All in the family
Filed in archive Entrepreneurship by Shawn Hessinger on May 21, 2007
Audrey Fox also took umbrage at a suggestion not to spend time telling family and friends about your great business idea.
Though Dane's reason for saying this was simply that entrepreneurs should avoid being "all talk and no action", Audrey responded:
Why again wouldn't you want to talk with friends and family about your start-up? Before I opened my current business, I had actually thought of getting into a different type of company (opening a franchise). While laying down the underpinnings for it, it was the honesty of my family that saved me from making a huge mistake. When someone else opened the same franchise months later, it closed within 6 months because the neighborhood couldn't support it. Not relying on your family's brutal honesty could be the biggest mistake on this list.
As I told Audrey in my own response, I suspect her brutally honest and, it would seem, very business savvy family is, alas, somewhat unique. Though many family members and friends may, I'm sure, try to be helpful when listening to your business idea, before placing too much stock in their advice, the entrepreneur must first ask how qualified they are to evaluate the business and how objectively they can evaluate an idea proposed by someone with whom they share close emotional ties.
Globe trotting entrepreneur Pelle Braendgaard puts things a bit less diplomatically.
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