Report by KAuf­mann Foun­da­tion Anatomy of an Entrepreneur

The very def­i­n­i­tion of an entre­pre­neur is for many some­one who sim­ply goes their own way, and define their own path to success.

And no ven­ture, and no entre­pre­neur, is pre­cisely like the other. But why do some make it and oth­ers, in spite of the best of inten­tions, do not?

I came across the 2009 report “The Anatomy of an Entre­pre­neur” by the Kauf­mann Foun­da­tion, based on a sur­vey of 549 com­pany founders across a vari­ety of indus­tries. The study seeks insights into high-growth founders’ moti­va­tions and their socio-economic, edu­ca­tional, and famil­ial back­grounds. Key find­ings are sum up what suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs seem to have in com­mon, in terms of back­ground, level of edu­ca­tion and motivation.

As an entre­pre­neur in the start­ing blocks of scal­ing up my busi­ness, I was of course curi­ous to see if I fit­ted the pic­ture and have what it takes.….

So here goes:

The aver­age and median age of com­pany founders when they started their cur­rent com­pa­nies was 40.

Tick! OK, I was 35. Not too far off the mark.

95.1 per­cent of respon­dents them­selves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47 per­cent had more advanced degrees.

Tick! With a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree under my belt, I fall in the lat­ter category.

52 per­cent said they ranked among the top 10 per­cent in High School. 

Yes Sir. I did. Can’t deny I was one of those book­worms with the glasses. Quite sur­pris­ing find­ing though, I had the stereo­type idea of the free-thinking entre­pre­neur that went so much against author­ity when grow­ing up, that his or her tal­ent wasn’t seen in school.

Less than 1 per­cent came from extremely rich or extremely poor back­grounds.

Tick! I cer­tainly lacked noth­ing when grow­ing up, and got the chance to travel, study, play and sport. But extremely rich: no. Extremely poor: luck­ily for me, no.  

15.2% of founders had a sib­ling that pre­vi­ously started a business.

Tick! My  brother has a rent-a-doctor busi­ness, Addoc, that he started a few years’ ear­lier than I took the plunge. For him, it is a side­job next to his ‘day job’ as a sur­geon, but nev­er­the­less, his ambi­tion and guts cer­tainly inspired me. 

69.9 per­cent of respon­dents indi­cated they were mar­ried when they launched their first busi­ness.

Tick again. Yes, I was mar­ried and I can’t stress enough that with­out the sup­port — and salary, let’s be hon­est — of my hus­band Han ten Broeke, I would never have been able to even think about quit­ting my job to start­ing develop a prod­uct full time. And those times when things seem to not go my way no mat­ter how hard I try, he is the one who inspires me to take that extra step. Again, again and again.

59.7 per­cent of respon­dents indi­cated they had at least one child when they launched their first busi­ness, and 43.5 per­cent had two or more children.

This cer­tainly chal­lenges the stereo­type of the entre­pre­neur­ial worka­holic with no time for a family.

As far as I am con­cerned: Tick again. Stronger: with­out my daugh­ter, there would never have been a busi­ness idea. Thus — no busi­ness.
Hav­ing a child also made me long for more flex­i­bil­ity in my pro­fes­sional life. Hav­ing a busi­ness does not mean work­ing fewer hours, for sure, but I can much more eas­ily com­bine this work­load with fam­ily.

The major­ity of the entre­pre­neurs in the sam­ple were ser­ial entre­pre­neurs. The aver­age num­ber of busi­nesses launched by respon­dents was approx­i­mately 2.3.

Nope, here I don’t fit in. With a past as a diplo­mat, I was about as far from an entre­pre­neur one could come, I guess, when I started this ven­ture. Let’s hope this is not an indi­ca­tion that I have 2.3 busi­nesses to go before I may count myself successful.….!

74.8 per­cent indi­cated desire to build wealth as an impor­tant moti­va­tion in becom­ing an entre­pre­neur.

