Currently fascinated by stories about entrepreneurs, but not so much your Richard Branson types, more your local boy made good.

I get the impression Stoner and NZCol might be pretty successful. Any others, and what’s the story?

🙂

I think NZCol is closer to an entrepreneur than me 🙂

Mrs S though has started working with two brothers who have developed a new kind of sports boat. The three of them are the company and it’s just at that stage ready for take off. Its going to be fun watching the company develop and hopefully become a success.
http://www.c-fury.com/
Anyone want one? 🙂

What do you mean by entrepreneur? The literal meaning is “Between-taker” or middleman…..buy cheap, sell dear. Not a role model.

the literal meaning is outdated and fallen from use though hasn’t it moses.

I think you can assume that the OP was referring to the more commonly used definition of an entrepreneur as

S: (n) entrepreneur, enterpriser (someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it)
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is a person who has possession of an enterprise, or venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. It is an ambitious leader who combines land, labor, and capital to create and market new goods or services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneur

That certainly applies in the case of the C-fury. The brothers have mortgaged their homes to pay for the prototype. Their parents have put money into it and theyve worked hard for two years to get it to where it is. The result is a product that Yamaha are all over and it got rave reviews at a small boat show launch. The next step is employing 3 or 4 more people, raising the tooling funding and going into production. At any time they could loose their homes….or build a succsessful business employing people…

Its quite exciting.

I’m laughing a lot …….

I’m sat here in my PJ’s (its 9.32am)
In a house with most of the furniture stacked up in the lounge/kitchen/diner
My 29er is in the lounge in bits, my roadie is on the trainer, my wifes clothes are strewn all over the house
There’s dishes everywhere (we don’t have a dishwasher)
I am technically working I suppose but its definitely no high flying Alan Sugar type enterprise !!
I’ve built and sold one company, have a new one which we are in the process of trying to flog or expand. I have a pathological hatred of working for other people and making them money really !. I consider myself to be quite crap at it actually but have taken a few risks which have paid off. Its stressful though – i woke myself up worrying at 4 this morning and really, nothings that important !
But thanks – i feel better about myself now 😀
And as if by magic the iPod shuffles “One Day Like This” – good old Elbow 😆

Is that a kind of catamaran rib?.Looks very interesting,are there any test vids of it running or is it still on paper?
8)

theres a vid on the site (its a crap vid, there’s more marketing stuff coming soon)
http://www.c-fury.com/video.php
Its a catamaran rib with a hydrofoil.

It planes flat and turns flat at a hell of a speed. Im just a pikey landlubber but I thought the handling was amazing.

the guys put a hell of a lot of effort (and 2x mortgages 🙂 ) into the prototype – its very slick which is why it went down so well at a small boat show launch. I gather Yamaha (who are putting the power on it) want it on their stand at Southmapton.

It was crawled over by loads of kids and grown up jetski dads. A good market to aim at. With seating for 4 it means dad can play and still take the family out for fun…

Im more interested in the military/RNLI uses though. They’re interested too because of the very stable platform it offers and the smooth ride means RNLI peeps can get to rescues without being knocked to sh!t like they are in a rib.

The background: I did a computer science degree after ticking the wrong box on my uni application (true story) i meant to do more electrical engineering !, worked during my degree and was lucky to join a startup company that paid me peanuts but gave me shares, had a hiatus working in the ski industry and doing computer stuff OOH really at the start of the internet boomy thing in early to mid 90’s, travelled a bit, arrived back in NZ in 2000 with $80 a bike, some gear and a grumpy gf, had to borrow 2 grand from my mum to pay the bond on a house, got a job with a Big5 consultancy, did well, left on good terms, walked into a contract job sorting a bank out, did that, joined another place with a %age shareholding, expanded that, sold to a telco, they cocked up my retention contract so i walked away that day and setup another company, 4 years later its trucking along and in merger/acquisition talks. Along the way i’ve lost a long term gf, gained a wife, swapped bikes too many times but settled on my 3 faves now, laughed a lot, cried a bit, gnashed my teeth a fair bit but ultimately enjoyed the ride (so far).
Amen.

Where Michael Aspel these days …..

Yeah, OK Stoner, I guess you’re right…but the word still seems to have shades of making money without getting your hands dirty.

