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Episode 0010 Shownotes

 What makes a scientist a good entrepreneur

In this episode you'll learn about the entrepreneurial mindset and business acumen that makes a scientist also a good entrepreneur. Both you can hone via your career transition into business, and some of it you build already at grad school! 

P. S. I am sharing this episode specifically also with my own bachelor and master students as some of them want to found their own company! Maybe you also want to do that and thus help your own students establish a better life for themselves, thank you!

Prefer to jump to your points of interest? Let's go!

Entrepreneurial mindset

1) Initiative & self-reliance

2) Future orientation

3) Creativity & innovation

4) Critical thinking & problem-solving

5) Communication & collaboration

6) Comfort with risk

7) Flexibility & adaptability

8) Opportunity recognition

Business acumen: 

A) Leadership

B) Finance

C) Strategy & business modeling

D) Marketing

E) IT

F) Operations

G) Service

H) Sales

Do you want to leave academia and think an employment in business is the only alternative? Well, then let me teach you something new. Employment in business is neither the only nor the last alternative to academia. 

In this episode, we will think about, would you be able to start your own company and your company could be related to your research because you've seen the total addressable market from your research as a PhD at graduate school. 

It could also be something completely different, as you transfer and monetize your skills gained in your PhD to that new product or service. So, we will be talking about the entrepreneurial mindset and also some business acumen skills and see, where there is an overlap between science and entrepreneurship. 

I think, external business experience before you start your own company will help you probably to gain investors and to be more confident on the market etc. But I do know a couple of PhD students who created and founded their own production and company straight after grad school. 

So, let's start with the entrepreneurial mindset domains. And the source for that comes from NFTE (https://www.nfte.com/). They pronounce themselves “nifty” and they stand for the acronym NFTE (Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship). 

1) Initiative and self-reliance

Well, as the founder of your own company, you need to take ownership for your products or services. No one else will. Even if you have employees, none of them will be able and also be willing to take the ownership for your own products and services (at least as much as you should do). So, you need to lead without input, or guidance and you need to overcome all obstacles, even against headwinds. 

You already bring this to the table as a scientist. You've been initiative and self-reliant as a PhD student. I mean, you probably did not get your PhD research topic just like a heritage you just had to execute. You probably had maybe a similar topic like all other early career scientists, but you had to create your own set of of experiments etc.     

2) Future orientation

You need to create a highly demanded product or service that is future-proof and that means that you need to understand the future of work. You should check episode 0004 on the Future of work for new PhD holders in business, because this will be helpful for you to see in which industries are attracting investors. 

You maybe want to create a product or a service, with a high demand and you need to think about a future-proof manner of how to create or produce and how to deliver the service or products etc. 

Chances are quite high, that this hasn’t probably been required so far at your grad school. Which is reasonable, as science is more like the groundwork and not so much on-demand, commercially driven research.

This is why our episode "The future of work for new PhD holders in business" will be valuable for you, especially the part on investors.     

3) Creativity and innovation 

You have to ideate unknown products or create a competitive, better delivery or service of know products or services. I think, this is your safest bet. That's the essence of science: to create empirically new insights. Think about how innovative your research is!

4) Critical thinking and problem solving

So, you need to be strategic and thoroughly reflecting and forecasting all the costs and benefits of your solution (i. e. your product or your service). So, you need to think about it from a 360 degree regarding costs and benefits across all time lines. 

Whether you've been running experiments, or sampling qualitative interviews: That is all critical thinking and problem solving. And I think that scientists bring that abundantly to the table. That is valuable from a business perspective.     

5) Communication and collaboration

Well to cut this short, I mean, you don't create a service or a product all by yourself, right? You have to work with people, like your clients, suppliers, your team and maybe also your sponsors, financial investors, etc. so that you can create, operate and deliver sustainably your products or your services. 

As a PhD student / candidate or even more as a postdoc, you have what it takes to be a good communicator and collaborator. I mean, you've done this probably in the setting of academia. Especially in science communication, you had to be able to speak about your research or other people's research in easy terms, in a way that is attracting and convincing others to come into academia and become a student of your discipline.       

6) Comfort with risk 

Every business comes with profits or losses. And usually, the profits come after the losses. I mean, usually you'll be having a lot of failure that you can either attribute to yourself or your own behavior. And I strongly encourage you to attribute that to the behavior, as you can train for the good skills, you can train for the good behavior. Don't attribute that to yourself, because that's hard to change. And in ten years’ time; you will be probably running your own business with a completely different business model and maybe even completely different products and services. So usually, people who own a business have undergone a lot of operational changes, but they have stayed true to themselves in the sense that they want to make a difference with their own business, but their service delivery, their services for that product may have changed over time. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs who struggle and the successful ones will lead despite uncertainty and challenges. You'll always have to find a new way to make money. And that's essentially what makes an entrepreneur successful. 

