In a recent podcast episode of Bizgrow with Tricia D. Young, Tricia sat down with Dr. Andrew Zacharakis, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, to discuss the methodology behind Entrepreneurial Thought and Action. Dr. Zacharakis has written many books on entrepreneurship and lectured all over the world and is considered to be a subject matter expert. According to Dr. Zacharakis, Entrepreneurial Thought and Action is fundamentally centered around starting a business at the lowest possible cost and therefore with the lowest possible risk. He cites the methodology takes into account three main aspects: who you are as a person ( i.e. your experiences, connections that will help you succeed); having a clear idea as to the business you want to launch; and launching the business at the lowest possible cost. He also states that it is all about taking small actions, learning from those actions, and reshaping your business idea to better match what the customer wants. When it comes to the first component-creating a business based on who you are-, Dr. Zacharakis claims that most people do this subconsciously already. Essentially, as an entrepreneur you have connections and experience that you have gained throughout your life thus far. By becoming aware of these factors and recognizing both your strengths and weaknesses, you can begin to create your business centered around you and the people you have within your network to help you. By utilizing your strengths but also acknowledging your weaknesses and building a team around them, it will become easier to create a business and attain the resources you need to become successful. The second component Dr. Zachakaris emphasized: launching your business with the lowest possible cost. He called this “affordable laws”. Essentially, this means not spending a lot of money right upfront in order to protect yourself and your business in case you go down the wrong path. Furthermore, this can give your business the freedom to constantly shift and evolve, growing with you as you learn. This approach sounds simple in theory, but in practice it can seem quite daunting. Dr. Zachakaris recommended starting out by doing low cost experiments. By testing your product or your service throughout your everyday life, this can lead to some realizations about your business that can help to improve the process. Dr. Zachakaris claimed that most entrepreneurs already do low cost experiments in their everyday life, however they simply have not been collecting the data. By conducting these low cost experiments and ensuring that the data from these is collected, it can help entrepreneurs to learn from people and grow their business in this way. By keeping actions small from the start, these actions can be reshaped, and then learned from in order for the business to be successful. In conclusion, Entrepreneurial Thought and Action can be achieved by creating a business centered around YOU and taking the experimental approach to help build a better, smarter business in a less risky way. This approach can help entrepreneurs get through the difficult startup phase and ultimately lead to a more successful business. To learn more about this model, Dr. Zachakaris recommends simply searching Entrepreneurial Thought and Action on Barnes and Noble or Amazon, as he claims all the most popular books on this topic are excellent and informative. To learn more about Dr. Zachakaris’ thoughts on this intuitive process, you can listen to his full interview with Tricia D. Young on the Bizgrow podcast on Spotify. In the podcast he goes into detail about the creator of Stacy’s Pita Chips, and how she launched her business using this model. Additionally you can find Dr. Zachakaris through Babson’s website; he welcomes emails referencing this podcast with significant and well informed questions.
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