I do admire people who use their skills to build businesses, tho’ – whether consultancy / flogigng their own capabilities, or designing & making goods like your mates & the JCB / Sinclair / Dyson types; especially the latter. I just want the idea to start running. The ideas I’ve had in the past have been at the wrong time for me. One day.

save your ire for the rentier moses 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier

If you can get rnli to take them that would be a great boost to the company’s standing.
Not sure it has a military application though as it seems a bit small,you’ll never get 4 squaddies +kit into it,better try MET for the river police usage.
These days many Lochs and Lakes have speed restrictions due to environmental issues,if this leaves a small wake then that has to be a selling point.
How about an electric versionFor inland waterways and other environmentally delicate areas.
.
.
Just a thought

to start with this is a 3.9m version. The hull design (which is the patented bit) is scaleable.

Military like it for drone use at that scale (mine sweeping, remote recording systems etc) . Bigger units would have different deck configurations.

I think the guys are looking at an onboard wankel for later models. Dont think theyve looked at electric yet but I will have a word 🙂

I have no idea whether it leavs a small wake or not relative to other craft, but when looked over my shoulder it didnt seem much for wakeboarding etc.

the other people interested in it I gather are the Olympic sailing outfit as a course boat. Coudl be cool 🙂

Me http://www.cosybike.co.uk Slightly niche but some of my clients are massive! and they keep coming back so I must be doing something right. Totally turned out different from planned as well.

Going from Derby to York with Cycle Derby if anyone is interested this weekend. 89 miles! eeek! http://cosybike.blogspot.com/

It’s 99% luck though, right? And 1% ruthlessness. Or probably 1% good hair. … Nah, 50% good hair.

I’m not convinced the hair is that important!

The c-fury looks like it will be a real winner if the price is right. Good luck!

It’s a case of letting go and devoting your life to a cause. I’m an entrepeneur (I suppose) and the biggest wrench for me was understanding that really, you don’t need someone else to make the decisions for you – the ones that affect your life.

I now love my job. Simples.

Started one and sold it.
Started another, then another and now starting a third.
Scary as a scary thing, wake up in a panic some nights, unless you cross a critical size threshold a 2 week holiday is impossible and if you go away you keep in touch so never really relax. You do spend a lot of time on HR issues – more than I ever imagined, red tape is enough to make you give up on many occasions.

But, I am still at the kitchen table at 8.50am with a coffee and have been working since 7am in a quite relaxed manner, will walk to the office a mile away sometime soon. Been to all my kids school events/shows etc, make them breakfast every day and send them off to school – it’s a good life if you can cope with the ups and downs.

Luck, yes a large part of it is luck. Right place, right time but the “entrepreneurial bit” is seizing and capitalising on the moment of luck. Can list lots of business people I have met and I cannot think of one for whom luck has not been the critical factor.

Started one and sold it.
Started another, then another and now starting a third.

You don’t do your own accounts do you Roger?

I make that four, not three.

😉

i’ll be interested to know what all of you are doing.

another thing I’ve always wondered about is what do people who do things like IT consultant or help to redress a bank actually really do.
To me all these jobs are ways of making money while blowing hot air and being good with excel. quite attractive really but very obscur to me. enlighten me.

To me all these jobs are ways of making money while blowing hot air and being good with excel. quite attractive really but very obscur to me

kinda what I do 🙂

But not too much hot air…

Like entrepreneurship, it takes a bit of a gamble to effectively pigeon-hole yourself into a specialism. My own pigeonhole is where an industry (Commercial Real Estate) and a skill-set (Financial analysis, maths, logic and dynamic project modelling in Excel) meets. To be honest there was a surprisingly big gap in the industry. I chose to concentrate on it and a combination of good luck and me hitting a field that I had a modicum of talent in meant that I could commit to going freelance.

To me all these jobs are ways of making money while blowing hot air and being good with excel. quite attractive really but very obscur to me. enlighten me.

FFS don’t tell _everyone_ thats what its all about…

I love the ability of the STW massive to be upset at any almost anything – in fairness to Moses he did back down from his original assertion, but I love it. The STW warmth to all fellow man 🙂

in fairness to Moses he did back down

Moses may be grouchy, but he is a gentleman 🙂

It would seem then that we are mostly all wage slaves (humble apologies to the jobless club) taking it from the man, rather than giving it to him.

MrsMugsy – another thing I’ve always wondered about is what do people who do things like IT consultant … actually really do

Well, I’m an IT Consultant for an IBM Business Partner.

What basically happens is someone comes to us with a problem, usually to do with making their business more efficient or cost effective in some way. We listen to their requirements and come up with a combination of off-the-shelf and custom software and hardware to solve the problem. We then (usually anyway) work on their site to write/install/setup the solution. My specialism is software design and implementation.

So it can be anything from a simple website or software installtion to, in a more recent case, helping one of the country’s largest financial institutions rebrand with a load of custom software.

kinda what I do

But not too much hot air…

That figures…you just save the hot air for here! 😛 😆 Only kidding of course. Fair dues to Mrs S though, hope it goes well – admire anyone who takes a risk like that.

