CNBC Business | Finding the X Factor

Finding the X Factor

CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick considers what magic ingredients make an entrepreneur 

What makes a successful entrepreneur? Family background? Certain personality traits? The ability to survive on four hours sleep a night?  And can an individual’s business talent be recognised at an early stage? In other words: is there an entrepreneurial X Factor? 

When you quiz successful business people on how and why they have reached their position, it quickly becomes clear there is a whole variety of qualities and circumstances. 

Take Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of EasyGroup, which owns the ‘Easy’ brand and licences its various branded ventures, including the airline. While Stelios (as he insists on being called by everyone) continues to successfully extend the brand into several areas – including hotels, telecoms and personal finance – he acknowledges that dumb luck played a significant part in his early career. Luck that he just happened to have a multi-millionaire shipping magnate father. 

If you have no luck to fall back on, there’s always timing. Take Sir Martin Sorrell, who left the comfort zone of a top job at world number three advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi in 1985 and set up with “two blokes in one room” to create WPP, now one of the world’s largest ad agencies. Sorrell says being one of the oldest people in the kindergarten that is the advertising business, may have actually been helpful. “In 1985 I was coming up to 40 years old, a dangerous age because you look back at the first 20 years and then you look at what you might achieve in the next 20 years.” 

Sorrell believes that budding entrepreneurs need to propel their Eureka! moments with a willingness to think globally, to enhance technology, pick up a language or two and, above all, to be mobile. According to Barclays bank, business start-ups for 2008 were at near-record levels – with the UK alone seeing 435,000 – which suggests that the current downturn will be a golden period for tomorrow’s household names. 

At CNBC, we have a vested interest in entrepreneurs – if they are making money it is good business for us. If entrepreneurs have environmentally sustainable business concepts too, it is good for everyone on the planet. Therefore, CNBC has linked up with Munich-based insurance giant Allianz to identify and reward entrepreneurs who have ideas that could lead to a greener future. We want to find the next Shai Agassi, whose Project Better Place focuses on a transportation infrastructure based on electric cars, or the next Joachim Luther, Germany’s “godfather” of solar power, or the next Hylton Murray-Philipson, the man currently generating the first rainforest bond from a London office. 

Agassi took the leap out of corporate life: “I started looking at what I was doing at SAP and I said that it doesn’t really change the world.” And maybe that’s it. For some people, climbing the greasy corporate pole just doesn’t feel good enough. It’s the leap into the unknown that really hits the spot.

The search to find Europe’s next great ‘green’ entrepreneur is underway. A new competition, called The Good Entrepreneur, is looking for budding entrepreneurs across Europe with a green idea or business plan for a product or service. 

The competition, which is the result of a partnership between CNBC and Allianz, closes on 31 July. Three finalists will feature in a CNBC TV series that will be broadcast across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia in the autumn. 

The winner of The Good Entrepreneur will be announced in the series finale in November and will receive a prize package worth more than €250,000, including cash, exposure and free advertising on CNBC, business insurance and consultant advice from Allianz. 

Get more details and enter online at www.goodentrepreneur.com