3 posts tagged “entrepreneurship”
According to Sean Tierney, a young entrepreneur and founder of Jumpbox, it’s not just that entrepreneurs are naturally attracted to those extreme sports, but entrepreneurs have a lot to learn from a sport like kite boarding. You can read his fun analysis here.
So when will they teach kiteboarding at business school?? very soon, I HOPE
a nice article about the state of entrepreneurship in France, by Business week La Vie Impossible Yes and no. The state has been trying to sweep away many of the outdated laws and regulations that have made life complicated for small-business owners. But French entrepreneurs continue to face cultural, bureaucratic, and financial hurdles. Even the government acknowledges that most businesses created each year are tiny, with scant prospects for growth. Says Philippe Bloch, co-founder and former chief of Columbus Café, a chain of espresso bars in and around : "You have to be crazy to be an entrepreneur in ."
Paris is encouraging entrepreneurs even as it continues to hinder them
Caught in a sort of no-man's-land between the powerful state and the heroic worker is the small businessman. It's not always a pleasant place to be. "In , a self-made man is viewed as a sort of scoundrel or gangster," says Francis Holder, the 66-year-old founder and CEO of Holder Group, an industrial baker that supplies McDonald's Corp. in and operates a chain of more than 300 boulangeries in Europe, Asia, and the
Holder's experience is instructive. The son of a poor baker, he overcame enormous odds to build his business. He worked 18-hour days, endured several near-death business experiences, and was forced to be much more competitive than the culture generally tolerates. Were Holder in , he would be feted as a classic up-by-the-bootstraps success story. Not in . Despite creating thousands of jobs, Holder remains an outsider in the clubby world of French business and politics. "In ," says Holder's son Maxime, "a soccer star scores a goal and gets the Legion of Honor. My father is not likely to ever get it."
If Renaud Dutreil had his way, people like Holder would be accepted and even celebrated by their countrymen. Dutreil is Minister of Small & Midsize Enterprise. Before his arrival in 2002, the ministry was a backwater. But Dutreil, 46, is quite unlike his predecessors. He remembers the humiliation he felt as a teen when his father's tannery went bankrupt. And he has set out with a passion unheard of in to help small businesses.
Dutreil's achievements so far will seem banal to an American. For example, he ditched a law that had made it illegal to run a business from home. He also led the charge to cut taxes, ease financing requirements, and lighten bankruptcy penalties. And to help boost animal spirits in a nation where fear of failure is endemic, Dutreil has twice crisscrossed in a special train to meet with entrepreneurs. He says the reforms have helped cut the jobless rate from 11% to 9%. "By most countries' standards, we're doing nothing original," he says. "But for , creating a culture of growth is very new."
BEWARE THE CODE
Problem is, there's only so much Dutreil can do to restrain the heavy hand of the state. His power does not extend to the infamous Inspection du Travail. The agency, whose origins date to Napoleon, was set up to ensure that companies aren't exploiting workers. Today, some 2,000 inspectors troll the business byways of looking for people who are working too hard.
A couple of years ago, Columbus Café founder Bloch ran afoul of the Inspection du Travail and found himself in criminal court. An inspector had noticed that one of Bloch's managers had worked 10 hours longer than the state-mandated 35 per week. The fact that she was filling in for no-shows didn't matter. Bloch, now 47, was found guilty of "obstructing the duties of an inspector" and slapped with a suspended fine of 2,000 euros (just over $2,500 at today's exchange rate). "I was sitting between two guys, one charged with killing three people, and [one] charged with raping his secretary in the parking lot," he recalls. "I said to myself, 'What the f--- am I doing here?"' French officials say the laws protect workers. Still, they concede that the Inspection du Travail can come on a little strong. Says French Budget Minister Jean-François Copé: "Our people are sometimes aggressive."
Then there's the massive 2,732-page Code du Travail. The laws are so complex that even small companies spend thousands of hours a year ensuring that they are in compliance. Augustin Paluel-Marmont, 30, runs Michel et Augustin, a maker of cookies and breakfast snacks that's loosely modeled on Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc. (UL ) Despite having just seven office staffers, he employs a full-time head of human resources who spends his days running around trying to locate official forms and then filling them in. Says Paluel-Marmont: "Your first hire must be a human resources manager, or you're dead in the water."
