By Greg Fisher - Larry and Barbara Sharpf Professorship, IU Kelley School of Business
What do entrepreneurs do to navigate the uncertainty and difficulty of launching something new and novel with only a few resources on hand? This was the question that my co-authors (Regan Stevenson, Emily Neubert, Devin Burnell, and Don Kuratko) and I sought to answer when we began analyzing transcripts from the How I Built This podcast. We analyzed 48 such transcripts from interviews with well-known entrepreneurs such as Sara Blakley (Spanx), Perry Chen (Kickstarter), Alli Webb (Drybar) and Joe Gebbia (Airbnb) to uncover the nature of the action that they took in the early days of launching their venture.
Most academic entrepreneurship research to date has focused on entrepreneurs’ cognitions (how they think about things and make sense of what they doing), strategies (how they position their new venture) or pitches(how they raise funds). What’s missing is research that actually focuses on entrepreneurs’ actions to navigate uncertainty and overcome resource constraints. We did this research to fill that gap. From our analysis, we identified that these successful entrepreneurs repeatedly did four things:
They acted with a sense of urgency
They engaged in creative and unorthodox action
They took action with the intent to do something useful
They addressed immediate challenges and opportunities
These four things came together in a common and repeated behavior we label entrepreneurial hustle – an entrepreneur’s urgent, unorthodox actions that are intended to be useful in addressing immediate challenges and opportunities under conditions of uncertainty.
Our analysis of the interview data suggested that entrepreneurial hustle is associated with five critical aspects of entrepreneurship:
Hustle empowers entrepreneurs to generate opportunities, creating more valuable options for them to pursue.
Hustle creates and attracts resources, allowing entrepreneurs to continue to operate despite resource constraints.
Hustle facilitates learning, generating valuable insights about what is valuable for focal customers.
Hustle fosters new venture legitimacy, making a new venture seem credible and real to external stakeholders.
Hustle generates connections, expanding an entrepreneur’s network so that they can call on others to help as needed in the future.
Engaging in entrepreneurial hustle is not enough to guarantee success of an entrepreneurial endeavor. But not being willing to hustle is certain to cripple an entrepreneur. Thus, hustle is a necessary, but insufficient condition for entrepreneurial success. Hustle must be combined with many other important elements to drive success; but if an entrepreneur is not willing to hustle they are much more likely to fail.
What can you do to embrace the positive effects of entrepreneurial hustle?
1. Give yourself permission to hustle – push yourself to make things happen, to engage in action, even if that action is not perfectly planned at the time you set out to do it.
2. Operate with urgency – push yourself to make things happen quickly, recognize that you don’t have time to wait for solutions, you must urgently create solutions to challenges.
3. Be creative and unorthodox – push yourself to uncover pathways and solutions that have not previously been used, look beyond the obvious for ways to solve problems and overcome challenges.
4. Have a direction – establish a broad vision for what you wish to achieve, but be flexible in what you do to move in your intended direction.
An example of entrepreneurial hustle:
At 27 years old, Sara Blakely was struggling to make a living selling fax machines door-to-door. Twelve years later, she was recognized as a renowned entrepreneurial leader, and the youngest self-made female billionaire in history. She had no business degree and less than $5,000 in savings when she started her women’s shapewear company, Spanx. Her idea for an innovative woman’s shapewear was born after she cut the legs off a pair of her pantyhose to and used that prototype to convince a manufacturer to produce a limited run of commercial samples for her. Next, she started cold calling department stores. After an unorthodox sales demonstration that took place with a Neiman Marcus buyer in a bathroom stall, the product hit store shelves. Blakely worried that Neiman Marcus would drop the product if sales weren’t strong, so she called up everyone she knew and enlisted them to purchase Spanx off the shelf. She later mailed each of her friends a reimbursement check. Although unorthodox, these types of behaviors are not atypical for entrepreneurs as they navigate uncertainty and overcome resource constraints. These are the types of behaviors that reflect entrepreneurial hustle.
Now, Sara Blakely is helping other women hustle, with $5 million in funding through The Red Backpack Fund. They have periodic grant deadlines. So, check it out.
This research has been published in the following journal:
Fisher, G., Stevenson, R., Neubert, E., Burnell, D., & Kuratko, D. F. (2020). Entrepreneurial hustle: Navigating uncertainty and enrolling venture stakeholders through urgent and unorthodox action. Journal of Management Studies, 57(5): 1002-1036. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12584
An accessible preprint of this article can be found here
Slides related to this research can be found here