Oups. Tough one. Hand on my heart, I found it so dif­fi­cult — in the begin­ning — to admit that yes.… I WANT TO MAKE MONEY! Why? After 10 years in devel­op­ment aid, it was very hard to wear the hat of some­one who thinks in terms of profit. It’s sim­ply a bit of a dirty char­ac­ter­is­tic in my old cir­cles. Also, Mum­my­Mug of course has a higher ben­e­fit than being a money maker: I sin­cerely do it also for the kids that will be saved the pain of scald­ing burns, if their par­ents are smart enough to use my inven­tion.  but this said, and cer­tainly since I have investors on board, and since I real­ize how enor­mously hard it is to make that profit: yes, I want to make money. And yes, if I do: I will have deserved it! 

Only 4.5 per­cent said the inabil­ity to find tra­di­tional employ­ment was an impor­tant fac­tor in start­ing a business.

Tick tick. I left my life­time safe employ­ment at the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion for my dream.No lack of employ­ment in the past thus!

Entre­pre­neurs are usu­ally bet­ter edu­cated than their parents.

Nope, I’m not! very proud that my father has even two degrees — in busi­ness admin­stra­tion and in med­i­cine. My mother is not far behind with an advanced teach­ing degree.

Entre­pre­neur­ship doesn’t always run in the fam­ily. More than half (51.9 per­cent) of respon­dents were the first in their fam­i­lies to launch a business.

I kind of am. My father is since a few years work­ing as an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant, after he got tired of the real­i­ties of employ­ment in the pub­lic health­care in Swe­den. But while I grew up, my par­ents were both work­ing in the pub­lic sec­tor and I’m the first one try­ing entre­pre­neur­ship at the scale Mum­my­Mug nec­es­sar­ily entails.  

The major­ity of respon­dents (75.4 per­cent) had worked as employ­ees at other com­pa­nies for more than six years before launch­ing their own com­pa­nies.

Tick and no tick! Does 10 years’ work expe­ri­ence, albeit in a very dif­fer­ent field and for a pub­lic insti­tu­tion count.…. ?

Last but not least: Net­works count. Pro­fes­sional net­works were impor­tant to the suc­cess of the cur­rent busi­nesses for 73 per­cent of the entre­pre­neurs in the study. In com­par­i­son, 62 per­cent felt the same way about per­sonal networks.

Cer­tainly agree. Net­works are every­thing. With­out them, you don’t get for­ward and you have noth­ing to fall back on when need be.

All in all — that’s quite encour­ag­ing, actu­ally. At least if I can prove to make some­thing out of this good start in life that I got ;-)
Who lives will see…

And in the mean­time, tell me: what is your out­look?

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CE-marking: not the most inter­est­ing sub­ject for a cre­ative entre­pre­neurs, who’d rather spend time on design, mar­ket­ing plans and chal­leng­ing online conversations.

But for any­one who plans to law­fully intro­duce a prod­uct on the EU mar­ket, like we do, CE-marking is of course not an optional sub­ject to tackle.
You sim­ply have to know which norms that your prod­uct must com­ply with, and make sure you take the nec­es­sary steps to met the stan­dard — or you could be fac­ing a costly recall and see your dream dis­ap­pear from the mar­ket faster than you can say ‘hepp’! That is a risk no entre­pre­neur should take.

For Mum­my­Mug, we started look­ing into this quite some time ago, and I must say that the quest for the answer to the magic CE ques­tion has been long and wind­ing.
It has taken me through erratic google searches, dis­cus­sions with var­i­ous labs, insti­tu­tions and experts; and even some brave attempts to chew my way through dense source texts of EU legislation.

I’ve had dif­fer­ent answers from dif­fer­ent experts and been pointed in all sorts of direc­tions, leav­ing me feel more con­fused each time — and not one step closer to where I had to be: with a well-structured Tech­ni­cal File ready for inspec­tion should some­one ask for it.

In the end, the solu­tion was just around the cor­ner: with fel­low entre­pre­neur Han Zuy­der­wijk who runs the online busi­ness CE-Marking.net from a base in The Hague.

