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Why Is There No Screening Process for Entrepreneurship?

SCREENING PROCESSES are a very good thing. They help you ensure that you aren’t marrying a bad kisser or renting a room in your apartment to a sociopath. Most high-risk, high-reward career paths have a screening process, too. The process identifies who has what it takes to make it big and weeds out those who are poor matches for a lifetime in that particular career.

For example, in the National Football League, there are a number of steps in the screening process leading up to the “big time.” You have to be drafted on to one of the thirty-two teams’ rosters. Before you can do that, to even be considered as eligible to be drafted, you typically need to have been an outstanding college football player, usually at a major school. To be an outstanding college player, you have to make the college team and be given playing time by your coach. To make the college team, you have to demonstrate outstanding athletic ability (and sometimes academic ability, too). These steps weed out the people who may have talent but aren’t suited for making a professional career in football (and thank goodness for that, or a bunch of five-foot-six, 130-pound guys who take twelve minutes to run a mile would all be trying out for their favorite NFL team every year).

Likewise, if you want to become a fireman, you have to endure and pass rigorous academic and physical testing. To be a lawyer, you need to graduate from law school and pass the bar examination in the state where you plan to practice law, and before you’re even accepted to law school, you need to perform well on the LSAT (the standardized law school test) and produce a strong law school application, as well as have solid undergraduate grades.

Becoming a doctor is even more rigorous. You have to spend years interning in a hospital. To intern, you need to graduate from medical school. To be accepted to medical school, you have to score well on the MCAT (the standardized medical school test). The doctor path has an even earlier screen. As noted by Seth Godin in The Dip, “Academia doesn’t want too many unmotivated people to attempt medical school, so they set up a screen. Organic chemistry is the killer class, the screen that separates the doctors from the psychologists. If you can’t handle organic chemistry, well, then, you can’t go to med school.” These screens are a good thing, because if you need major surgery, you want the best and most committed doctor possible operating on you, not someone who throws up when she sees blood or has unsteady hands.

Yes, most careers with big risks and big financial, emotional, or achievement-oriented rewards have a screening process. Going through a screening process not only filters out those without the necessary talent or predisposition for a given career path but allows you to learn about various aspects of a profession before you make a commitment to it, which in turn helps you know that you are truly interested in that career. Spending the time and putting forth the full effort that it takes to get through the entire screen helps you demonstrate to yourself that a particular path is something worth pursuing and that it is a good “fit” for you.

However, being an entrepreneur doesn’t really have a standardized and effective screening process, which is unfortunate since, unlike other career paths, to become an entrepreneur you typically have to put your own money at risk (as well as spend your time and effort). This essentially means that so long as you can get some money together, you can attempt entrepreneurship—even though you may not have any idea whether or not you are a good fit in that role or whether it is just a passing fancy that looks great on paper, but one in which you will quickly lose interest after getting your hands a bit dirty. The lack of a screening process means you won’t know if perhaps the timing isn’t right for you to pursue the entrepreneurial path, which will severely limit your ability to succeed.

Well, I don’t want you to lose your money, time, energy, or sanity on a new business venture just because of a lack of an entrepreneurship screen. I first addressed this issue when I pioneered my proprietary five-step FIRED-UP®¹ entrepreneurship assessment as a basic test to evaluate some of the timing and mindset components that affect an aspiring entrepreneur’s fit with the entrepreneurship path. Expanding on that assessment tool, this book offers a more in-depth screening process that anyone who is considering starting, buying, or franchising a business should take very seriously.

As the illustration above shows, you can think of the entrepreneurship screening process as a two-way screen: entrepreneurship evaluates you to see if your skills, strengths, and personal circumstances are consistent with running a business (for example, do you have the right mindset, motivation, and experience for it?), while you evaluate entrepreneurship to gain enough relevant knowledge to see if you have the true desire to commit to a particular opportunity and also to figure out if that opportunity is large enough to justify the risks you would take on in pursuing it.

If any part of that screening process shows a deficiency, you can then assess if it is a timing issue (whereby you can work to strengthen that area and then evaluate the opportunity again); an opportunity issue (whereby you can reevaluate other opportunities as they arise); or a personal issue (whereby you conclude that entrepreneurship will not likely ever be a match and you move on to something that is).

As you evaluate the dynamic between entrepreneurship’s risks and rewards, you should ask yourself not, “Could I be an entrepreneur?” but “Should I be an entrepreneur?” As Barry Moltz says in Bounce!, “Many entrepreneurs risk too much . . . their potential return—if they achieve it, which most do not—is not worth the odds they accept. They are blinded by their passion.”²

ENDNOTES

1. FIRED-UP® is my proprietary five-step screening process to assess whether aspiring entrepreneurs have what it takes to start a business (or if they should keep their day jobs). It is actually an acronym for Finances, Inspiration, Responsibilities, Experience, Dedication and Unbridled Passion. It focuses on the entrepreneur, their motivation for wanting to start a business and the appropriateness of the timing (vis-à-vis what else they have going on in their lives). It focuses on the entrepreneur and does not comment on the merits of their chosen businesses.

2. Barry Moltz, Bounce! (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 142.