What is it about garages that drives such amazingly committed environments for nascent business startups?
To give us a ground-level view (no pun intended) into this motivation, let’s explore an experience I had last week at AirVenture2013 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. For a few days, I had the good fortune to join thousands of aviation enthusiasts to sample the intoxicating world at the intersection of aviation and innovation.
At the very core of the sport aviation movement is the homebuilder with a dream of personal flight. These ordinary individuals harness this dream and spend nights and weekends in the garage building the hardware for their dream – an airplane. This is no small undertaking; finding the roughly 2,500 hours needed to build a serviceable aircraft in an average individual’s schedule is a big deal – that’s 250 weeks, or almost 5 years, for someone who can devote 10 hours a week of work to their craft.
During the event, I made it a point to talk with the finishers, those souls who have stepped up to the challenge and made it through. Now, I want to parse out and share with you what I heard from this group through the lens of what I have experienced in my own microbusiness launches. What I discovered, was that whether building an airplane or building a business, there are three recurring themes among projects that require this level of deep signup and commitment:
1. A Powerful Vision
One of the reasons the Oshkosh event is so important is that it provides a very visible goal and peer group for the would-be airplane builder/owner. I would like to build a plane like the ones I have seen at Oshkosh, where there are builders and enthusiasts of all flavors – ultralight, light sport, antique/classic, warbirds, rotorcraft and gliders. Each community meets, reinforces the vision and provides encouragement and support. An interesting and very related point is that many people develop the human relationships first, then select their projects.
Second, this is an opt-in process. A key part of the process of embracing aviation is finding the niche that is the most interesting and has an economic fit for you. This may be anything from a participant in the restoration or maintenance of a historic craft to a full-blown custom build of your own. Either way, choice is a key component in the development of deep commitment.
Garage entrepreneurs seems to develop similar structures in a more ad-hoc way. Gathering the core team almost always progresses from the lone visionary to the visionary operator team. This then gives birth to the garage activity that others opt into.
Many cities now have meetup groups of founders and inventors who get together for cross support and mentoring. These functions and gatherings are very useful in creating the platform for human relationships and opt in. An early example of this was the high school computer club that Woz and Jobs were part of that eventually started Apple Computer.
2. A chain of events/projects that connect to the vision
The homebuilder group has made big changes here over the arc of the 30 years I have been an EAA member. In the early days, people built from scratch using blueprints — they purchased basic materials and formed them into parts themselves. A huge step forward was the kit plane, which provided some pre-built componentry for the hard-to-build parts, such as important structural pieces, hard-to-shape exterior components and electronics. The latest move here is builder-assist programs that bring a builder in to work on his craft under the watchful eye of a professional airplane builder. As you might guess, this environment allows the owner to make huge progress in a short amount of time.
In the garage environment, the entrepreneur is sometimes the modern equivalent of the plans builder, using the simplest of materials and his imagination to make the product or service come to life. Recently, tools and techniques have come forward to make this process less arduous and more predictable. Included in these is the Lean Startup movement pioneered by Eric Ries, the business model generation work done by Alex Osterwalder, and the systems-level work put together by Steve Blank and others at Stanford. The analogy for the builder-assist program may well be the incubators like Tech Stars and Y Combinator that pull together entry-level entrepreneurs with serial business builders.
Disruption alert – 3D printing and the rise of the Maker Airplane may be affecting the aviation world soon…
3. Enough adversity to keep it interesting, but not so much that it kills the dream
When I spoke with those who have created their own planes, I always made a point to ask them what the hardest part was. And while the answers varied, everyone I spoke with had an area that was very challenging for them – for some it was rivets, others electronics, for some fitting the canopy. What was universal, however, was that everyone faced adversity, and when they overcame it, they were changed by it. In fact, they had more confidence and more humility in nearly equal measures.
Experienced entrepreneurs reflect this same kind of humility, confidence and resilience. When someone tells you their 15-year overnight success story, it is amazing the variety of challenges they encountered. When you have the chance to hang out with a founder that has done the full cycle – listen carefully, there are hard won lessons to be learned. One such lesson is the myth that innovation begins and ends with the idea.
Real innovation occurs in taking an idea and forging a path in the real world, with real business systems, in a sustainable way. Click to Tweet!
These three areas begin to unpack the amazing drive displayed by entrepreneurs in the garage, and give us some insight into how we might begin, in a small way, to replicate and scale it. I would be interested in your observations as well – please leave a comment below, or drop me a line.