Han  has a really fresh approach to CE-marking that can save every­one in prod­uct devel­op­ment a lot of money: the Do It Your­self CE-Certification.

Han is an expe­ri­enced CE-marking lawyer, who used to work for the Big Estab­lished CE-Marking Lab­o­ra­tory. Over the years, he saw how the CE-marking indus­try cre­ated a kind of mys­tery cloud around the whole CE-marking process, mak­ing clients feel that CE-marking is some­thing very com­pli­cated — which it is.

But what he really did not like, was that the estab­lished lab­o­ra­to­ries all seem to have agreed on a well-kept trade secret: namely giv­ing clients the impres­sion that there is no way around hir­ing the expen­sive The Big Estab­lished CE-Marking Lab­o­ra­tory to get the CE-marking organ­ised. And luck­ily, there cer­tainly is away around that costly process.

Han’s recipe is sim­ple: he starts with stat­ing the sim­ple truth that in almost 90% of the cases, the CE mark­ing reg­u­la­tions allow prod­ucts to be self-certified for CE marking. 

In other words, you can sim­ply do the CE mark­ing your­self. He does not say it is easy, but for a very rea­son­able fee, he does pro­vides a rich resource base, a pro­fes­sional scan and a prac­ti­cal tool­box with tem­plates and check­lists to help you help your­self: to struc­ture your work and process, with every­thing from under­stand­ing the basics of CE mark­ing, map­ping the norms applic­a­ble, make a plan for con­duct and prop­erly doc­u­ment a con­fir­mity assess­ment and set­ting up the nec­es­sary paper­work for your Tech­ni­cal File, that even­tu­ally will result from all this hard work that lies ahead of you.

Because hard work it is: using CE Marking.net is no short­cut. As for so many things that come an entrepreneur’s way, choos­ing for Do-It-Yourself-CE Mark­ing means sim­ply roll up your sleeves, put in the hours and the effort and get it done.

What makes CE Mark­ing dif­fer­ent is that it takes a fresh per­spec­tive to some­thing that seems com­pletely impos­si­ble at first sight. And per­haps even more ben­e­fi­cial is that CE Marking.net empow­ers you to know your game, know your prod­uct and become even sharper for the next prod­uct you hope­fully will develop some­time in the future. Not putting it in the hands of an expen­sive con­sul­tant that will bill you every time you call.

And the ser­vice helps you save up to 80% of the cost you would have had by using a 3rd party.

This, ladies and gen­tle­men, is why CE-Marking.net should be stan­dard included in your entre­prenur­ship toolbox.

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I just had a lovely email exchange with Louice, who runs 2 vol­un­teer led baby and tod­dler groups in a Berwick-upon-Tweed in the North of Eng­land. 40 fam­i­lies use the group she has started to get together, sup­port each other and have fun.

Pre­cisely what play­groups are all about — see my pre­vi­ous blog posts on cof­fee morn­ing / play­group safety, what to serve and other tips.

Due to safety rea­sons, Louice avoids serv­ing hot drinks to par­ents in her groups. Smart.

But she inquired about the Mum­my­Mug to be able to instead serve hot drinks safely — smarter!!

As they oper­ate on a shoe­string bud­get, we have dis­cussed a coop­er­a­tion whereby we could con­sider spon­sor­ing the group with mugs once it reaches the market.

Let’s hope we can make that hap­pen! I can’t wait to hear the sto­ries and see the pics from the happy faces of Mums and Dads finally being able to enjoy their tea again. Thanks again Louise for get­ting in touch!

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I’m very proud: today, the Mum­my­Mug is fea­tured in Collezioni 03 Baby, a styl­ish, glossy Ital­ian mag­a­zine and cat­a­logue for baby fash­ion and par­ent­ing essentials.

Absolutely gor­geous pho­tog­ra­phy, fan­tas­tic pre­sen­ta­tion of fash­ion and acces­sories for the 2010 Spring and Sum­mer season.

Cer­tainly worth an on-screen flick-through! 

