On The Essence of Entrepreneurship

By Michael E. Gerber

 The New Oxford American Dictionary tells us that the definition of the word essence is: the intrinsic nature or indispensible quality of something, esp. something abstract, that determines its character. 

So, then, what is the essence of entrepreneurship?

Well, I would suggest, at the risk of baiting the bear, that you read Neil Senturia’s screed on the good Donald Trump to truly get a taste of it.  No, it’s not the essence of Trump I’m referring to …he radiates an essence, yes, but not hardly the essence I’m speaking of here… (you can hardly miss the ordure of Trump’s essence!)

 No, the essence I’m speaking of here is Neil Senturia’s essence, in his writing, in his raging, in his splendid tromp on the Donald’s latest foray into network marketing.  It’s that which is the essence of entrepreneurship:  Neil Senturia’s delight in telling a great story. 

It’s what all great entrepreneurs do.  Not, necessarily as well as Neil Senturia does, true, but as all great entrepreneurs do in the invention of an enterprise, at the heart of which lives a story worth telling. 

If Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, were writing a column here, I am sure he would have sung to the high heavens of the beauty of his hamburger buns, the inexpressible joy he got from the indescribably consistent, delightfully satisfying, remarkably buoyant buns that then graced, and still  graces, a Big Mac billions upon billions of times over in countries as far flung as Peru, China, every state in our Union, Australia, Iceland, everywhere you and I look, where the Golden Arches – see the expressible beauty of that!—applaud his creation to everyone within sight of them. 

Yes, a great company is a great story, told by a Story Teller who’s in love, madly so, with his or her creation, no matter how trite that story might seem to the elite who snide among us, the story of an entrepreneur will be told, no matter how, no matter who is listening, no matter whether the world is ready for it or not, the story is the story is the story, yes, and thank G-d for those among us who are so madly in love. 

Which bring us back to you, dear reader.  You, who are thinking of starting your own business.  Or, perhaps you who has already started one.  It reminds me of a conversation I had so many years ago with a plumber who was to become one of my very first clients, when that plumber said, “New things get old, Michael.” In his dismal response to my childlike excitement at describing how his ordinary plumbing business could quickly become an extraordinary plumbing business if he could simply get rid of the crack in his ass. 

Now what in the world did I mean by that? 

If my plumber, Larry Pellegrino, could have simply risen above his lapse of consciousness for one scintillating moment to see…to clearly see…how thoughtless he was…then, and only then, would he have been launched into the intrepid world of entrepreneurship, into the world of telling bold stories, into the visual, emotional, functional and financially delightful world where miracles happen to the delight of everyone who comes into contact with them.

 I saw in Larry Pellegrino’s plumbing business an opportunity to do spectacular things in a way no plumbing contractor had every thought to do before. 

Perhaps in the design of his trucks…the vivid and remarkable colors waiting to be used, the bold, heroic pictures to be painted on his trucks, the gleam of his trucks’ otherworldly sizzling shine.  Perhaps the are-you-kidding-me dress code of his people, a starched white smock, as though they were going into the scientific laboratory to do their dirty work, rather than what they were actually there to do…to clean out the muck from the stopped up toilet. 

I’ve seen bolder things done with truly unbold businesses, and so have you. 

So, what then is this column leading us to, dear reader, intrepid voyager, would-be entrepreneurial investigator? 

It’s simple. Get with it. 

As the old song says, The world is waiting for the sunshine.  And only you, and I, and those other mad geniuses like us waiting in the wings, will, in G-d’s  Good Stead, make it happen, today, if we dare to.

And G-d help us if we don’t. 

Let me know what you think.

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