PR has the opportunity to embrace entrepreneurial thinking

PR has the opportunity to embrace entrepreneurial thinking

Business skills and entrepreneurship are not the same thing. Business looks at financials, spreadsheets and marketing plans whilst entrepreneurs look at finding problems and coming up with solutions. It’s the way someone thinks.

If you look at risk, for example, business will teach you how to mitigate risk and most people in business fear it. To an entrepreneur, risk is exciting, and creativity and innovation are essential. If you learn more about being an entrepreneur, you’ll learn how to embrace risk. Here’s a useful 12-week ‘How-to’ from Forbes.

Entrepreneurs love to collaborate, share and exchange ideas, even with potential competitors. Something PR is often guilty of running away from, thinking more like a business, guarding innovation and ideas.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t a job, it’s about a way of thinking and approaching challenges and opportunities. Real entrepreneurs can flourish in any sector, whether it’s government, not-for-profit or business, as a leader or an employee. Entrepreneurial thinking allows people to identify the problem early-on and present a solution. Something all businesses and organisations absolutely require.

For PR, entrepreneurial thinking is possibly one of the biggest assets a practitioner could possess. It fits with how PR practitioners have to deliver innovative and creative solutions to tell client’s stories and help build brands.

  • Being the same as everyone else has never allowed a brand to standout.
  • Diversity in PR is essential if we are to represent any business or organisation which speaks to diverse audiences.
  • Technology is PR’s best friend. Technology is the common denominator for all new successful start-ups, including developing software, data mining, algorithms etc
  • PR should be, arguably, scalable – entrepreneurs are focused on scaling their business, more rapidly, maximising productivity and delivering faster more efficient results.
  • Thinking like an entrepreneur requires a unique approach to the world and a mindset to help view the world as limitless in its possibilities for improvement, change and, ultimately, innovation. PR seeks to change something.
  • A lot of entrepreneurs don’t succeed first time. They learn and they develop as the grow. PR can apply the same thinking – when innovating with clients it may not always work out, but the learnings from that will help you improve going forward.

Business is all about building relationships. PR is the driver of building and maintaining good relationships with a business’ publics. Relationships are essential for survival and growth.

Entrepreneurs instinctively build relationships and keep growing them. Specifically, it means recognising and valuing the people who you will encounter in your business and personal life, and bringing them along with you on your journey. You have much to learn from others, just as they can learn a lot from you. As Richard Branson put it, “Other people have ideas also.”

This blog post originally appeared on my blog.

Blog post by Laura Sutherland, Founder of The PRofessionals (or PR Fest as most are calling it!) and runs Glasgow-based PR consultancy, Aura PR