In a spe­cial sec­tion, the Mum­my­Mug is pre­sented among other cool prod­ucts and a fun­da­men­tal detail for the smart Mums.

‘Home at last! And time to relax with a cup of cof­fee. Mum­my­Mug comes to the res­cue, a mug with a spe­cial lid, spill proof, to avoid any lit­tle acci­dents. Mum can sip at will, leav­ing a safety valve to do the rest… because mums also deserves a moment’s peace and calm.…

… or oth­er­wise expressed, sound­ing even bet­ter in Italian:

.. anche le mamme mer­i­tano un attimo di serenita tutto per se!

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In the last cou­ple of weeks, I have had the priv­i­lege of being fea­tured on three online plat­forms for women — for Mums, for female entre­pre­neurs and for those who count them­selves in both categories.

I was fea­tured with a Mumpre­neur Pro­file on Anto­nia Chitty’s Fam­i­lyFriend­ly­Work­ing web­site.….

.… m y sto ry was pre­sented in a great blog post on Mum­s­LikeYou last Fri­day (6,000+ users and 40,000 — 60,000 monthly hits).…..

.….and I was pre­sented as the Mem­ber of the Week of the boom­ing net­work driftig.nu for female Swedish entre­pre­neurs, with 6,000+ mem­bers and a real trea­sure of encour­age­ment and inspir­ing advice.

Of course great expo­sure for me and the Mum­my­Mug to a rev­e­lant audi­ence within net­works much big­ger than my own. The fea­tures gen­er­ated about 500 vis­its to this site and many inter­est­ing com­ments and new leads to help me build my business.

I can only say — thank you! And I here­with return the favor. Please visit the sites above. You’ll not regret it.

Of course it did not hap­pen by itself. Yep, I did make the first cold call con­tact with the women behind these sights and I sim­ply asked for the pos­si­b­lity of being fea­tured. They were all quick with feed­back, gen­er­ous with their time and with their sup­port in terms of lend­ing me access to their platforms.

This is Online Sis­ter­hood in action. The more I explore the online com­mu­ni­ties for women, by women, I see exam­ple after exam­ple of women invest­ing their time and energy in unselfishly help­ing some other woman to find advice, to con­nect, to build their busi­ness, find online friends or a great buy. And, as study after study on the tremen­dous online engage­ment of women, this engage­ment is cre­at­ing real and mutual value; for women per­son­ally, and for their businesses.

Isn’t it funny that we women, who often in the ‘offline’ world are known for the absolute oppo­site to the gen­eros­ity to each other and with­out will­ing­ness to help each other fur­ther on the career lad­der, are engag­ing so gen­er­ously, and at such a mas­sive scale to com­plete strangers online? Per­haps is eas­ier for us women to show this gen­eros­ity to each other when we are meet­ing in the vir­tual world, free from the inher­ent com­pe­ti­tion that occurs when women work or live side by side offline. What do you think?

What­ever the rea­son: online, it’s a brave new women’s world.

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After a few months of blog­ging and div­ing into the online Mum com­mu­nity, I am more con­vinced than ever that the Mum­my­Mug should be brought to mar­ket together with other online Mums.

Mums who are already in the game for a while; estab­lished as blog­gers and per­haps have a pro­fes­sional back­ground in marketing.

Mumpre­neurs, who obvi­ously would be shar­ing in the finan­cial suc­cess they will hope­fully help cre­ate, by blog­ging and pro­mot­ing the Mum­my­Mug to mums.

But who also would lis­ten and crowd­source  ideas for what the Mum­my­Mug should evolve into, and feed that infor­ma­tion back so I can tune the prod­uct and the brand into the real needs of the Mums using it.

Thus some­thing going way beyond clas­sic affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing. Some­thing really rid­ing the social media wave!

So — are you the Mum­my­Mug Mum I am look­ing for? Then I can’t wait to hear from you ( cecilia@mummymug.com ) . Together we can put the magic into the Mum­my­Mug brand!

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Hi every­one! I hope you have had a relax­ing and good Christ­mas break and feel refreshed and ready for the new year. I hope 2010 will bring you health, hap­pi­ness and all other things you wish for your­self and your family.

