A few weeks ago, I laid out my theory for the difference between professional managers and entrepreneurs. Then, I boldly proclaimed that there are four types of entrepreneurs in the world – the tinkerer, the visionary, the innovator and the misfit.
Since you didn’t deluge me with piles of email missives saying I was a nut job, halfway to being fitted for a straightjacket, this week let’s take a deeper dive into the world of entrepreneurs.
Meet the Visionary Entrepreneur, the one who sees the future. Like a seer, visionary entrepreneurs gaze into their proverbial crystal ball and then tap into their uncanny ability to identify glaring gaps in the marketplace for specific new products and services, even entirely new industries.
Henry Ford and Steve Jobs are the poster children for visionary entrepreneurs.
Long before anyone else, Ford recognized the market opportunities for making the automobile affordable to the masses. Because of this, he essentially created an entirely new industry where one didn’t exist before and became its early master. Further, the process Ford developed to make this happen – the assembly line – was a transformational idea which was subsequently applied to nearly every industry to create scalable efficiencies.
While not quite as impressive as liberating the masses to travel more freely – and farther – across the country, Jobs accomplished similar breakthroughs for the personal electronics and animated filmmaking industries.
Through his company, Apple, Jobs created a viable market for personal computers, first through the original line of Apple desktop computers, then with the Macintosh. Using the same company, Jobs then reinvented the marketplace for music delivery through the iPod and its truly visionary iTunes platform. As if that weren’t enough, Jobs took a hiatus from Apple to found Pixar Animation Studios, where he re-imagined the world of animated filmmaking.
Visionary entrepreneurs also possess traits owned by The Innovator, which isn’t surprising because The visionary entrepreneur is an innovator at heart.
Visionary entrepreneurs are not afraid to try new things and fail. In fact, sometimes, their ideas are too far ahead of the market so they’re unable to fully capitalize on their creation.
Consider Charles Stack, a Cleveland-based entrepreneur who in 1992 founded the world’s first online bookstore, Book Stacks Unlimited, long before the World Wide Web or Amazon.com existed. A bibliophile, Stack parlayed his hobby into a business and used the then-popular online bulletin board system (BBS) to allow people to dial a phone number and log their computer in to the bookstore.
Stack built Book Stacks to 500,000 titles before he sold it in 1996 for $4.2 million to the company that would become Cendant Corp. This was mere months after Amazon.com was founded and months before Amazon’s high-profile $32 million IPO that would usher in the beginning of the dot-com era.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of cases of visionary entrepreneurs not just reaching the marketplace first but also finding out they’ve standing there alone – without enough potential customers to start the momentum toward critical mass.
Often, visionary entrepreneurs create the niche where they play, sometimes going months or years without direct competition. Here’s a column written by Smart Business co-founder and CEO Fred Koury, a visionary entrepreneur in his own right because he literally developed the niche market and product where Smart Business Network competes nationwide.
At their core, visionary entrepreneurs see unrealized potential and know how to effect change to realize that potential.
First, meet Dave Gilbert, CEO of the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission. When he took the reins, it was a two-person operation that existed basically in name only; today, Gilbert’s breathed new life into the organization and turned it into a regional revenue driver.
Next, meet Albert Chen, who took an idea from proposal to reality at Telamon Corp., building a half-billion-dollar organization in the process.
And there’s Ben Fertic, who saw immense untapped potential in the World Triathlon Corporation and expanded the brand beyond what others had been able to do.
Let’s not forget about Pat Ryan, who grew Aon from a local insurance company into an industry giant by leading the company through a combination of organic growth and integrating more than 425 acquisitions.
The Visionary Entrepreneur is a fascinating breed of entrepreneur. In two weeks we’ll take a look at the second of the four types, the Tinkerer. Next week, we’re back to Innovation and an analysis of the second of five traits shared by innovative organizations.
Dustin S. Klein is publisher of Smart Business Network, where he is responsible for all things content-related. Reach him at [email protected] .
