The Entrepreunerial Mindset

I've been re-reading "The E-Myth Revisited" this week. The premise of the book is that in order to have a successful business you need to have a balance of 3 business skills - The Entrepreneur, The Manager & The Technician. Most people that start a small business are skilled in only one of these three (often the technician) and consequently their business fails.

Most of what Gerber says rings pretty true to me. However, for me, I probably have more of an entrepreneurial mindset than the other two. In my work I am involved in R&D and have lots of vision about future product concepts. Most of my career I have been way ahead of where management wants to be. I have many patents but no real world applications. I don't lack the other two skills completely as I have strong technician skills (getting the job done). I'm weakest at management of the task. I tried a management position for a couple of years and just hated it.

The outside business interests that I have tried have been completely unrelated to my engineering job and as such I have not been caught up in the technician dominant problem that Gerber thinks is the most common problem. In both real estate and network marketing I have had lots of vision and many creative ideas. I thought of multitudes of ways to change the network marketing business but when it came to execution, I just didn't do the work as I discussed previously. When I had purchased over 10 buildings in the 1980's I just could not manage the many problems the properties had and just got too bogged down to get anything done.

Gerber talks a lot about creating a system. In my mind that was one of the strengths of the Amway business (at least in Dexter Yeagers groups). There are lots of people with their own systems trying to teach Network Marketing. The same is true in real estate. Every time I go to a REI club meeting a new guru has a new way to market or purchase or sell. And of course each one wants $800 to buy the complete details of their course.

So the idea that has been fomenting in my mind is can I use a wiki to create a real estate guide that doesn't cost the average person thousands of dollars.