The Novice business archetype

 

Money archetypes prove to be extremely useful to help a wider audience discover why we do what we do with Money. It is a simple yet powerful concept.

So powerful, that we can also use it in a more business oriented context. My message seems to resonate with business owners and self-employed. I am sure, with the "job for life" a thing of the past, many more will jump on the bandwagon in the years to come and start their own business, freelance or look for additional streams of incomes .

This is why I am introducing the Novice business archetype today. More business archetypes will come in the following weeks : stay tuned!

The Novice is the most inexperienced of all the business archetypes. Typically, a business owner with a strong Novice archetype is quite new to the business world, and may have only previously held jobs where the responsibility for moving the business forward relied on someone else. He may have jumped into a business venture on the basis of some dream, maybe out of frustration from his 9 to 5 job, or because he genuinely thought he could do better than his peers involved in the industry.

No matter what the original motivation was, the Novice archetype has a tendency to make decisions that are often impractical and impulsive rather than well-thought out. The lack a general understanding of how to run a business or how to take a product or service to market is a major weakness of the Novice archetype.

It is very common to make expensive mistakes in the first months of a venture. We regularly hear that 80% of businesses fail in their first 5 years. I am not 100% certain if it is statistically true everywhere in the world but based on my experience in dealing with businesses in Europe and Americas, the proportion seems about right. I came across many businesses who failed because of their inadequate cash flow management. Sometimes we could blame undercapitalization, sometimes it was overtrading. But dig a little deeper and you will always discover a Novice archetype at management level, running the show in the background making costly mistake due to lack of experience.

For instance, it is still common to see startups spending a lot of money on product development or shops spending fortunes on facilities before even having any slight idea of where the money is going to come from. Those organisations suffer from the "if you build it, they will come" mentality.  Unfortunately, they build it and quite often ... no one comes.

Incubators, Chambers of Commerce and business groups do well to bring to life promising business ideas and teams, sometimes provide funding and mentoring to get off the ground. I wish more of them could realise that very often, even though we know what we should do, "something" stops up from doing it or pushes us to do something else and add a module about in their programs or a service to their offering.

Experts who take into consideration the behavioral dimension of Money add a lot value by overcoming the lack of experience and making the most of the energy and optimism that come with the Novice archetype.