The Entrepreneur's Lament

By David N. Feldman

Welcome to my first BizBox column about the challenges and the fun of creating and building a business. As I discussed in my Small Business Salon, in 1992, I broke free from the “golden handcuffs” of large law firms and started my own firm, and then never looked back (okay, maybe once or twice). I now run a 24-lawyer shop in Manhattan, which I started as a one-man practice. This means that I deal with all the gray hair-inducing decision-making as well as the high-five moments of exuberance that years later still have me excited to come to work every day (okay, almost every day).

So what’s difficult for entrepreneurs? You may have heard of the “entrepreneur’s lament,” but an intense (well, two-minute) Internet search does not lead to a definition. So what is the entrepreneur’s lament? What, exactly, do entrepreneurs lament? Say it enough times and it starts sounding kind of dumb. We turn to www.dictionary.com, which says lament means “to feel or express sorrow or regret for.”

What do entrepreneurs have sorrow or regret for? In my experience both running businesses and representing entrepreneurs as an attorney, I have seen about seven different laments stand out. In this and the next few columns we will talk about these and I'll offer a little advice on how to deal with them:

o Focus. Pursuing new ideas to the detriment of the core business.
o Work/Life. Missing out on real life while pursuing business passion.
o Employees. Inability to find great help and keep them.
o Partners. Challenges in finding or maintaining good business partners.
o Money. Inability to find necessary financing for growth or survival.
o Burnout. When one morning you just can’t do it anymore.
o Boredom. When there’s not much more to build.

Let’s hit just the first one today: focus.

Entrepreneurs are natural dreamers, who tend to focus all they've got on pursuing something new and exciting. After successfully building a business, an entrepreneur may come up with something additional that may be accretive to the business that is already there or, sometimes, may be an entirely different business altogether. This may be especially true in the current economic environment, in which entrepreneurs are apt to sense the need to diversify or hedge their bet.

Entrepreneurs are the ones who never listened to the advice, “Don’t give up your day job,” since most of them did exactly that. So how do you ensure that your first business doesn’t slip while you dive into the new obsession?

A client of mine had a rapidly rising magazine business. He was on the Inc. magazine 500 list of fastest-growing private companies. At one point, he got excited about adding a business conference side to the operation that would complement the magazines. He focused almost exclusively on that, leaving inexperienced managers to tend to the magazines. Several years later, he suddenly realized that the magazine business he was in was consolidating, and that his larger and larger competitors were beginning to crush him. But by the time he came to this realization, it was too late. He ended up selling the business for much less money than he had expected to. Oh yeah: the conference business never took off.

In my case, I have become known as a lawyer helping companies go public through non-traditional means such as reverse mergers. I have written the only text on the subject and travel the country to speak. It is the foundation of my law practice. But I also do other things, and I believe I do them very well, too. One example is mergers and acquisitions. So I have spent time in the last few years trying to increase my visibility in that area. I have attended and spoken at some M&A conferences, and am working on building relationships in M&A. But I am staying at all times focused on the base, never turning down a reverse merger speaking opportunity (I am off to China in March for one) and continuing to build visibility through my blog, www.reversemergerblog.com.

In sum, while that Great New Idea needs a lot of attention, you should never obsess over it at the expense of continuing to bring the same dedication, enthusiasm, and creativity to your main business. If you’re just bored with the business you built, well, stay tuned for a later column. But if not, then realize you cannot do 500 things at once. Focus on the base and save 2-3am for the new idea if necessary. In my case, my best creativity comes in the shower…I know, as my kids say, Too much information, Dad!

Next time we will cover other components of the entrepreneur’s lament—which, if handled right, really need not be all that lamentable.

David N. Feldman, founding partner of Feldman Weinstein & Smith, is the author of Reverse Mergers and blogs at Reverse Merger & SPAC Blog. He can be reached at dfeldman@fwsllp.com.

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January 5, 2009 1:10 PM