Could the Next Business Super-Star be Living at Home?

In today’s globalized and hyper-connected world, talented individuals rarely go unnoticed. If you’re an exceptional high school student the Ivy League schools will find you no matter where you live, and If you excel at sports you’ll find no place to hide from the NFL, MLB, NBA, or FIFA scouts. We live in a world where everything, from the weather, to the calories we consume, to the IQ of our preschoolers, gets scientifically measured and ranked.  Ironically, however, when it comes to spotting entrepreneurial talent things are quite different.

Take for example the iconic case of Jack Ma – the billionaire founder of Alibaba, the world’s largest online store-. Ma was born in China in 1964 and throughout his childhood and early adulthood struggled for money, although he showed early signs of an inventive and self-reliant spirit. It’s probably not surprising that his business brilliance went unnoticed by communist China’s school system in the 1980’s. What’s striking is that as a job applicant he received more than a dozen rejections –even from U.S. companies like KFC- and as a college applicant he was rejected by Harvard 10 times!

For some reason, the human traits that make for successful entrepreneurship have not been given nearly as much attention as have those required for superior academic, professional or athletic achievement. Thus, in comparative terms, there has been a void of scientific tools and systems to detect potentially stellar entrepreneurs early on. It is, in fact, intriguing that a world so obsessed with measurement has overlooked the fact that successful businesses are the result of human ideas and talents that can be quantified. 

The truth of the matter is -as Ma’s case illustrates- that entrepreneurial talent exists regardless of whether we measure it or not. But the problem with not measuring it is many potential entrepreneurs could be going unnoticed through school or work, without receiving the coaching or support they need to realize their potential. Think of those childhood friends who enjoyed building and trading toys, selling baseball cards, or running lemonade stands. If you had to bet, what would you say they ended up doing as adults? Now, fast forward in your life, think of all the business-minded people you’ve met along the way, and try to picture them today. Guess what they do for a living. Obviously, they all must be business owners, right? Well, not necessarily. In fact, if you resist the temptation to look them up in Facebook and try to figure out their careers based on statistics, you are in for a big surprise.

Judging by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data, our best guess should be that less than 1 in 10 of our childhood friends became a formal entrepreneur, and if they are lucky, their business is one of the roughly 50% that survived past the 5th anniversary, or the 33% that stayed in business for 10 years. So, what happens to the vast majority of the “would be” entrepreneurs along the way? how many of them get discouraged on their journey? and, most importantly, how many could have succeeded with timely and adequate support? Again, the high business failure rate suggests the missed opportunities are so massive that we, as a society, should be concerned. Yet, without a good way to measure the entrepreneurial talent available in our communities in the first place, it’s hard to know the real number of dreams that are going broken, or the amount of economic energy that is being wasted. For crying out loud, without good tools to spot this kind of talent we can’t even tell if the next business super-star attends the high school down the street, is a member of our team at work, or sits at our dinner table every evening.

Fortunately, Gallup scientists seem to have solved the problem. After studying more than 4,000 business owners in the U.S. and internationally, they identified 10 discrete talents that are present among the most successful ones and, based on this knowledge, created an online assessment to measure them. This invention –called Builder Profile 10™, or BP10™- (rebranded from its early version, Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder®, EP10™ ) is the latest breakthrough out of the same labs that created the world-famous Clifton StrengthsFinder® and, building on Gallup’s 30 years of research into the psychology of success, the predictive power of BP10™ has been extensively validated. According to Gallup’s research, individuals with high builder talent per the BP10™, outperform their less talented peers on several key metrics. These individuals are:

·       3 times more likely to build large businesses and to grow them significantly

·       4 times more likely to create jobs

·       4 times more likely to exceed profit goals

·       5 times more likely to exceed sales goals

The BP10™ assessment provides a detailed report of a person’s unique ranking of the 10 talents that predict success in the “business builder” job. That is, the job of an entrepreneur in a new venture, or of an “intrapreneur” working for an established company. So, with the help of a trained Builder Talent Coach, the assessment informs the amount of builder talent present in an individual relative to Gallup’s normative database, or as compared to a reference group that gets measured on it (i.e. the students of a school district, or the employees of a company). But, perhaps equally or more important, BP10™ provides individuals with an understanding of their business building “style”, their dominant talents, and their lesser talents. This knowledge allows the person –again, typically assisted by a trained coach - to create an action plan to turn talents into strengths and to manage the lesser talents through strategic partnerships and other support strategies.

The beauty of BP10™ is twofold. On one hand, by identifying who among a pool of individuals possesses the greatest potential of becoming business super-stars, it can help high schools and colleges, local governments, start-up incubators, companies that operate under the franchise model, or just innovation-driven companies searching for talent, select the best candidates and put them on a fast track developmental program to increase their success chances. At the individual level, on the other hand, BP10™ can help existing business builders -the anonymous entrepreneurs that won’t make it to the cover of Fast Company or Forbes but who collectively create 99.7% of the country’s jobs- to understand themselves better and to gain a new perspective on the reasons for their successes and failures. For instance, a small business owner currently wearing “too many hats” may find in the assessment the clues to focus his or her energy in a more efficient and productive way, by concentrating efforts on tasks that appeal to their natural talents, while letting others take care of tasks where they struggle. Not of less importance, BP10™ can help them identify the kinds of Builder Talents™ that are missing at their companies, thus allowing them to be more deliberate and accurate in their talent acquisition efforts.

In a world that struggles to create jobs at the rate that is required to power the global economy in the years to come, avoiding entrepreneurial failure should be a top priority in the government and business leadership agenda. One way to accomplish that –and perhaps the least common until now- is to scientifically identify potential entrepreneurs early on, and to provide them with the support they need to develop. Another way is to gain a sharp understanding of the business builder’s psychology to help existing business leaders become more self-aware and to manage themselves accordingly. Both strategies are critical to stop the job “bleeding” and to avoid going blind in the face of the Jack Ma’s of Steve Jobs’ around us. Like our first pair of prescription glasses, BP10™ has come to meet a long neglected need we didn’t realize was so severe until we tried it on.

Jesus Rios

Quanttitudes' Founder & CEO