Why I Became An Entrepreneur

I am telling this story for two reasons.
First, some of you were kind enough to ask.
But more important, there are a lot of misconceptions around entrepreneurship and one of the biggest is that people who start their own companies were born with an entrepreneurial gene.  
That is certainly true of some, but I have a feeling my story is equally representative and if it gets you to reconsider your career path in this turbulent economy, so much the better.
Here goes.
John F. Kennedy said he became a war hero because “they sunk my boat.” I became an entrepreneur because I got thrown out of my job.
The background is simple. It was a Thursday in the early 1990s, and I was about to stand up to the man who owned our publishing company. He had just issued an order that cut the legs out from under my boss, the man who ran the magazine (no, not this one) I worked for.
Since I:
a) Liked my boss;
b) Thought it was a truly bad decision,
c) Would be the person who would have to make the lousy decision work (I was managing editor) and
d) Was raised to speak directly to people with whom I disagreed (instead of complaining behind their backs) I felt compelled to say something.
I went to our owner and said “Look I understand what you want to do, and it is your candy store. If you really want to do this, I promise I will execute it to the absolute best of my ability, but it is a truly bad idea for the following reasons” and I went on for two or three minutes explaining the potential problems in detail. There really were a lot of them.
The owner thanked me for my “honesty and candor” and for having the “guts” to confront him.
“I like that in an employee,’ he told me. “I am still going to do what I want to do, but I am giving you a $15,000 raise effectively immediately.”

I went home Thursday night feeling pretty good about myself.
Friday morning, I was summoned to the owner’s office. “Paul, I’ve thought a lot about our conversation yesterday. You’re fired. You can leave right now. There is no reason to go back to your office. We will have someone pack up your stuff and ship it to you.”
I had a stay-at-home wife; two kids (ages 11 and 6) and lived in a very nice Manhattan suburb in a house that came complete with a mortgage that could, as my grandmother would say, “choke a horse.”
I would like to tell you that at that moment I said to myself “this is the perfect time to start a company.” But I didn’t. I was a “magazine guy.” All I ever wanted to do as far back as I could remember was work at a national magazine.
And  so I spent the next couple months frantically trying to land a new gig.
But even then publishing was in flux and while people offered me all kinds of elaborate contract arrangements, nobody presented me with a full-time job offer. And so, kicking and screaming I became an entrepreneur.
I didn’t have an entrepreneurial gene in my body. I had never thought about being responsible for generating my own paycheck.
But I didn’t have a choice.
And so, proving that I actually practiced what I preached, I followed the Act. Learn. Build Repeat model that we have talked about before, and created my own microbusiness.
What worked for me, could work for you, even if you don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in your body.
If you are still on the fence about starting your own company, you could try to develop something on nights and weekends.
But, given the economy, you owe it to yourself to think about it.
I wish I had before I had to.
My story has a happy ending. But I would have gotten their sooner, if I had stared working on what became my microbusiness before I got fired.
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Paul B. Brown is co-author of Just Start published by Harvard Business Review Press.