Seriously? If another person tells me he has an entrepreneurial firm I think I am going to scream! I know that sounds a little extreme but come on. Really?
To me, I find it insulting. No one knows what an entrepreneur goes though unless he/she is in his/her shoes. If the business is doing poorly, who suffers?
Now you may say that it’s all about risks and rewards. But I’ve been on both sides of the fence and I know that when my company has done poorly, I take the hit. Not my staff. Not my vendors. Me! And on the flip side, when we do well, I always overly compensate my employees because without them, I wouldn’t be anywhere.
Law firms or other professional service firms with more than 25 partners, in particular, love to tell you that. Their brochure reads, “we are the entrepreneurial law firm for entrepreneurs.”
PR firm too talk this up. “Our entire staff is entrepreneurial,” a PR CEO told me. When I dug deep, I saw that not one person in the firm owned his or her business. They all worked for someone else, so how could they know what it’s like to operate a small business?
The other day, I was talking with a banker and he told me that his bank operates as if each division is its own entity. “We are an entrepreneurial bank,” he told me.
Is it that I object to people using the word loosely? Or is it that they are using the word to mean something other than it was meant to be? Or, is it just a marketing tactic and if that’s the case are business owners buying it?
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