I read somewhere that entrepreneurial ability runs in families. If your father and mother had a business you are more likely to open one yourself. It seems logical that what you observe your parents doing when you are growing up becomes a possible and natural way of maneuvering through your own life. I have just been pondering this tendency of ours to do accept as normative what our parents do. In my blended family, the three children of my Boyfriend have started working right after high school, just like their mother and father, while my daughter will continue to study. I am not sure if this is good or bad. I am just thinking about it.

 When I read the article on entrepreneurial ability I must have thought that it was about something else entirely and continued reading. Usually if I can tell that an article is about finance, business or something related I avoid it. Entrepreneurial ability is conspicuously absent in my family. On some level I cannot bring myself to fully believe the financial layer of reality, so I ignore it. I can identify with the old Romans, who thought that a man even once involved in a business transaction had sullied his brain so that it was no longer fit to use for politics or philosophy. What entrepreneurial skill we have in my family is limited to my Dad giving me unsolicited advice on how I should have (in the distant past) acted to get rich. It does not offend me. I know that he is really talking about himself.  

Me, I am a wage slave like my parents were. I love being one. I love knowing that I will be paid at the end of each month without having to deal with taxes and VAT and billing somebody.

I have only had one good business idea in my life. The idea was to edit and improve homepages of others. I am very good at seeing how to improve a web site. It does not even feel like work. It feels just like editing text; a task I always give top priority and which feels more like fun than like work. After I read the Bible of homepage usability it got even easier to see what changes would improve a visitor’s experience.

The problem, however, lay in introducing the concept to a potential customer. “Your homepage sucks.”, is a message of limited allure, no matter how diplomatically put. I learned the lesson the hard way; the first homepage owner I approached was a translator with multiple grammatical errors on his site. I never got a reply to my offer, but suddenly my e-mail account had a subscription to pictures of disrobed Asian females. People are sensitive about their sites just like they are about texts. Maybe more so. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that having worked on a site for three years makes it pleasant or useful to the visitor.  That requires a completely different perspective. People who surf have plenty of subconscious expectations when going to a site. It is whether your site does or does not fulfill those expectations that determines if the visitor stays past the first few seconds.

Recently I’ve had more success with my business idea: I helped a colleague’s husband with the site of his business. It was a difficult task. The business had three main, very different, sources of revenue which should be represented. The business caters to private individuals as well as large organizations. The main problem was that since the firm was afraid that competitors would check their prices they did not want to post the pricing model. Not having any price model on the site made gave the whole business an ad-hoc quality and must have scared off many households, with limited budgets, shopping for those types of services.  Luckily, the guy responsible for building the site was very receptive and excited about discussing these types of issues.  

 I also propositioned a skilled goldsmith to edit his site. He used to live close to me. When I ran into him accidentally and said hello he insisted I visit his site. He was targeting customers willing to pay a minimum of $ 400 for a piece of jewelry made especially for them. His page contained mixed messages and multiple grammatical errors. On the first page he encouraged visitors to bring their old gold jewelry in to sell it, an invitation that evoked images of poverty rather than those of high quality and luxury which he was really aiming for. His other main problem was his guest book, which was fairly empty, save for ranting entries in Spanish from his mother, who was thanking the Lord for her gifted son and his precious hands, etc etc. He had not wanted to offend his mother by removing her entries, but he agreed that some people might find them unprofessional.

I understand better now how to be careful with the vision of the owner. I know what I can offer. It is not some crap that I try to get some poor sod to buy; I have something of value to offer. Sometimes the ego of the site owner prevents him from being able to take in nine tenths of my message. That is okay. I don’t have to be right even when I AM right. Doing business does not seem so awful any more. I check my brain. I don’t know about politics but I think I could do some philosophizing if the need came up.