Entrepreneurship Q&A: Paul Jones, UW Oshkosh Entrepreneur in Residence

From your experience, what are the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur?
Every entrepreneur is different, as is every deal. Still, there are, I think, at least two characteristics that, if you don’t have them, you are all but certain to wash out as an entrepreneur.

What are those common denominators? The first is “fire in the belly.” Successful entrepreneurs live and breathe their business; they are workaholics, though they usually don’t think of what they are doing as work, but rather as a contest of sorts. The second is supreme self-confidence coupled with a high comfort level for ambiguity and change.

On the one hand they have to know they are right: on the other, they have to be able to recognize — the earlier the better — when they are “wrong” and be able and willing to change course without losing that initial self-confidence that they are never wrong!

A final thought: Every successful entrepreneur I’ve ever known had at least one major quirk, personality wise. These people are, almost by definition, a bit crazy to be doing what they do. Of course, the really driven, top people in just about any field, from arts to sports to business, tend to be personality outliers.

Are there one or two UW Oshkosh alumni who come to mind when you think of successful entrepreneurs?
While I have not met him, Jere Dhien, who owns a company that is either the only one in a space or the largest in the space, was one of our outstanding alumni last year. Not high tech but has been aggressive in reinventing a market. For example, his company cleans and refurbishes all of the pallets that 600-pound cheese containers are shipped in the U.S.

He went to the cheese industry when each cheese maker was cleaning his or her own pallets and offered to do it for everyone. Does the same for beer barrels. Coors is only brewer that does not use his company to refurbish barrels.

How is the College of Business inspiring or preparing students and grads to become entrepreneurs?
Well, it starts with a well-rounded curriculum, which we’ve got. It goes on to making students aware of the opportunities in entrepreneurship and the culture of entrepreneurship, which is something we’ve got in terms of small business entrepreneurship and something we are getting, I think, in terms of entrepreneurship.

With regard to the College of Business, what are the differentiators regarding curriculum dedicated to entrepreneurs?
Entrepreneurs, small business or high-impact businesses need to be generalists. While they may have a specialty, they need to have a working grasp of all aspects of the business, if only so they can be intelligent consumers of managers with other specialties. The curriculum also needs to reflect an understanding of the differences — in terms of goals, culture, metrics, etc. — between small business and high-impact business entrepreneurship. That is something we are working on now — adding a high-impact business perspective to an already strong small business curriculum. 

Regarding YES!, what are the benefits of working with this young age group and what skills are you trying to instill?
Well, in terms of high-impact business entrepreneurship, our students, even the undergrads, are in fact in the prime age range for launching high-impact business careers. Bill Gates, after all, was a college dropout. Seriously, while some high-impact business entrepreneurs begin their high-impact business entrepreneurship careers later in life (by necessity or choice and particularly in capital-intensive industries like biotech) the majority start young, either as founders of high-impact businesses right out of school (or in school; think Michael Dell), or as people who early on look to find homes as managers or techies in high-impact businesses founded by others.

In terms of the skills needed to get into the high-impact business world, the most important thing we do is make students aware of the high-impact business world and its culture. If they want to get into the high-impact business world, they need to know the lingo, the players, the way that world works, which is different from the big business/small business world. Beyond that, they need to be generalists. Even the techies need to have some general awareness of the other aspects of running and growing a high-impact business if they want to maximize their chances for success.

In your expert opinion, what is the current trend for folks taking the entrepreneurial leap across the country? Does the economy impact these choices one way or another?
As they say, every cloud has its silver lining, right? When I was in Research Triangle Park in the early 1990s, before the area had emerged as a major center of high-impact business entrepreneurship, we used to say that the best thing that could happen in terms of growing the high-impact business sector in the area would be for IBM to layoff 5,000 people (admittedly, gallows humor).

Well they did. And that pool of laid-off IBMers, and many of those they left behind who suddenly realized their future at IBM was not as secure as they thought, played a major role in the rapid emergence of the RTP area as a high-impact business center over the period 1995 to 2005.

The great economist Joseph Schumpter famously said that the essence of capitalism is creative destruction. Well, high-impact business entrepreneurship is the innovation engine behind that statement. If you prefer, think of Rhett Butler — and Scarlet, for that matter: stay in turmoil; there is opportunity.

All of that said, there is less capital out there for high-impact businesses in this environment, which is a serious issue. But that cycle will come back, too.

Do you have an observation regarding what the next decade might hold regarding Americans choosing to become entrepreneurs?
Looking at the economy generally, one of the biggest challenges we have in crafting our national response to the recent financial meltdown is to make sure that we don’t respond with regulatory overkill. We clearly need to develop more effective regulation of financial markets — and we always will, as there will always be a set of creative, if misguided, people whose business model is based on breaking the rules.

At the same time, we have to make sure that we don’t impose regulations that stifle the financial innovation that so often goes hand-in-glove with business innovation. It’s a difficult balancing act, and if we don’t get it right, we could easily throw out the entrepreneurial baby with the soiled bathwater.

Do you think the statistics reporting that for the most part most new, small to medium-sized businesses fail in the first two years still reflect the trend?
Yes. The failure rate is even higher for high-impact business entrepreneurs. But, then again, when a high-impact business succeeds the financial and economic-impact rewards are typically orders of magnitude greater than when a small business entrepreneur succeeds.

Also, high-impact business entrepreneurs, win or lose, tend to “recycle” into new high-impact businesses. So-called “serial” or “repeat player” entrepreneurs — even those that fail — are probably more successful on average than newbies.

Might you offer the top three to five "truisms" in trying to become a successful entrepreneur?
You’ve got to have fire in the belly. You’ve got to be confident but educable. You’ve got to have “situational awareness”; that is, you need to know all of the players in the market you are after — the customers, the competitors (and there is always competition), the distribution channels, the talent, whose ox you are goring (i.e., who will be hurt by your success), etc. And you need to know the lingo and culture, particularly if you are from an area or background that suggests — to the insiders — that you probably don’t know the lingo and the culture.

What, from your viewpoint, is the value to students and the University of having an entrepreneur-in-residence?
Having only been here since last summer, my sense is that there are a lot more potential high-impact business entrepreneurs in the student body than you might think. Whether or not you can teach high-impact business entrepreneurship is an interesting debate, but from what I’ve seen even if you can’t teach it you can uncover latent high-impact business talents and interests just by exposing students to the HIB entrepreneur world.  One of my entrepreneurship students came up to me after class last fall and said, “This is really exciting: I didn’t know you could do this kind of thing if you didn’t go to a big school in a big city.”

What do you see as the distinctive feature(s) of this University in creating a spark of entrepreneurism in its students?
Well, in terms of small business entrepreneurship it seems to me that Oshkosh has been teaching it and encouraging it quite well for a number of years. In terms of high-impact business entrepreneurship, I think seeking someone like me out — someone who has been there and done that in terms of being an high-impact business entrepreneur and venture capitalist on a national basis — to get involved is a great start in terms of giving UW Oshkosh students an inside look at a career path that they have had little if any exposure to and one that most would not think is a possibility in Northeast Wisconsin.

In fact, it is a possibility in our region; if we don’t see and act on that as a University and a region, we are likely to see our region’s economy fall behind those areas where high-impact business entrepreneurship — and the innovation it drives — is a major piece of the economic picture.

Here in the New North, we are living in a region that in many ways is still living off of the labors of the generation of high-impact business entrepreneurs that built the paper industry a hundred years ago and more. It’s a great legacy, but it’s time for a new generation of high-impact business entrepreneurs to build a new foundation for the next 100 years.