The Organizational Ineptitude Of Entrepreneurs

I just got back from a syndication conference in Las Vegas where I learned a great deal about capitalizing business opportunities.  One of the significant themes I have seen play out over and over again for the last several years is that entrepreneurs are resource short in this economy.  Capital is an obvious constraint to growth, but other resources are equally scarce when an entrepreneur is bootstrapping.  Human capital and access to network-based experts are often as important if not more important to entrepreneurs than access to capital.  

In previous blogs I have written about the concept of enterprise value.  Firms often have additional intrinsic value because of the way they are structured and the expertise of the management.  It is extremely difficult for organizations to have solid enterprise value absent a diverse set of managers with certain core areas of expertise.  

One of the things that has consistently surprised me over the last several years is the unwillingness of entrepreneurs to merge resources and partner in response to the gnarly economy.  People are too stubborn to recognize that the business world is exceendigly complicated right now and that the better path is to organize their affairs in a manner where they can couple their talents with those of other like-minded entrepreneurs to create a whole that is worth more than the sum of the parts.  

Co-syndicated arrangements where people can raise money together and exercise their unique talents and areas of expertise are far better models for competing than going it alone.  This is especially true with the challenging circumstances present in the economy.  Hopefully more budding entrepreneurs will recognize this going forward and align themselves to mutually produce prosperity.