GreenSearch People: Entrepreneur, Manager, Technician: Will The Real Business Owner Please Stand Up?

Every entrepreneur has three different people inside him. The degree to which we balance, recognize and manage the influence each of these people has on us, the greater potential for success we will have with our businesses.

Every company goes through several phases in its life cycle. Gerber calls them infancy, adolescence and maturity. As owners and founders of businesses, each of the three people inside us plays a role in the different life cycles our companies experience. The three different types of folks residing in each of us in varying degrees are the entrepreneur, the technician and the manager. Sounds pretty elementary, doesn't it? The problem is that "while each person wants to be the boss, none of them wants to have a boss," says Gerber. So these three folks start a business with the idea of being the boss, and that's when the tension starts to build.

The entrepreneur looks at the world differently. Here is a person on a mission. Every situation he encounters becomes transformed into the century's most compelling business opportunity. Here is the person with the dream and the vision. Onward and upward is the rallying cry of the entrepreneur. Ideas run rampant through his brain. Every day there is a need for change and new ideas are implemented rapidly even though the other folks in the company are still absorbing his last new ideas. To them this person is nuts, a loose cannon, who is making their lives hell on earth. The entrepreneur is constantly running faster than the company. This is by design, though. He has a need to control everything and everyone around him. He does this by keeping everyone off balance while chasing the dream. He drags and coerces them along and feels that if only he didn't have these dim-witted employees, the company could be years ahead of where it is now.

The manager in all of us is a different animal all together. He is pragmatic and driven by rules, predictability and order. The manager is concerned with things like whether the equipment is being stored, accounted for and maintained properly. He looks at all those opportunities the entrepreneur sees and calls them something different - problems. The manager resigns himself to cleaning up the messes created by the entrepreneur. Interestingly enough, while these two people seem to be constantly at odds with one another, the natural tension between them is what sometimes creates dynamic and successful companies.

Let us not forget the third person in the entrepreneur; the technician. The key strength of the technician is that he is the doer. He doesn't reside in the future like the entrepreneur. He doesn't reside in the past like the manager. No, this person resides in the present. He loves to see things get done. "Make something happen" is his motto. He loves to work, but only on one thing at a time. As a result, he's very distrustful of and agitated by anyone who gives him more work to do than he believes is possible to do. He proudly separates himself from those he perceives only think about things and do nothing to make them happen. While not terribly interested in ideas, he's very interested in how to get things done. He's a staunch individualist. He knows that if he and his ilk don't do it, it won't get done. Not only does the entrepreneur give him bad hair days with his crazy new ideas, but he's also at odds with the manager who's always trying to make him conform and become part of the "system." Talk to the manager and he describes the technician as a "problem" employee, a non-team player. Talk with both the manager and the technician, and they both resent the entrepreneur who started all this trouble in the first place.

Sound familiar? Each of us has these characters living inside us. And every day each is striving to be the boss. Just think what it would like to be a person who was able to keep all three people in perfect balance and under control. It boggles the mind to think of what could be done.

Gerber tells us that in his experience, the typical small business owner is 10 percent entrepreneur, 20 percent manager and 70 percent technician. "The entrepreneur wakes up with a vision. The manager screams, 'Oh no.' And while the two of them are battling it out, the technician seizes the opportunity to go into business for himself," writes Gerber. That's why so many of us have a high degree of "technician" in us when we start new businesses.

Many technicians start a business and at first they are successful because their business is in the infancy stage. In fact, the technician is the business. His customers love him and have nothing but rave reviews about how he takes care of their needs. He's working his tail off, but he loves it. Soon however, the work backs up on him and he can't get it all done. "Infancy ends when the owner realizes that the business cannot continue to run the way it has been; that, in order for it to survive, it will have to change … When that happens, most of the technicians lock their doors behind them and walk away. The rest go on to adolescence," writes Gerber.

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