from pins to rivets to screws to (in the end) welding to get the pieces fixed together. Only the infinite patience and understanding of the woman who owns the hardware store saved us from spending hundreds of unnecessary dollars in equipment costs.
Going into your first business you will save money by engaging in a hundred do-it-yourself projects in and around your assets, but understand that you will not save as much money as you wish you would. There is a learning curve each time you step outside your skill set, and that learning curve usually has a toll attached—a toll of time, wasted supplies, first time tool purchases, and frustrating sense of “not as good as if a professional had done it” that lingers on the project after it is done.
2 Comments
Robert DeVore
November 7th, 2006 at 6:02 am
Nice post here. I couldn’t agree more with this post. Starting my web design company, I found myself doing a LOT of things in the beginning that I will NOT do now, and as you said, they ALL took too much time away from my day which could have been used to do more productive things. I agree to cut corners where you can, but only if it doesn’t cut more time than money.
Evan Prieskop
November 7th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Like almost everything else in business, we are faced with a balancing act. It can be difficult to know how much you can do on your own and how much you just have to bite the bullet and call in a professional for.
I cannot even offer any sound advice to new business owners on the issue because every project has different risks and every entrepreneur different abilities. I just want to remind young entrepreneur’s that engaging in do-it-yourself projects and experiments outside their skill set should be subjected to the same cost/benefit analyses as everything else, with allowances made for mistakes and the learning curve itself.
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