Pete Worrell presents three Bigelow research studies on entrepreneur-owner-managers. Successful EOMs score highest on authenticity, leadership, and gratitude; they show exceptional grit, especially persistence; and despite their reputation, they're generally risk-averse, not risk-takers.
Hi everybody, I'm Pete Worrell with Bigelow. You know, Bigelow is widely known as the merger and acquisition advisor that deals exclusively with entrepreneur owner-managers. But some of our friends and clients, maybe some of you, ask us, "What the heck is your definition of an entrepreneur/owner-manager anyway?" So here it is. An entrepreneur/owner-manager, what we call an EOM, is someone who owns and leads a significant private business. Typically, they have a significant amount of their investment in the world, sometimes all of it, at risk in the business. So they have skin in the game when they make decisions. They have sort of a symmetry between their potential for gain and their risk of loss. What do we know about entrepreneur-owner-managers anyway? Well, it turns out quite a lot. At Bigelow, part of what we do is try to get better and better at advising our clients and making good decisions about their businesses. And so we've done several pieces of independent research about entrepreneur-owner-managers and how they can make better decisions. One of them we did with the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Marty Seligman, a well-known psychologist, is the Character Strengths Study, where we did an online study of several hundred entrepreneur-owner-managers to identify their top 5 character strengths. The results of that study showed us that the 5 top character strengths for seasoned, successful entrepreneur-owner-managers are authenticity, leadership, gratitude, fairness, and zest. What do we mean by those? Authenticity. Well, what Brené Brown may call vulnerability. Leadership, not management. Gratitude. A great quote: "Thank God I grew up with one advantage. I had to work for everything I ended up with." Fairness. A win-win game, not a win-lose game. Zest. These are spirited women and men who go positive, and go first. Another study we undertook as part of this was to determine the grit scale of entrepreneurs. Grit is identified as passion and persistence for long-term goals. With the help of Angela Duckworth, we found that entrepreneur/owner/managers, seasoned successful ones, scored much higher on the grit scale than the general population, especially high on what's called persistence of effort. Angela was our featured speaker at the Bigelow Forum a few years after that, where she presented her findings. A second study we did a couple of years later with a team from the Harvard Kennedy School was on the risk tolerance of entrepreneur-owner-managers. Advised by the well-known behavioral economist Richard Zeckhauser, we found that entrepreneur-owner-managers, curiously and ironically different than what the general public or the media say about them, actually were risk-averse. As opposed to risk-seeking. It's our belief that entrepreneur-owner-managers and the businesses that they own are the most powerful pro-social and pro-economic force on the planet. And that's why we dedicate our firm, Bigelow, to working exclusively with them, to helping them unlock their personal and professional potential and experience their freedom. If you're interested in reading either one or all three of these studies in their entirety, Or if you'd like to see some of the other information that Bigelow has assembled to immediately benefit entrepreneur-owner-managers, go to BigelowLLC.com and click on EOM Resource Library.
