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 was brows­ing the web today for a smart and fun present for a good friend of mine who just had her first baby. You know the sit­u­a­tion: it has to be prac­ti­cal, fun, orig­i­nal, use­ful, cool… and cost some­where around max 25 euros (since MANY friends tend to have kids this year). Via the great Dutch web­plat­form Trotse Moed­ers (‘Proud Moth­ers’), man­aged very well by a newly found IRL friend of mine, I stum­bled upon some great hand-made Nappy Wal­lets from the Aussie Mum-invented brand ‘Belly Bumps To Baby Hugs’- and thought — hey! This is a winner!

The Nappy Wal­let will hold (sur­prise..!) those nap­pies any new mother sim­ply needs to bring as soon as she leaves the house, plus all the other essen­tials: wipes, small tube of nappy rash cream and other small items that are use­ful when one is out and about. And has it has small pieces of rib­bon at the bottom,one to attach the keys to and the other to attach a dummy to. Fin­ished off with a handy strap, so it can be hung on the stroller.

Handy to just grab and go — and makes that big, bulky, heavy dia­per bag, that I used to lounge around, history!

As I’m sure my friend has bet­ter things to do right now, with a 2 day old baby in her arms, than read my blog, I am pretty sure it will still be a sur­prise when she unwraps it. But I’ll surely ask for a review again a few months’ down the line, when the Nappy Wal­let hope­fully has come to good use!

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Today, I met Navah who runs Tag-On; a com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­sul­tancy that devel­ops prac­ti­cal, hands-on Social Media Strate­gies for brands and com­pa­nies. We were sit­ting next to each other the blogger’s group that meets up every two weeks at the busi­ness cen­tre where I am based, the Women’s Busi­ness Ini­tia­tive in The Hague: a great way to get some dis­ci­pline in the blog­ging, share best prac­tices and — get blogging!

But most impor­tantly, it gen­er­ates real-life encoun­ters, like this one. Nor­mally, I fea­ture Mumpre­neurs who have invented a prod­uct, but this time, I make way for Navah.

Navah is a recent Mumpre­neur who has a three-year old daugther and started her busi­ness this year. Her pas­sion is to share the insight that

“no mat­ter what busi­ness you are work­ing in, there is always a way you can ben­e­fit from social media!” 

Her blog is a stream of good tips and links to use­ful resources, such as her lat­est post which is a con­cise descrip­tion of how Facebook’s new pri­vacy con­trols work, illus­trated in a sim­ple screen capture.

Fol­low Navah on Twit­ter , check out her blog and Face­book page!

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My heart goes out to the par­ents and fam­ily of a 2-year-old Amer­i­can boy, who trag­i­cally died last Wednes­day as the result of a scald­ing burn. His arm, neck and torso were scalded four days ear­lier, when the boy was reach­ing for a tum­bler of hot water that had been boiled to pre­pare tea. Doc­tors now research the results from micro­bi­ol­ogy and tox­i­col­ogy tests to con­clude how the scald could develop into a fatal.

Since I started my Mum­my­Mug adven­ture in 2007, I have come across study after study that repeat the same mes­sage: scalds from hot drinks are fre­quent and cause seri­ous injury in children.

But this is the first case of a hot water scald injury result­ing in death that I have ever seen reported. Should this unnec­es­sary acci­dent in spite of all pre­cau­tions you take hap­pen in your home: please — take the advice to see the doc­tor if the scald is larger than a post­stamp. Let’s make sure we never have rea­son to pub­lish a piece of news like this one again.

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Play­group plan­ning should start already before the litte ones have arrived! For me, it felt com­pletely nat­ural to stay in touch with the other par­ents in my prenatal/birth class, that I and hus­band fol­lowed dur­ing the preg­nancy.   After our babies were born, we got together to see who had been hid­ing there inside each of our bel­lies, and to share experiences.

Form­ing a play­group from a pre­na­tal class often works very well: the babies are all around the same age and born within a cou­ple of weeks of one another), you usu­ally live rel­a­tively close to each other and are on maternity/paternity leave in the same period.

Did you also form a play­group with the bud­dies in your pre­na­tal class?

Photo: we extend our thanks to Heal­ing­dream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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In new research pub­lished at Malmo Uni­ver­sity, Swe­den, Anna Carls­son (PhD), con­firms the pic­ture that we see over and over again in acci­dent sta­tis­tics around the world: hot liq­uid is a major cul­prit of scalds in small children.

The study kept track of the num­ber of chil­dren being brought to health posts and hos­pi­tals in one city in Swe­den for treat­ment. 148 chil­dren came for burn injuries. 80% of those injuries were scalds, caused by hot liq­uid (71%) or hot food (29%). The great­est num­ber was boys between one and two years old.

Sec­ond, Anna analysed the causes of the scalds.  One key con­clu­sion is that an acci­den­tal scald is more likely to hap­pen when some­thing is unusual and out of the daily rou­tine:  dur­ing a sud­den visit by a friend or when a fam­ily mem­ber was tired, stressed or ill.

