We stress the importance of engineering personal goals and aspirations into entrepreneurs’ business models. This includes both financial goals (income and wealth) and personal non-financial goals.
A profile of an entrepreneur at Career Journal shows how one entrepreneur found the balance she was seeking between work and family.

In a culture obsessed with profit and growth, how do you curb the growth of a successful start-up to preserve time with your spouse and new baby?
For Brenda Thompson, who started the business of her dreams only months before having her first baby, the answer is to ignore the siren song of expansion and keep the business small. Her story shows how taking the long view can pay off.

The interview with Thompson is worth a careful reflection by any start-up entrepreneur. She is honest about the upside and the downside of the career path she has chosen.
(Thanks to John Russell for passing this along).

If you have spent any time in Nashville you have probably heard of the Bluebird Cafe, the iconic music club founded by Amy Kurland back in 1982.
After twenty-five years, Amy decided it was time to exit her business. From the Tennessean:

Amy Kurland, who started The Bluebird in 1982 as a gourmet restaurant, is selling the now-legendary club to the Nashville Songwriters Association International. The group promises not to change a thing.
“I wanted to retire, but I didn’t want The Bluebird to go away,”‘ said Kurland, 52.

Amy could have sold the club for a lot more money than she did. But, money was not the only kind of wealth that Amy created in her business. She measured her success as much in terms of her ability to create a venue to help launch the careers of struggling songwriters and musicians as she did by the income and wealth that her business generated for her.
Instead of selling to the highest bidder, she sold to a group that would forever keep her vision alive. That is clearly the act of a good entrepreneur.
The list of now famous artists who got their start at Bluebird is unprecedented in the music industry: Faith Hill, Trisha Yearwood, Garth Brooks, Josh Turner…. the list goes on and on.
My first experience with the Bluebird Cafe came while I was being recruited to work at Belmont University. The Dean took me to the Bluebird to give me a taste of what Nashville had to offer. Immediately I was taken back to my college days in the 1970s. Ann and I loved to listen to coffeehouse musicians — singer songwriters just like the Bluebird hosted night after night. (A note of trivia: I tried my hand as a coffeehouse musician a time or two in those days). I was hooked.
We now get season passes every year to go to Bluebird on the Mountain. Bluebird teamed with Vanderbilt University to offer a monthly Bluebird songwriters night under the stars on top of the nob (that is what we call big hills that are not quite mountains here in Tennessee) where Vanderbilt has their observatory. It runs from spring through fall.
Thanks, Amy. Thanks for having the courage to start Bluebird, and thanks for having the courage to insure it will stay the Bluebird now that you are moving on in your life.

We are finding more and more young women being drawn into entrepreneurship as a way to gain more control over the balance between family and careers. This article at the Wall Street Journal shows that is it not just the Moms who are seeking this type of lifestyle balance.

Interviews with men who stayed home with their children for several years, and are now looking back on it, paint a different picture. While much attention has been paid to at-home mothers who opt out of the corporate rat race for good, many at-home dads are quietly doing the same thing — finding flexible alternative work. And while the adjustment can be rough, some of these men discover at-home parenting marks a permanent turning point toward better life balance.

Amy Lynch has an interesting post at her site about Generation Y workers (or as I call them the Entrepreneurial Generation). She is a consultant on Generation Y — yes, it seems we need consultants on this generation….
From her site:

Millennials grew up during an era of extreme informality. Polite behavior and face-to-face skills are not a given with this group. Even when they want to be polite, be a valuable employee or provide customer service, they may not know how. Furthermore, they grew up communicating by computer, so they may miss the nuances of your body language or tone of voice that could tell them when they’re doing something that isn’t up to standard.
So the question is, how do you distinguish Millennials who have no interest in or incentive to work (and whom you cannot continue to employ, at least not at this stage of their lives) from those who are simply behaving Gen-Yishly and need coaching rather than firing?