I’m just back from a trip to Swe­den, which com­bined nice relax­ation with the fam­ily with use­ful meet­ings and con­tacts for Mum­my­Mug. Really look­ing for­ward to a new year, which will cer­tainly bring lots of hard work but also a lot of fun, I am sure!

As one of my New Year’s res­o­lu­tions is to start vlog­ging, I decided to start right away!

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I don’t plan to make this blog a clas­sic prod­uct review plat­form — there are enough good ones out there doing that already. 

But I do plan to share inspi­ra­tional sto­ries of other suc­cess­ful Mumpre­neurs and their prod­uct or ser­vice. First and fore­most, I sim­ply feel tremen­dous respect for what they have accom­plished. I know from my own expe­ri­ence that suc­ceed­ing in prod­uct devel­op­ment, brand­ing, estab­lish­ing an IP port­fo­lio, con­vinc­ing part­ners and poten­tial cus­tomers of your idea, sourc­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers, going to trade fairs and, last but not least, rais­ing the cap­i­tal needed is a daunt­ing and 360 degree chal­lenge. So, these Mumpre­neurs deserve pub­lic­ity and that we help spread the word about them. I also sim­ply feel extremely encour­aged and inspired, as they are liv­ing proof that they can be done! I hope they will inspire you as much.

Today, I would like to put Solvej Bid­dle in the spot­light. She’s a clas­sic Mumpre­neur and has built her busi­ness while rais­ing two chil­dren, now aged 6 and 4. She is the inven­tor behind Content&Calm Cot­Canopy, which already is sell­ing well in the UK mar­ket. The Cot­Canopy is a clever baby sleep solu­tion; con­sist­ing of a light-weight canopy  that you can mount over your baby’s travel cot, to cre­ate an instant night time feel­ing. It will allow your child to stick to its rou­tine and sleep well wher­ever you go. Check out the video where Solvej explains in her own words what the Cot­Canopy is all about. The awards and press cov­er­age has come rolling in dur­ing 2009, the Cot­Canopy is sold online and also stocked at some major UK retail­ers. Solvej is now busy with expand­ing into sis­ter prod­ucts such as a canopy for the car seat, and will expand into a full prod­uct range.

Solvej orig­i­nally had the idea for it in 2003 when she took her first child, Andrea-Anna, with her on trav­els and out­ings as a baby, and found her­self strug­gling to pro­vide a fit­ting and prac­ti­cal sleep­ing envi­ron­ment for her child. I’m sure you recog­nise the sit­u­a­tion: you are away at friends for din­ner on a summer’s evening and strug­gle with hang­ing up blan­kets for the win­dows to black­out the light. Or your baby wakes up at home in at 5 a.m on a summer’s morn­ing when the sun comes up, but nei­ther baby nor you has had any­where near the amount of sleep you need to feel rested. With the Cot­Canopy, this is no longer a chal­lenge, as the lit­tle one can enjoy his or her own per­sonal dark­ened and famil­iar envi­ron­ment, even when the lights are on or the room is light.

Obvi­ously, the Cot­Canopy first and fore­most helps to us as par­ents to pro­tect a lit­tle one’s pre­cious rou­tine and I think a reg­u­lar, good sleep is one of the num­ber one things we as par­ents all aim to pro­vide for our kids.

But impor­tantly, this prod­uct also has ben­e­fits for the rest of the fam­ily. It avoids putting every­one else in the room in the dark when baby needs a nap, and grants us that flex­i­bil­ity to travel or stay­ing with friends. In all hon­esty, at least I find that it does kind of took some of the fun out of the hol­i­day to turn out the lights at 19h30 while on hol­i­day, and spend the rest of the evening your­self fum­bling around a dark hotel room so that baby can sleep.

Now, that is my kind of prod­uct — it meets the needs of both the chil­dren and the adults in the fam­ily. It is use­ful, it has been designed to meet real needs. And it has been cre­ated and brought to mar­ket with pas­sion and perseverance.

