Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Online V’s Offline Entrepreneurs

Having spent the Christmas holidays with my head firmly in Web 2.0, detailing my new web based businesses, I had a sharp reality alignment today when I took my new little daughter into the two restaurants to meet the staff and catch up with Nic.

Apart from the cooing and inevitable crying, I spent much of my time chatting to the staff about issues and problems that they had, and dealing with mistakes that had been made. It made me realise how different online and offline businesses can really be, and got me thinking about the differences between online and offline entrepreneurs. The web has significantly reduced the barriers into business. Think about it:


  1. It costs far less to establish a web based business than the average offline counterpart.
  2. Legal matters online seem to less of an obstacle to business. You can buy an established online business without even dealing with a solicitor / lawyer, and yet the offline business world is plagued by ancient legal practices.
  3. Businesses can be tested, closed, expanded and sold very quickly with relatively little risk.
  4. Staffing in the real world can be a nightmare. I would estimate that 30% of my entire productive work time is spend dealing with staff. In my online businesses, most people are paid for what they produce. Freelancing is commonplace, and workforces expand and contract with workflow.
With it being so much easier to establish an online business my guess would be that the range of web orientated entrepreneurs is larger. This is a good thing, as money, status and every other variable are eliminated from the mix. It is a greater test of true entrepreneurial flare, because the many that enter are reduced to the few that succeed.

So another cheer for the web! But alas it’s back to the real world for me. I have a series of phone calls to make to try and sort some of these staff problems before I can get some real work done.

posted by Paul Fisher @ 1:18 am

1 Comments:

At 1:42 am GMT, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Paul,
You should read "The World is Flat". It ties into your observations but also makes the case for the need to have businesses based on physical location - restaurants included. So someone in China may be confirming your clients' dinner reservations over a VOIP line, but the rest of the service is still local.

Cheers,
Peter

 

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