Joe Dwyer had a simple formula that he used for success when he was launching his first business; work until you drop. That is exactly what he did reports Chicago Business.
He often worked seven days a week, rolling off his chair to the cold office floor for a few hours’ sleep. That business took off, as did others in Mr. Dwyer’s early career. By age 32, he had sold his shares in one business and had sold two others outright, for a combined windfall in the millions.
Time to relax, right? “What’s the first thing I did when I quit? I started two new companies,” he recalls.
Sometimes just one isn’t enough. We call these people “multipreneurs” because for them, running one company at a time isn’t sufficiently challenging or satisfying. Over time, they acquire multiple businesses and try to make them all fly at once.
While some experts suspect the ranks of multipreneurs may be growing, there are no solid figures on their prevalence. “There’s probably just not as many of them to really get a satisfactorily significant number,” says Linda Darragh, director of entrepreneurship programs at the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship.
She points out that multipreneurs have a rich history – take Thomas Edison, for example – and with the economy in a downturn, entrepreneurship is likely to continue building. “There’s an ability now to test things very quickly. You can have an analyst check to see if people are buying it and using it, and you can switch to something else pretty quickly.”
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