If the overweening state doesn't drive French entrepreneurs to distraction, the business Establishment might just finish the job. Amélie Faure, CEO of Pertinence, a small software company that helps the likes of Wyeth (WYE ), BMW, Airbus, and Siemens (SI ) boost manufacturing efficiency, says dealing with her own countrymen can be maddening.
After agreeing to buy her products, the subsidiary of a French aerospace conglomerate failed to pay on time. A lengthy renegotiation ensued, and at the end of six weeks of haggling, Faure, 42, walked away. "They spent months trying to get us to lower our price by 10,000 euros," she says. "But every month they had our product would have saved them 200,000 euros. This was very stupid and frustrating -- a real waste of time."
In the end, many French with entrepreneurial yearnings jump ship. Every year, thousands of France's most promising youth decamp for London, New York, Silicon Valley, and beyond to seek their fortunes. They may vacation at their families' country houses in Normandy, Brittany, or the Côte d'Azur. La belle vie, after all, will always be in France. But their business dreams, they figure, will come true more easily far from the reach of the Inspection du Travail.
Talking about Apple as a whole, I have to say it is a company led by very smart people, who have understood one crucial thing: that our generation is more quality sensitive than price sensitive. In other words, people no longer care about the value for money as much as was the case in the past. They do care however about purchasing "perfect" products.
American Apparel and Diesel also understood that. Levi Strauss didn't.
If you make great products, you can afford to price them very agressively, and people will still buy them, almost irrespective of the price. For instance, Levi Strauss always believed that people would never purchase a pair of jeans at more than 100 bucks. Diesel showed that this psychological limit was pure nonsense for the new generations and that even yougsters with limited income would go as far as $200 if they think that the product is good. Levi's is in fact better value for money, as for the price of one designer pair of jeans, you can buy up to 6 Levi's pair of jeans, but this value for money thing no longer matters in the yeear 2000s. Levi's got it all wrong: as Diesel and Guess were booming in the US, they kept selling $30 pairs of jeans at discount retailers such as Target and Walmart... Now Levi's is on the merge of bankruptcy, and they are soooo desperate... check this out for instance. lol .
American Apparel founder Dov Charney also understood it. Although it originally seemed weird that blank t-shirts could be priced as high as $30, he proved that if those were well fitted and of high quality, their price would no longer matter for young customers. Whether at $30 or $40 they would buy it, as they do consider it as being much more than a simple t-shirt.
These firms such as Apple and American Apparel, no longer focused on Value for Money but on "Exceptional Value for a lot of Money", are the hottest and are likely to remain so. They're the sign of a changing society, full of Singles more focused on their immediate consumerism and well-being than on raising a family and saving up for a house for instance.
This is also the reason why I am convinced that Yelo, the start up I worked for during the summer 2006 will be a great success. The first Wellness Center for exhausted Urban Warriors was launched this month in NYC's westside, and it is already making quite a bit of noise.. the concept is audacious: selling naps (and reflexology treatments) to over-stressed corporate clients. The conservative part of us might question the rationale behind paying for a nap (just like it did question before the rationale behind a $30 blank American Apparel T-Shirt), but Yelo is now going to prove that if this Nap is taken within a YeloCab, in NYC's Westside and in such a well thought about environment, then it's nap that is well worth its 70 cents a minute...
Not to mention the second business line of Yelo, reflexology treatments, that can be either combined with a nap or taken alone. These are offered by well trained professionals. Reflexology is a holistic medicine that lies on the belief that by touching specific pressure points on the hands, feets, or even ears, the patient can acheive an immediate well being. I personally witnessed the passion that Asians have for these treatements during my time in Hong Kong, and the Chinese even believe that diseases in all parts of the body are curable with reflexology. Given their record life expectancy, we'd be right to believe them... Most of us are very skeptical about this kinds of (magic) treatments, especially the fact that it might help in curing diseases. Yet, one thing is sure, the well being achieved following a reflexology treatment is exceptional. Nic's goal is to convince workers that they will be more productive during their day if they take refreshing breaks throughout the day. Ciao Ciao to the coffee break!
Nic is a marketing expert and more importantly, he is a very demanding and intense client. Therefore, Yelo will be very client focused..with a few details worth mentioning such as a strict no-tip policy to reflexologists (this is extremely rare in NYC) as Nic wants the clients to be fully focused on their treatments without having to worry about anything else.
If you want more info on this very promising start up, check out the brand new Yelo website.
