The Entrepreneurial Risks You Don’t Expect

Some risks are obvious. In our latest podcast, Paul Downs and Jay Goltz, a couple of grizzled veterans, discuss how they manage the risks they never anticipated.

Good Morning!

Here are today’s highlights:    

• It’s important for entrepreneurs to understand we all make mistakes, which is why we’ve started a new Slack channel called dumb mistakes. Josh Inglis went first.

• Minority- and women-owned businesses expect to lose billions in government contracts.

• Mexico and Europe are bracing for the trade-war fallout.

• A renowned pastry chef and cafe owner is now feeding people for free.

THE 21 HATS PODCAST

Managing the Unexpected Risks of Entrepreneurship: This week, Paul Downs and Jay Goltz talk about the risks they didn’t see coming. While everyone knows there’s a risk that a business can fail because it just doesn’t work, there are lots of other, less obvious risks. These are not the risks you lose sleep over, but they’re real, and if you don’t manage them, you can expose yourself needlessly to a slew of problems. Because most people learn about these risks the hard way, Jay and Paul set out to create a top 10 list of them, but I think—for those of you keeping score at home—we actually hit 11. Which led Jay to caution: “I by no means am telling anybody, ‘Oh my God, I don't sleep at night. I'm worried about all these things.’ I'm not worried about them. I just keep an eye on them.” Wait, says Paul, that’s another one: “The risk is that you let this thing live in your head and that it destroys your ability to focus on what you should focus on.” Okay, so that makes 12. And by all means, please let us know which ones we missed.

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