I see that as the biggest gap when I compare my own PhD graduate school experience and in stark contrast to my business experience. I'd been working with people, patients who had tumors as a neuroscientist (psychologist), so I've been working with people who were nearly dead, and then came back and had to undergo therapy so that they were able to partly participate in life. These kind of risks or issues, or challenges and changes in the people's lives are a total difference to the risk of losing millions of money. But then again, it's not about life and death. 

7) Flexibility and adaptability  

I think that we all are familiar with Darwin's survival of the fittest. And that certainly applies to surviving and thriving in business with your own company. So, the question really is, do you have the resources to change? 

In the long run, you always have to invest to make more money. You probably don't just inherit some money and can play with that. But instead, you have to invest and maybe you will have some losses, but you have to make more money in order to have profits at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of the century. 

So, if entrepreneurship is your way to go, I would strongly urge you to look for role models. For more than 10 years, more than 20 years and even for a century. Because I can tell you that these companies that are still surviving and thriving, probably have a different business model or operating model compared to when they were founded.

And this is the entrepreneurial mindset that you need to emulate, because the challenges have changed over the course of the last century and today, but the abilities to survive and adapt they are the same. 

I think that this is something that we also bring abundantly to the table as a scientist because we are probably very flexible and adaptable. So, if something in your experiments didn't work, and the protocols didn't work, you had to change, there was no other way. And then you had to be waiting patiently and try again and try again. And I think that this resilience that you've been building, to overcome the obstacles and to adapt to win in the long run is something that you can take and apply very easily in the business. The only challenge is that you absolutely have to understand the tools, the concepts, the frameworks applicable to the business side.

8) Opportunity recognition

Problems are abundant and inevitable. The question really is do you see problems as your chance to solve and to capitalize on your solutions and those solutions can be new products, new services, new delivery of known products and services. 

But essentially, if these problems are a problem of a huge total addressable market, then this is your chance to profit from that. How? By creating a solution that will help your clients in a way that they are more than happy to pay you for that solution. Obviously, I'm saying that your solution your product needs to be a great quality, it needs to be helpful & thus valuable.

A solution for your client's needs and problems must lead to a return on your own investment, or else, you don't have a business for very long. 

At grad school, we tend to have not been exposed to opportunity recognition. So, no one asked us to make money based on of our research. So, sometimes we have industry collaborations, when we were lucky because the principal investigator had ties to industry, but usually that is not so much expected from a PhD student. 

Business acumen

And now we will switch gears from the entrepreneurial mindset according to NFTE and we will look into business acumen (Indeed, 2022), which I think is absolutely a must-have to survive as an entrepreneur. Hint: You’ll find in their link even more skills and further resources, I only discuss the highlights.

A) Leadership

So even if you start out on your own without an employee, you have to be a good leader for yourself. Especially when you are self-employed, no one looks out for you when you are working intrinsically for your own business, but doing that in over time for a long time. No one will pick you up when you are down and no one will ask whether you have finished your “thinking through the whole problem”, or whether you're just procrastinating etc. So, you need to be a strong leader for yourself. 

And then later, when you are successful with your company, you will have to have some employees, e. g. virtual assistants or full-time employees as well, so that you can do strategic things. They can execute or help you in units of your business where you don't have the expertise. At the beginning you probably are more of a generalist; you do everything. But you can't do everything at the very highest level, which your company, your services, your products deserve when they really serve many customers. 

And that's why, if you're an owner, who started your company, and you scale that up, you need to delegate. If you don’t do this, that’s the opposite of a good leader. And toxic leadership in academia is something we all know, right? Leadership differs in academia vs. business.     

B) Financial acumen 

Well, financial acumen helps you to look at your finances; investments, budget, forecasting, e. g. how much cash flow do you need to fuel your business and how much money can you save for future-proof investments? Without it, you will be very negatively surprised when you create and turn in your tax statement. And then you'll find out that even though you made money, that's not enough to cover all the costs. And you should give yourself a couple of months or a year’s time in order to become profitable. 

C) Strategy and business modeling

And that really goes hand in hand with financial acumen. Depending on how much money you have, you can dream bigger, or you have to be more realistic. You have to have the right strategy to think about the business model first. How big is the total addressable market? How much money would the clients pay for that? How much value is that? Your solution costs some production effort on your side. So, production is your investment, etc. And people pay for the solution and how much it is worth for them. So, you need to also be able to see pricing strategies, to think about variants of your products or your services. And that is essentially business modeling in the sense of how can you make more money based on your assets? 

And I think that goes without saying, but you should always orientate yourself on the future of work, because that will help you to see whether there are some industries or businesses thriving. That will also indicate for you, whether there is still some room you to gain exposure and to make your own product or your services in that niche, or not.

D) Marketing

To understand how big the total addressable market is, you need to do some market research and you need to do some marketing. Find out what is the sentiment of your who is your ideal customer avatar. What are their problems, try to be empathetic and to understand walking in their own shoes. Even though you think that you can serve them, their POV is more important than yours. They have some needs and problems, which they probably need to solve first because before they can attend to your product and your services. So, maybe you have some product or service value chain to accompany a given customer lifecycle.

