Don’t Be An Ambulance Chaser

There is no doubt that although the majority of entrepreneurs are simply individuals who spot a gap in the market where it exists, and use their business sense to make it work for them, there are others who see an opportunity for profit everywhere, and even take an approach which morally compromises them. It is important for an entrepreneur who wishes to be taken seriously that they do not get a reputation for the latter. It may make short-term business sense to be ready to make money where others would feel morally compromised, but in the long term fewer people will want to do business with someone who has a reputation for being morally blind.

In cases of natural disaster, a high-profile death, national emergency or other such events, some people will see the chance to make money and care little about how their actions will be interpreted. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11^th, 2001, almost the entire world was united in revulsion about the events and in sympathy for the victims and their families, as well as being strident in their insistence that such a thing should never happen again. It was also the case, however, that a few individuals saw the opportunity to play on people’s fears by spotting a sales opportunity – hiking up prices on essential living items in the knowledge that people would be reluctant to leave their homes, selling security devices which would be useless in the event of another attack to play on the very real desire for safety, and so forth.

It is desirable for an entrepreneur to be opportunistic. Seeing the chance to make money where it exists is how an entrepreneur makes a living. While there is a lot of moral relativism around – “Someone was going to get rich off this, why not me?” is a favourite defence – it is essential for a businessman to consider the matter of public relations. OK, most people will view the concept of public relations to be something of a pseudo-science. The truth of the matter is that in business, it is important. In most cases, our conscience will restrain us from doing something that the majority of people would find distasteful. It can be tempting to look at someone profiting from a tragedy and think “Well, if that ass can do it, I don’t see why I should suffer because of my conscience.” But there are very good reasons not to give in to that thinking.

When someone makes a living off preying on the fears and the sorrows of individuals or groups, they gain a reputation as an “ambulance chaser” – from the branch of law known as “personal injury”, where people are encouraged to find someone culpable for an accident and sue them regardless of genuine responsibility. Ambulance chasers are not widely respected and will find that anyone who has a genuine choice as to whom they do business with will avoid them like the plague. It may be a way of making short-term cash, but in the long run it is not really a sound business approach.

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Two Heads Are Better Than One

There is often an impression that the world of entrepreneurship is somewhat hyper-competitive, with many people under the impression that if you can’t do it all on your own than you might as well forget it. There is a fairly negative impression of sharing, of accepting or looking for help, and once the game is over and the money is counted, the people with the most smug smiles on their face are the ones who are able to say they did it all on their own. Some credit has to go to these people, undoubtedly, because they have done a fine job to get so far without any input from someone else. But would it be such a bad thing to enlist help on occasion? Sometimes a partnership is, after all, more than the sum of its parts.

Whatever you call it – outsourcing, joint venture, partnership or anything else – there are times when doing it all on your own becomes counter-productive. Maybe it is true that no-one knows your business better than you do, but sometimes you will need to look beyond the world in which you are comfortable and allow someone else to take a look at things. Working together with them in an official capacity could be the smartest decision you make – and the best for you. Some people avoid joint partnerships because they feel that they will have to share more than they would like. But what if a half-share in something big is better than a hundred per cent of something smaller? It does not have to be about doing it all on your own. Sometimes the partnership is the soundest business decision and the best for your bottom line.

It is best to accept early on in your business career that you are not going to be a master of all trades, because no-one is. There are gaps in everyone’s knowledge, holes in everyone’s experience. This is not an admission of weakness. It is strategic realism. If you accept that you are not an expert on everything, and enlist someone who is an expert in a field that can help you, you will benefit from their expertise and you will see better results for it. Indeed through working with someone else you can find yourself absorbing knowledge that could help you in many other ways somewhere down the line.

It may be that someone else speaks another language which will help with an overseas market, or that someone has an innate knowledge of a specific way of doing a job – something that your customers have requested several times in the past. The other person may have an ingrained knowledge of the geography of an area you want to crack, but whatever it is, the important thing for you as an entrepreneur is that it can aid you in your dealings and take you up a level. Spurning the chance to work with someone else, someone with experience and intelligence, is simply cutting off your nose to spite your face.

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