E-entrepreneurs are revolutionising everyone’s business landscape

THE E-ENTREPRENEUR revolution is coming to a business like yours and it will happen sooner than you are prepared for, if people like Glen Carlson have anything to do with it.

 

Mr Carlson is a leader in the new business of nurturing e-business entrepreneurs. His company, Key Person of Influence, has focussed since it began in London three years ago on the infinite potential of the service industry – and enabling its up-and-coming leaders.

He calls it “the entrepreneur revolution” and it comes to you from the other side of the world, or from a remote farm or, perhaps, from a suburban kitchen.

Mr Carlson is unusual in that he is one such modern-era, tech-led business entrepreneur who is actually in the business of assessing, nurturing and training entrepreneurship in others.

He describes the e-entrepreneur revolution as the third great shift in the world’s progressive culture of employment:

There was the agricultural revolution, when a man worked the land; then with technology came the industrial revolution and its multiplication of factories and machinery; and now, thanks to the internet boom, the world is in the grip of the entrepreneur revolution.

“Business used to be geographically constrained, now it’s not,” Mr Carlson said. “You can have a global business from your kitchen table.

“We live in a time when it is entirely possible to repackage and reposition our skills and expertise so that it is accessible to anyone who is looking for what you have to offer.”

Mr Carlson warned, of course, that success “doesn’t just fall into an inbox”. Just as in the physical world of small business, factors such as having the right thing to sell, an appropriate business plan, and a deep understanding of what you’re getting yourself in for all play a role.

“There is plenty to get excited about the role of tech incubators in the entrepreneur revolution,” Mr Carlson said. At age 32, he is CEO of a company that, taking its own advice, is currently spreading its influence across the globe and expects to quadruple its turnover in the next three years.

After starting and selling a series of internet-enabled businesses, mainly in the training sector, Mr Carlson and business partner Daniel Priestly founded Entrevo, an international training company operating in the UK, US and Australia. 

In recent years Mr Carlson has probably become best known as the CEO of the popular 40 week Key Person of Influence (KPI) Growth Accelerator Program, in which he and his team specialise in helping fellow entrepreneurs and business leaders become more valuable, visible and connected in their industries. /2…

“We like working with service based business owners who want to develop their skills and talents into a really great company,” Mr Carlson said. “They love what they do, and they want to be well rewarded for doing it.”

KPI helps these businesses implement global best practices through workshops, webinars, and a cloud-based learning management system which Mr Carlson said is used by prestigious schools and universities around the world. The KPI program is already operating in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, London and Tampa (Florida), with expansion to Perth later this year and plans beyond for other cities in the US and UK. 

“World-renowned tech incubators have incubated some of the most successful web companies in the world,” Mr Carlson said.

“They started in a Petri dish of leadership, mentoring and resources. Those little tech incubators have spawned an internet revolution and that has spawned its own revolution in the service space.”

Mr Carlson practically works from a laptop in Port Melbourne and the odd café around town, forgoing the need to endlessly criss-cross the globe while rolling out training courses that give birth to e-businesses from the east coast of Australia, London and the US.

He’s both passionate and savvy about being at the forefront of this revolution and genuinely thrilled as he sifts through the ideas that people present to him.

“We modelled all those things that do well with tech incubators and applied it to the service industry – doctors, lawyers, financial planners, coaches, architects, pilots, personal trainers, horse massage therapists; any one delivering a service of some kind,” Mr Carlson said.

“We are training people across 50 different industries.”

But Mr Carlson warned that even in this unprecedented era, service industry entrepreneurs still needed the fundamentals of good business, including experience in their specialised fields, to seek success.

“The thing you absolutely need is enough experience in your industry to have an opinion, and to specialise with that,” he said.

“You need existing skills, talents, expertise; a track record doing what you do – you can’t be a newbie, this isn’t some magic way to success.

“This is about taking your existing skills and expertise and packaging them, then repackaging them, in such a way that they become more attractive to people and hence a lot more valuable.

“Plus, it’s very difficult to make something successful that you don’t really deeply love. It has to be close to your heart.”

He said in an era of dramatic technological change, never has there been such potential for a person who has a great business idea and practical expertise to easily reach the hugest market imaginable, “thanks, of course, to the internet”.

Mr Carlson is the keynote speaker at a series of Key Person of Influence events around Australia this month: Melbourne February 7, Sydney February 13 and Brisbane February 28. He is presenting alongside well-known business builders Michael Micalewicz, Andrew Grifiths, Tim Dwyer and Valerie Khoo.

http://www.keypersonofinfluence.com.au/

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