That is inspi­ra­tional! Con­grat­u­la­tions and good luck Solvej.

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In Swe­den, the Christ­mas sea­son has a very spe­cial begin­ning. Mid-December, we cel­e­brate the feast of Sankta Lucia; a pro­ces­sion and cer­e­mony of light and music. A girl rep­re­sent­ing Santa Lucia wears a crown of can­dles and is dressed in white, accom­pa­nied by her maid­ens, each car­ry­ing one can­dle. They sing to the melody of the Neapoli­tan song Santa Lucia and the cer­e­mony con­cludes with the singing of Christ­mas Carols.Lucia was an Ital­ian saint and the per­for­mance has all sprung from a mix of ancient and more recent Nordic tra­di­tions and cul­tural influ­ences. Noone seems to have kept track of why we do it — but there is no doubt that we love it! And every city, school, com­pany and church with self-respect will run a Swedish-style beauty con­test to select the girl that will have the honor of being the Lucia.

And what could be more fit­ting than a spiced Christ­mas cof­fee to really get into the Lucia mood! 

- Mix a a pinch each of cin­na­mon, sugar, nut­meg and ground cloves with some vanilla syrup in the bot­tom of your mug.

- Add half a cup of freshly brewed coffee

- Top up with hot milk, gen­tly stir .…. then click this link for your very own Lucia expe­ri­ence, and enjoy the moment.

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In many play­groups, the mem­bers sim­ply take turns host­ing the play­group in their own homes. Which is not only an afforable but also very warm and friendly way to organ­ise a suit­able venue. But espe­cially if the play­group is organ­ised in a home envi­ron­ment, it is use­ful to agree on some Ground Rules and take some sim­ple mea­sures, to keep it safe for every­body and avoid unnec­es­sary dam­age to your belong­ings. Because as much as your home prob­a­bly is adapted to the life of one tod­dler or two, it is quite dif­fer­ent to have per­haps as many as ten run­ning around.

- Own­er­ship. Spell it out the obvi­ous: every­one is respon­si­ble for safety. Although you’ll surely want to chat and relax, each Mum must actively keep at least one eye on their own children.

- Overview. Cleary decide in which area of your home the play­group par­tic­i­pants should stay — prefer­ably in an open space where the adults can sit down but always can see the kids. Check the floor care­fully for any small for­got­ten items and toys that tod­dlers could choke on. — Make sure that any gates in front of stairs are securely closed.

Don’t be shy to close off the rest of your home: lock the door to your home office and if pos­si­ble, try to close off the kitchen so that no chil­dren can wan­der in there unsu­per­vised. Also put toys that you know your child for sure does not want to share or would not like to see get bro­ken, in one of the off-limits rooms.

- Pro­tec­tion. In the area you do pro­vide as play space, remove all frag­ile items or at least put them out of tod­dler reach. Cover that white couch with a blan­ket that eas­ily can be thrown in the wash.

- Pro­vide a cen­tral play point. Put a blan­ket on the floor in the mid­dle of the room, and put the toys you would like to share in the group on it. It will  make it an invit­ing place for the kids to sit and play together in a place where you can see them.

- Make it pos­si­ble for them to run around safely. Remove any rugs on which kids who run around play­ing hide-and-seek eas­ily could trip and fall. If you have fur­ni­ture with sharp cor­ners, con­sider plac­ing cor­ner covers.

- Stay healthy. Agree that any child (or Mum) with a fever, stom­ach virus or other trans­mit­table dis­ease stays away from the play­group meet­ing. Agree that all kids wash their hands before they grab the snacks.

-  Keep it spill-free. Serve the kids drinks in small car­tons with straws, and serve tea and cof­fee to the adults in lid­ded cups, such as the Mum­my­Mug, to avoid spillage and scalds. Never ever leave for exam­ple a ket­tle or a teapot on the table, but serve and put it back in the kitchen.

- But just in case… Check in advance where you have your first aid kit and that it is still prop­erly stocked with band aids — so you know where to look should an acci­dent still happen.

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