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Contingency plan for your business not your career

Dec 4th, 2009
by Farhan.

I saw this tweet from a twitter account I follow called StartupUK:

Considering an Entrepreneurial Venture? Go For It, But Have a Career Contingency Plan « The …http://digg.com/u1HVA7

I went via digg to tweetmeme to a blog post on a site called the Job Search Guide about having a career contingency plan. I don’t buy it. In fact I would say having a career contingency guide is almost a step towards failure.

I think entrepreneurs need to be so laser focused on making a great big business that having a contingency plan almost makes you fall off the path to success. Your contingency plan should be on the business. If the business is failing, pivot, a new model, a new customer segment, a new distribution model etc. Don’t fall back on a new career until you know there’s no segment, no distribution, no possible pivot that should be able to work – in which case what the heck did you go into the business for?

This is especially true for young entrepreneurs, if you’re starting from scratch, failure is experience. Taking risk is better then living off benefits and having nothing to show for it.

I have a big problem with people in HR in general and specifically people in HR who look at CVs and see entrepreneurship as a failure rather than seeing someone who tries to create opportunities rather than waiting for opportunities.

My favourite example is this post on Fred Wilson’s blog about getting a college education – “One thing you don’t need to be an entrepreneur, a college education”. Specifically, this exchange between 17 year old Michael in Vancouver and Fred Wilson. In a nutshell, the kid has crap grades because he’s been busy starting things, so he’s not going to University; Fred asks him for his Linkedin and then connects him with some companies he knows and next thing you know that kid get’s a job! Because the people who really matter recognize that this is someone who cares about building great things and people like this are rare.

A lot of failure is due to lack of execution, but some of failure is down to just bad luck. It’s important to know when an entrepreneur has started something and been unlucky versus started something and been unable to execute and it shouldn’t be a career trip up, it should be a career advancement win, lose or draw.

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Posted in: business, career, entrepreneurship.

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  • Great post. I think there is an entrepreneur contingency plan that is neither career nor business... ensuring that the entrepreneur takes all possible opportunities to generate passive income. If you need an office - can you buy the office in your name and lease it to the company? A warehouse? same. If the business works - you have a working business and 2 good assets. If the business faces challenges, you can generate passive income from the assets and be in a better financial position as you begin your next entrepreneurial adventure.

    I think there is a serial entrepreneur career path - this goes from viewing life as a series of decades and building reputation, capital, network, experience so that each decade you can build a business that has ten times the impact as that of your previous decade.
  • Thanks for the comment Conor, totally agree that business should try to generate passive incomes as soon as possible - but don't think this is a contingency, this seems like a basic hustle plan.

    Agree with the serial entrepreneur career path as well, you look at people like Tony from Zappos, Loic at Seesmic, Ev at Twitter, etc these are guys on their 2nd, 3rd, 4th companies all have learned from previous experiences to build new businesses.
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