Successful Entrepreneurs and The Importance Of Building A Team

I often encounter entrepreneurs who see themselves as soloists, single individuals boldly taking risks to create new and imaginative products or solving problems in unique and unusual ways by themselves. Successful entrepreneurs know that in order to discover untapped markets, to develop new solutions, and bring a product to market requires a team of people who can add their unique talent and skill to the mix. Many entrepreneurs try to do it all, and this is a recipe for failure. No matter how gifted, skilled, and talented an entrepreneur is there are still things that are required for a successful business that others do better than they do. I live with the Vega Role Facilities Theory day in and day out and have for over thirty years. You could say that I have become so familiar with the theory and the power of its concepts to transform people’s lives that I wrongly assume that everyone else experiences what I do. Still, it continues to surprise me when after I have delivered and interpreted inventory results someone says “This is very interesting, so what do I do with this information?” I could go on for pages, but let me focus my comments today on one area – entrepreneurs and team building. VRFT is a powerful tool to help people see what they are skilled at doing and what things they do best. More importantly for this discussion, VRFT is uniquely positioned to provide the reciprocal information as well. By this I mean those things that a particular individual does not do well. In the case of an entrepreneur, this information may well be the crucial difference between success and failure. So when an entrepreneur says to me, “I already know this about myself. So what?” The answer is “Have you used this knowledge to build your team?” Let me give you some hypothetical examples: An entrepreneur has the idea for a product but not the skills to manufacture it. Without someone with production skills, employee or contractor, the idea is only that – an idea. An entrepreneur has a network of influential people, contacts, and marketing but not the organizational or operational skills to manage the day-to-day operations of a business. Without the right person to organize and manage the business plan, entrepreneur’s schedule, and finances the end results is likely to be chaos. Or maybe an entrepreneur has a fantastic new idea but no strategy or plans to bring it to fruition. They need someone whose skill is providing advice, long-term strategy, and short-term tactics. Without someone to fill these critical roles an entrepreneur’s business may stumble along, but it will not take off the way the entrepreneur envisions. VRFT not only provides the information the entrepreneur needs to understand their own skills and talents, but also the information necessary to know what skills and talents are needed to compliment the entrepreneur, how to position current team members’ talent to fill the gaps they are best suited for, and how to evaluate prospective team members to determine if the talent they bring fills the needs the team has. All this from a simple but powerful assessment.