I’m never sure what an entrepreneur is these days. I suppose I’d put Dyson into that pigeon hole but not so sure about the likes of Alan Sugar. I don’t really like either of them but Alan Sugar was more of a buy ’em and sell ’em merchant whereas Dyson had some great ideas at the outset* and has built a fairly major business up around those original ideas. So, though he winds me up a bit, I reserve more admiration for him.

For me, the modern entrepreneur is the guy/gal who gets sick of working for other people, is happy to forego the magic figure that appears in the current account on the same day every month and just goes out there and does it (or something different) himself. I did it around nine years ago and some years have been good and some years have been tough. The tougher years were the first few though and now it’s more a case of one or two tough months in every six – try never to be complacent but I’m human and still get caught out by the leaner periods every so often.

My field isn’t any new product…it’s very manual (but with a bit of buying and selling these days (only so many hours in a day) but I try to use a background of customer facing roles to give the client a more professional attitude than they expect. Fortunately, as a “tradesman”, you start out with low expectations so turning up on time, giving prompt quotes and invoices (like a bullet….of course 😈 ) and not being afraid to give bad news puts you ahead of a lot of the competition a lot of the time. To a certain extent you’re your own boss but you have to realise you just have a different boss every week – as long as you remember the client/customer is the one who really pays your wages, then you’ll stay on your toes.

Vive l’entrepreneur I say.

EDIT: *I have a client who worked with JD in Bath before he ever went out on his own. Very interesting story about the whole cyclone thing…

I’m on my forth company and this one is handmade chocolates and truffles. Time will tell how it does.

Thanks, Stoner, and also for the education.

Entrepreneurship has been a dirty word for me since (sorry about this) Mrs T made a big thing of it, while simultaneously starting the deindustrialisation of Britain. It seemed to me that many of her favoured enterprises were a form of exploiting the poor. And since the word rentier was brought into play, her reliance on oil revenues to sustain the state was another factor in ebabling her to do that.

But as I said, good luck to the self-made men. If you can do it, it’s admirable – I just lack the idea to take forward.

chakaping – Member
Started one and sold it.
Started another, then another and now starting a third.
You don’t do your own accounts do you Roger?
I make that four, not three.

Sorry, I didn’t count the one I sold as it’s not mine anymore. And, no I don’t numbers are not my forte, that’s why God created accountants 😉

Sugar was more of a buy ’em and sell ’em merchant

Making most of his money through property….

As well as luck, I think they key attribute of effective entrepreneurship is the ability to assess risk.

As a lawyer, my job is effectively the negotiation of risk transfer. However, this tends to make lawyers very risk averse (as we always seek to transfer risk away from clients). Which is why you hear of few entrepreneurs who have been lawyers.

Dr North, OTOH, while being a university lecturer, has a much better concept of risk and a better aptitude for analysing risk quickly and then acting on it. She’d make a better entrepreneur.

Not wanting to upset anyone on here but the current vogue for all people in business to have an MBA does deter people for taking a risk, especially in breaking new ground. Those identified as entrepreneurial – Branson, Dyson, Stelios, Ryan etc would probably not have done what they had if they conformed to the MBA process/mindset.

<waits for flaming>
All the people I have worked with, at or to in business that have had MBA’s have been utter useless c0ckheads with no real world ability but a tremedous ability to spout forth utter sh1te because they think an MBA lets them. I don’t have an MBA and don’t need or want one which doesn;t make me feel inferior in any way.
</end flaming>

>All the people I have worked with, at or to in business that have had MBA’s have been utter useless c0ckheads with no real world ability but a tremedous ability to spout forth utter sh1te because they think an MBA lets them

I’m sure that people like that exist, lots of ’em 🙂

To counter that I’ve worked with some incredibly driven AND talented MBA types who are obviously destined to make a shed load of cash at some time in their future. They will probably screw up somewhere along the way but I have no doubt that at some point they’ll achieve “minted” status.

Oh and Stoner – entrepreneur ? PMSL 😀

Ok so maybe then they will be minted c0ckheads with nae mates !

What ever you do avoid “partnership” as they can run away with your business. Not all but mine did.

I bet if your livelihood is on the line you will graduate or learn far better and faster than MBA.

MBA is not there to help you to become an entrepreneur it is there to satisfy your view that “MBA equal success” or simply satisfy the bureaucrats. With the amount you have to pay to enroll on MBA you might as well use that to start a business which is far more useful.

I’m not, but for £50 I can introduce you to one

I thank yew…. I’m here all week, try the ribs