Another trig­ger was the mis­judge­ment of the child’s capa­bil­i­ties. Given the quick motoric devel­op­ments that chil­dren go through dur­ing their first years, the par­ents expressed that they often didn’t realise that the child had acquired the capac­ity to for exam­ple actively reach for a cup until the acci­dent had already occurred.

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I need to find around 20 Mums — and Dads! — who would be will­ing to take part in a user test for Mum­my­Mug, which we will run in June.
It is part of a last val­i­da­tion test before we ramp up pro­duc­tion, and sim­ply con­sists of using a Mum­my­Mug at home for a week, and then telling me about the experience.

So, where to start look­ing for these test pilots? Of course it needs to be par­ents with small kids, who like to drink tea and cof­fee, and who prefer­ably are mem­bers a group that meets up any­way, so I can ben­e­fit from con­nect­ing with sev­eral peo­ple being in the same place at one time.

In other words: I need to find a play­group!  As Eleonore is already push­ing 5 and goes to school, the ones I used to go to are no longer active.

Some­one gave me the tip that many play­groups nowa­days are reg­is­tered on MeetUp.com.

OK, said and done: I sim­ply ticked in ‘Play­group’ in the search-field, and… voila, 2,615 results, includ­ing one in Ams­ter­dam. with 161 participants.It has a 5-star rat­ing, so it must be fun!

I’ve fired off an email to the group organ­iser, and now I can only wait and see if they are happy to check out me and my MummyMugs.

Because I totally respect that these groups are of course not for com­pa­nies to con­tact with­out per­mis­sion. I hope they agree to see me — to be continued!

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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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As Swedish as I and the Mum­my­Mug are, we also have another root, namely the region of Twente in the East of the Netherlands.

Why there, you would think? Well, you are look­ing at yet another lovepat; as I fol­lowed my Dutch hus­band Han back to live in his home town Haaks­ber­gen in 2007. Haaks­ber­gen and Twente  is thus where I started devel­op­ing my idea for the Mum­my­Mug. As a new arrival in a new coun­try, I lit­er­ally had to start from the begin­ning: learn­ing the lan­guage, build­ing my net­work and try to work out how on earth to start the adven­ture of trans­lat­ing the idea for the prod­uct con­cept Mum­my­Mug to a real product.

Today, the regional news­pa­per Tuban­tia has pub­lished a fan­tas­tic fea­ture arti­cle on Mum­my­Mug. It is unfor­tu­nately not avail­able online, as it has been placed in their spe­cial peri­od­i­cal De Onderne­mer (‘The Entre­pre­neur’). I take it as a great honor: not only is it great pub­lic­ity, it is — know­ing the Twents cul­ture — a real token of recog­ni­tion. And in Twente, it takes time and effort for a new­comer to earn his or her place.

You see: liv­ing in Twente is not just liv­ing in yet another part of the King­dom of the Nether­lands.  It is liv­ing in Twente.  This region and its proud inhab­i­tants, call­ing them­selves Tukkers, really have a sense of spe­cial com­mu­nity and many have lived here for gen­er­a­tions. There is even such a thing as a move­ment for the Free Repub­lic of Twente (in Dutch) — that  even hands out Twentse pass­ports to peo­ple who swear alle­giance to the Twentse flag. Yep, this is pos­si­ble in a coun­try like the Nether­lands, built on the prin­ci­ples of accep­tance and lib­erty. The Tukkers speak a spe­cial dialect — Twents — that really is so dif­fer­ent in vocab­u­lary and pro­noun­ci­a­tion from  reg­u­lar Dutch, that it is dif­fi­cult for some­one who has learned reg­u­lar Dutch to  under­stand it. And no won­der: an online dic­tio­nary of Twents count almost 1,700 spe­cific Twentse words!

So in today’s blog, I want to return the favour: I am also very proud of Twente!

The first per­son I came in con­tact with was Mar­tin Gre­vers, who designed the con­cept of the Mum­my­Mug. Read more about this cre­ative inven­tor and our coop­er­a­tion here. Dur­ing an inten­sive first year of prod­uct devel­op­ment, I also got to know a range of other cre­ative part­ners, such as the design bureau Indes in Enschede, teach­ers at the Indus­trial Design Depart­ment at Sax­ion Hogeschool and at Tech­nis­che Uni­ver­siteit Twente , and sup­port and advice from the Indus­trial design Cen­tre that have helped me come in con­tact with the right peo­ple at the right moment. I even got per­sonal advice more than once from the Mayor of Enschede, Mr Peter Den Oud­sten.

Wher­ever I have come, I have felt the cre­ative and entre­pre­neur­ial spirit of Twente and am very grate­ful for the con­tri­bu­tions of all part­ners that have helped and encour­aged me along the way. With­out the warm wel­come that Twente offered to a newly arrived Swedish woman with not much more than a good idea in her pocket, the Mum­my­Mug would prob­a­bly never have got­ten off the ground. And although I am based in The Hague nowa­days, I go to Twente often and still work reg­u­larly with my Twentse partners.

Thus — I’m proud to say, on behalf of Mum­my­Mug: Wij Zijn Tukkers — and proud of it!

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