(Thanks to my colleague — and fellow Kentucky Wildcat fan — Lori LaBleu for passing this along).

For those of you in the Middle Tennessee area, I will be giving a talk today on the new book that I co-authored with Mike Naughton, Bringing Your Business to Life: The Four Virtues that Will Help You Build a Better Business–and a Better Life, which is part of our Good Entrepreneur Project. The book is scheduled to be released next summer.
I will be talking at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Nashville at 6:30 p.m.

There is a perception that that small businesses pay much less and are as good to their employees as are large corporations. The latest data from the SBA tells us that the low pay is not exactly true — small business pay is up to 90% of that paid by large businesses. And the just released list of top small businesses to work in from the Wall Street Journal and the non-profit Winning Workplaces shows that they are at least as good to their employees.

While each company is very different, we encountered some common themes: These small businesses tend to let employees at all levels make key decisions, and they groom their future leaders from within. They offer generous traditional and untraditional benefits (how about a six-week sabbatical?). And they constantly hunt for new ways to improve the employee experience or engage employees.
And many share a sizable slice of their profits with employees, teaching them to read company financial statements so they grasp how their job is connected to the success of the organization.

These small businesses set a high standard that any small business owner should aspire to achieve. The article offers compelling profiles for each small business on this list. These offer a road map to help entrepreneurs build truly good cultures for their employees.
If you think your business or one that you come in contact with should be on this list, you can nominate them for the 2008 list here.

My column this week in the Tennessean encourages entrepreneurs to translate their ethics and values into concrete actions in their businesses.

While business ethics is getting much more attention in the press, in the boardroom and in the classroom, I am concerned that our definition of business ethics is sliding into a legalistic world of rules compliance.
Whether it’s in everyday life or in the business world, we have to be careful not to boil morality down to a simple list of don”s that serves as a checklist of how to be ethical.
Business ethics should so much more than a list of rules to follow. It should be a much broader set of standards of how we treat one another..

I had the pleasure of giving a guest lecture today based on our new book, The Good Entrepreneur (co-authored with Michael Naughton from the University of St. Thomas). It is so affirming that today’s students are looking for more out of their business than simply cash. Don’t get me wrong — they want to be financially successful! But they also want so much more out of their lives and view an entrepreneurial career as a path to reach all of their goals in life.
In our discussion today we talked about the question: “Who is the good entrepreneur?”
Traditional entrepreneurial virtues have been thought of in terms like ambition, ingenuity, diligence, perseverance, tenacity, and self-discipline. While these virtues are necessary for building a financially healthy and successful venture, they ignore the fundamental purpose that leads many people to become entrepreneurs.
When we survey entrepreneurs and ask them how they define success in their businesses they will include things like building a certain type of culture in their businesses and creating good jobs for people in the same breath as building profits and wealth. Building a culture that reflects our intention of how we want to treat employees, customers, and other stakeholders in a way that is consistent with our core values requires that we broaden how we define entrepreneurial virtues. It does not mean that the traditional virtues listed above are unimportant or irrelevant — quite the contrary. They are necessary to create a financially successful business. But they are not sufficient to create what we call a truly good company.
Being a good entrepreneur challenges us to think about the virtues that define our character. Character forms with each act and each decision we make in our business. It is formed by the opportunities we choose to pursue, who we choose as business partners, who we hire, our product and market decisions, and how we engage our local communities. Every business decision or action we take, no matter how small, can shape this character.
The executives at Enron did not wake up one morning and suddenly decide to cheat their employees and shareholders. In all probability their actions were the culmination of a career of actions and choices that shaped who they became as people, which dictated how they would act when it came to the big decisions that led to that company’s demise.
We choose to look at entrepreneurship in our book from the classic cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage and temperance.
Prudence refers to being good stewards of the resources we pull together from others to build the business. We understand the obligation we have to those who give us their money, their labor, their business, and ultimately their trust. The good entrepreneur does not take that trust lightly.
Justice refers to treating people fairly. For example, if our employees help us create profits and wealth, it is just to find ways to share that with them be it through compensation, profit sharing, phantom stock, stock options and so forth.
Courage doing what is right in spite of the added risks and challenges that this path in life creates.
Temperance is understanding that we are more than entrepreneurs. We are spouses, parents, friends and citizens. We need to take actions that lead us to be good in all that we do. That may mean that we temper our ambitions to make sure we have time for family and friends.
So who is the good entrepreneur?
The good entrepreneur is intelligent and technically competent. She is a good steward of the resources and gifts she has available. She is prudent.
The good entrepreneur builds strong relationships in his family, with employees in his business, and in the broader society. He does this by being just.
The good entrepreneur overcomes obstacles in building her company, but does so without ever compromising what she knows to be truly right. She does this with courage.
The good entrepreneur moderates his work ethic with rest. He does this through temperance.
I will be writing more on all of this as our book comes closer to being released next year by Regal Books.

