A typical successful entrepreneur is flexible, understands that a startup is not necessarily a business — and computes with a Mac.
That’s the broad takeaway from an appearance on ABC’s “Business Today” segment by Marcus Tarrant, managing director of BusinessPlanningHQ, an online tool that helps people develop a detailed, visually appealing and legally defensible business plan.
Tarrant’s appearance was especially cool for us because his company of one of the hatchlings at the Anthill business incubator in Melbourne. But as a man with more than a decade of experience in business consulting and creation, his words stand on their own:
- A startup isn’t a business, per se. It’s the means to find the right business. A startup often lacks the structure that only time, along with trial and error, can bring.
- Lack of flexibility of the biggest barrier on the bridge from an idea to a business. An entrepreneur may think his original idea is the perfect fit for a problem or need; he’s often wrong. The ability to step back, see the need from fresh angles and reshape the idea as necessary is crucial.
- Australia’s entrepreneurial spirit trail “is a lot better than it was. I’ve seen it grow substantially.”
- And Tarrant notes that, strictly from an anecdotal perspective, most of clients he works with use Mac computers instead of PCs. Why? “They’re wanting to do things … They know that the cost of starting a business is a lot less than it was 10 or 15 years ago. So they can just sit there in the wee hours of the morning playing around with their Mac developing iPhone apps or whatever it is they want to put together.”