E) IT  

To deliver that, you need to think about IT as your infrastructure to run financial reporting, delivery, email marketing etc. So, your ability to operate in a future-proof manner will be a huge asset for your own business and depending on your IT skills, this is something that you maybe need to outsource. I see my IT operating model as a strategic tool to increase the bottom line because I can save costs by using the right tools in the right manner. 

F) Operations

They don’t only comprise of an IT side, but they also apply to the execution side with people. Essentially, if you have a service, then you need to operate on that. You need to deliver the service; you need to have a customer service. You need to have a training for your customer community. 

G) Service

I want to highlight that with a really high-quality product or service, you don't need a lot of customer service. Customer service is traditionally only required when the service and the product is crap. If you have a good service or product, then the customer service is less demanded, it can be automated and you don't have to have a full-time employee or team doing that because there's not too much required in customer service. Instead, the people in the customer service could also be thinking of marketing and market research. Why? Because they are having the rare opportunity of talking to your clients and thus are able to sell (other products / services in the value chain) to them. So that they can tackle their new problems also together with you. If you have a great product or service, they will trust you also with the new problems to solve. 

H) Sales

Without sales (recurrent vs. one-time), you don't have cash flow. You need enough to fuel your own business. You have to have enough cash flow so that you can go from one month to the other and create new services or deliver your existing services in a future proof manner. Your sales history is social proof of your value for your clients and also indicates to venture capitalists that you are worth for them to invest into your company.

Final remarks & my own experience

I know that this episode has been niched down to a fraction of PhD holders and postdoc scientists who think of themselves as possible entrepreneurs. 

So, I hope that you will like this episode! If you found value in this please use the SpeakPipe or comment via my social media channels to let me know your episode-related questions! 

That would also encourage me to ask other people who have been entrepreneurs right after their PhD so that you will find other role models. I know a couple of them and also know some networks, who could also contribute in a future episode as an expert interview. 

Also, I know a PhD student who already founded her first company in her home country and will found another one soon, and I can't wait to interview her! Let us know, via the SpeakPipe, whether you are interested and what questions I shall as her!

Taken together, for me at least, it was good that I had a couple of years in different companies before I sort of ventured out and created my own company. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had the business acumen. I did not have any business acumen when I left graduate school. I learned it the hard way. I learned it from master graduate who studied business (which I hadn’t). I learned it from people without an academic degree. I learned at three different employers to be able to see what it takes to be successful in my business. It is literally no rocket science and PhD holders will be able to understand. The question really is, are you open to learn that and also will you enjoy that? 

I see some advantages of being employed. One is at least, you just have to do the job. There's only one job that you have to do and you have to excel on that and then you're safe. Granted that you chose a future-proof employer and a future-proof role, etc. Again, listen to the episode 0004 on the “Future of work for new PhD holders in business” to be able to land a job that is relatively safe.   

After all, leaping into business is hard enough. And we are rooting for your PostdocTransformation!

But I encourage everyone who leaped into business as an employee, to ask yourself, can you be also an intrapreneurial thinker even if you are just employed and it's not your job to be the entrepreneur within your company? 

Actually, this is the task of your leader or manager. But you know, sometimes you are just not lucky and your leader, your manager, your boss is not an intrapreneurial thinker and that leaves room for improvement. Because if he / she / it leads you and your team members into nowhere, then you'll probably all will lose your jobs. 

But instead, if you are able to think as an intrapreneur seeing what other services or products you should create instead of or additionally to the existing ones with your team, then you have increased your chances to stay on board when the ship of your team will be unleashed. 

That's why I encourage you to also listen to episode 0001 “check your readiness to leap out of science”.

0003 is about the “10 steps for your career transition into business”. 

And that is also associated with an email course with 10 emails on a weekly basis or you can also binge them, if you don't have enough time to leap into business. 

If you're still unsure about your potential career directions after academia, I also have episodes on reasons for staying in academia but also reasons for leaping into business. 

So, in closing, remember, you will own your PostdocTransformation, and I want you to invest strategically into your doctorate according to your vision of life. 

Thanks for your attention and until the next time!

Eleonore & Team PostdocTransformation

P. S. With our previous episodes, we just reached 4500 podcast downloads (is this good or bad, we have no idea, LOL). Let's see, whether we can hit 5000 by the end of season 3! So, we need your help! Please share your favorite episode with your PhD bestie, that doesn't have to be on your social media channels. Just text them via your WhatsApp etc. 

Why? It would encourage us to continue with our PostdocTransformation show. We have lots of content ideas for a season 4 and beyond, but we need to evaluate our Return on Invest vs. our opportunity costs as this is just one part of our business model.

We are preparing a new weekly German show for fresh (bachelor) students who need easy to apply psychology tips to improve their studies! This is also valuable for you to share with YOUR own students, if you are also teach! Let us know, whether you would also listen to that (or prefer that in English).

70% of our show audience speaks German, btw. Which is unexpected as our Instagram followers are more globally dispersed. 

Use below SpeakPipe or DM us via our social media channels about future episode topic suggestions (a. k. a. your career transition related questions). 

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