Serial entrepreneur serial#

Steppe interacts with entrepreneurs daily, and the common thread he notices is curiosity. While certainly a great achievement, it's hardly surprising for a man who founded seven profitable business ventures, ranging from an oil trading company to the Southwest Bank of Texas. Since he arrived five years ago, the program's enrollment has jumped from 35 students to more than 3,000. Nonprofits are still fair game.ĭan Steppe, 66, is the director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston's business college. 'I want to do something that doesn't involve having to return capital to investors,' she says. I'm not qualified or interested in running a really big company.'īlue Lake will likely be Johnston's last for-profit startup, but not her last startup endeavor. 'There's only so far I can take it, because I'm not motivated by just making more money. 'I know it has to be done, but somebody else needs to own the company when it happens,' she says. Her children's magazine, Tessie and Tab, will eventually need a video program, she says, but that's for a successor to figure out. That makes me feel good.'īlue Lake Publishing, which Johnston founded in 2002, is a company she hopes to sell in the next five years. 'I'm very comfortable with having a long to-do list, which cannot possibly get finished, but that I can attack daily. Though she knows most people may not find the decision easy, she says it helps for entrepreneurs to be 'addicted' to productivity. 'I thought, 'At 32, if it doesn't work, so what? I'll earn more money.'' Knowing she's now on her second startup and not averse to more, it's easy to assume risk tolerance isn't a problem for Johnston. 'It had never occurred to me before to start my own business,' Johnston recalls, but with very little fuss, she quit her job, tapped her life savings of $50,000, and founded PrintPaks (which she sold to Mattel three years later for $26 million). Like Skorman, she left behind a high-paying position in corporate America to start her own business.Īt Hewlett-Packard, Johnston was frustrated that her proposal for a children's printing kit wasn't gaining any traction, so when a friend suggested they go into business themselves, she agreed.

Judy Johnston, 47, is six years into running her third startup. I need a lot of stimulation, and for me, this means starting businesses that I feel will make a difference.' 'I feel a need to prove myself,' he says. Skorman points to several motivators throughout his entrepreneurial career. Because I'm an extremely emotional person, I have to work extremely hard to make logical decisions.'

Serial entrepreneur serial#

'Successful serial entrepreneurs don't make decisions based on emotions like fear, greed or anger-only logic. Until then, he says, his own perceptions were holding him back. The subject, he concludes, 'deserves more research in order to provide better prescriptions for practice, and to facilitate policy that encourages entrepreneurial activity.' 'Estimates are that about one-third of new ventures are initiated by serial entrepreneurs, and their firms tend to be larger,' Stewart says, noting that higher business success rates may be attributable to prior experience and the resulting ability to leverage a wider network of key customers, suppliers, partners and financiers-all crucial to business creation. While environmental influences such as parenting, education and culture do affect behavior, innate characteristics like leadership and intelligence manifest themselves very early on in life, he explains.īut what is certain is that serial entrepreneurship is an extremely important economic and social phenomenon. 'The results,' he says, 'suggest that there is a psychological profile that drives serial entrepreneurs, predisposing them to multiple venturing.'Īs for whether serial entrepreneurs are born or made, Stewart tends toward the former. In one study, Stewart and his colleagues concluded that serial entrepreneurs were bigger risk-takers, more achievement-oriented, and had a higher preference for innovation. and from that, I got the courage, or craziness, to start.' An Academic View of Serial EntrepreneurshipĬlemson University professor Wayne Stewart has taken a close look at how serial entrepreneurs differ from their more novice counterparts. Before striking out on his own at the age of 36, Skorman was a senior executive at Bread and Circus, now Whole Foods.