About the Book:
In YOUNG GUNS: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own(AMACOM 2009), Tuchman uses examples of entrepreneurs who turned a “Big Idea” into a viable business venture to assure young professionals that they too can follow their dreams by starting and succeeding in their own business.
Some excerpts, featuring quotes from Kevin Greaney, CEO of Children’s Progress:
On Children’s Progress’s “Big Idea”:
Why do some businesses fail? Why don’t they all succeed today? After all, these amazing resources are at everyone’s disposal. The answer is the absence of big ideas in the entrepreneur’s world. To get an idea of what I mean by a Big Idea, listen to Kevin Greaney, CEO of Children’s progress, a company that helps teachers and school administrators evaluate how kids are doing in the classroom:
We were already very interested in student assessment and student achievement. My partner Eugene Galanter had been doing research on those issues since 1984; I had managed several small businesses in the education field. He and I each had some strong opinions about the players who were already out there, the big publishers who controlled most of the market. They were doing their version of assessment: big, standardized, bring-a-number-two-pencil, fill-in-the-bubble tests. We knew that those kinds of tests had been developed back in 1906, and they really hadn’t changed since then. We felt very strongly that those tests didn’t really tap into the mind of the child being tested, and that they didn’t really tell the instructor much. We felt we could build a better tool. So we were pretty excited about student achievement, even before we formally started the business.
Kevin Greaney’s Big Idea had to do with harnessing technology and research to improve student achievement.
On Who Children’s Progress Intends to Help:
The chance to help a specific group of people should be one of the major characteristics of your business idea. I mentioned Kevin Greaney, of the firm Children’s Progress, in the previous chapter. Here’s what he had to say about developing his company’s mission:
We felt strongly, based on our own experience in the field, that… we knew we could develop a better, more interesting, more helpful assessment system for schools to use with younger kids, and we also knew we could give teachers more information about what kids know, what they don’t know, and why they don’t know it. We knew we could give teachers in that underserved group some insights about what they should do about that situation, when a child doesn’t know something.
On Working With the Right People:
As Kevin Greaney, CEO, explains,
…I think picking a business partner is more of an ethical and moral decision than a business decision. Somebody might have all the academic credentials in the world, or all the seemingly relevant business experience in the world, and things still might not work out. You have to have an internal sense of whether it is right for you to pick this person.