There is a book that I have been meaning to read that I saw reviewed in our local paper here in Nashville. I have not had a chance to read this book yet, and usually I don’t write about a book until I have read it. But, the concept behind this one caught my attention. The book’s title is RUT Management: Discovering Adventure in the Routine of Life. It was written my local writer Mark Cornelius. Here is the abstract from Amazon:

The Answer’s Been Right in Front of You the Whole Time! Most of us travel well-worn paths with the expressed mission of breaking out of the RUT. It seems to be the right thing to do on the surface; who wants to think of themselves as being in such a routine that they can not, should not, dare not veer off the trail? And You Thought “Escape” Was Your Only Option! Not another self-help book, RUT Management is a fun but truthful look at the very human tendency to pursue distraction rather than maintaining the focused pursuit of long-term goals and dreams. This work addresses the constant conflict between “convention” and “change” in our lives. It examines RUT development, RUT anatomy, RUT relationships, and RUT management as tools for navigating the path through RUTs, and for DISCOVERING ADVENTURE IN THE ROUTINE OF LIFE.

When I was a full-time entrepreneur, my life often seemed like constant chaos. One thing that stands out in my mind from this period was how precious certain routines in my life were to me.
The weekly trip to the riding stable with my daughter. My daughter and I sang or whistled the same silly songs every time we drove through the country on the way to her riding lesson. I stood at the same place along the same fence during every lesson, and marveled that such a little girl could control such a gigantic animal.
Going to church with my family. Our son was the one who made sure we went to church every week — even when we were on vacation. Whether we were in the mountains in North Carolina, or in the middle of Florida, come the weekend, he would always ask the question — Where are we going to go to church? I have to admit that it occasionally crossed my mind to skip church, especially on vacation, but I was always snapped back to the reality of the importance of this routine in our family life together.
Eating dinner at the table. This was the routine that my wife created for our family. We began every evening meal with a prayer — the same prayer every time. And then the conversation would always begin with the same question from me — What was fun today? The kids would then tell us about the little things and the big things that happened in their lives.
Friday pizza with my partners. Every Friday at lunch, my two partners and I closed the door to the conference room and shared pizza. The staff knew not to disturb us. Did we plot grand strategies for the future course of our business? Every once in a while we would. But mostly, we shared each others’ company, traded funny stories, and talked about our families. It was the one time each week that the three of us always would share the fellowship of a meal.
I could not agree more with the premise of this book — get in a rut!

My column this week at the Tennessean is on rest and vacation:

Rest. Entrepreneurs can never seem to get enough of it. Vacations. Not a word that is in many entrepreneurs’ vocabularies.
According to a study just released by American Express Small Business Monitor, about two-thirds of small business owners find it stressful balancing their personal and business lives. Yet true rest and real vacations are essential not only for the entrepreneur’s personal health but for the health of the business.
So how do you build a business that allows you to create balance in your life?

You can find the entire column here at the Tennessean.