Welcome to Businesspundit. This is the second stop on the Business Blog Book Tour. This inaugural tour is for the book You Need to Be a Little Crazy by Barry Moltz (check out Barry's Blog here).
I'll review Barry's book this afternoon, but first, I'd like to ask him to post on a specific topic – people. Barry writes that he would rather have an "A" team with a "B" idea than the other way around. This echoes what other VCs and angel investors have told me. Just last week I was at a meeting listening to a panel that consisted of several directors for angel investment groups. All of them said this same thing – It is the people, not the idea, that truly determine the success of the business. One panelist said that he hates receiving business plans that say "we have no competition." He can usually find a competitor with a quick Google search and that just makes the management team look incompetent. Of course you have competition, we all do (even if it isn't direct). I've only just begun my entrepreneur trek, and already tons of people have come to me with an idea that they want to turn into a business. But probing deeper, I find out they don't really want to turn it into a business, they want to let someone else do the work while they get paid for having the idea. They don't understand that an idea by itself for a new product or incremental improvement on some existing product has very little value in and of itself. Good management teams with intelligent, ethical, creative people, on the other hand, are worth their weight in gold.
So what I would like to focus on today as Barry visits this site, is the people aspect of starting and growing a business. What type of person do you have to be to run your own business? What type of person do you have to look for when hiring employees? What personality traits and skills are most important? I hope Barry will address these issues in a post, or series of them, later today.
