Building a business is tough. It requires great determination and self-confidence. But there are unseen dangers lurking within both of those necessary ingredients.

Pride, arrogance, and stubbornness often become the siblings of determination and self-confidence.

In 1999 one of the founders of Webvan confidently faced reporters, answering questions about the company’s sweeping vision of home grocery delivery. The company had recently raised a staggering $375 million in an IPO and was valued at over $1 billion. He explained how they would continue to assemble a gigantic infrastructure spanning the U.S.

When reporters began to question “profitability” and “proof of concept”, asking pointed questions about exactly how they planned to ensure that the business would be a success, the founder chastised, “…what you have to understand, is that we are very, very smart…” This was a supreme example of pride, arrogance and stubbornness.

Webvan expanded from the San Francisco Bay area to eight U.S. cities and initiated a $1 billion network of high-tech warehouses. But considering the super-thin margins of the grocery industry, a lack of user adoption or demand, and rabid spending, the company failed to complete it’s proposed 26 city expansion. It closed in 2001, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, putting over 2,000 people out of work and dashing the hopes of thousands of shareholders.

As an entrepreneur, it is vital that you learn to balance determination and self-confidence with a healthy dose of humility and openness. Some of the best direction insight, you will uncover along the way will be the unexpected advice and feedback that will be provided from potential customers, investors, employees, vendors, or friends. Sometimes these are tough facts to face. It’s this advice that might force a change of plan or a painful course correction. But it’s that sort of insight that ultimately makes your business thrive.

Peter Drucker put it this way, “The greatest danger for the new venture is to “know better” than the customer what the product or service is or should be, how it should be bought, and what it should be used for…the new venture needs to be willing to see the unexpected as an opportunity rather than an affront to its expertise.”

Check out this great post for more information about this topic:

Success Starts With Humility

Tags: Building a Business, Business Plan, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Marketer, Marketing, Peter Drucker, Webvan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 9:43 am and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.