Known as the first ‘American Entrepreneur’

 Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790), known as "the First American", was an American statesman.  He was a very important person in the American Revolution and in making the 13 colonies one nation.  As a leader of the Enlightenment, he influenced European scientists. He even was the first thing many Europeans associated with America at the time.  Despite his later fame as a scientist and diplomat, Franklin actually thought of himself first and foremost as a printer, all the way up to the end of his life. He was without a doubt one of the most successful printers of his time in America – and he provided an example of entrepreneurship we can learn from even today.

Qualities that made him a successful entrepreneur

 Printing is an industry with high capitalization costs, so Franklin needed support to get set up on his own.  His honesty and ambition won him the confidence of friends with the resources to fund a print shop, and his diligence and work ethic made the business a success.  In his autobiography, Franklin noted that he often worked past 11pm to get a job done, and that if necessary, he would stay overnight to redo it. In a town the size of Philadelphia, people quickly noticed this extra effort, and Franklin’s growing reputation lured customers away from his rivals.

 Even as a young tradesman, Franklin sought to improve himself and his community. He organized weekly meetings of a small group of other tradesmen and artisans, called a Junto.  At their weekly meetings they asked how they “may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?”  In between establishing a university, hospital, lending library, militia, firefighting brigade, learned society, and insurance company, Franklin and his fellow Junto members sent plenty of business each other’s way.

 Franklin, like his peers, could be relatively certain of his income from commissioned work, which included legal forms, contracts, licenses, sermons and pamphlets.  But for bigger rewards, printers had to take bigger risks, by acting as publishers. Printing, as we’ve already noted, is a capital and labour intensive industry, and so a printer who published an entire edition of a book would need a lot of capital. If he misjudged his market, he could easily be left with a stack of unsold volumes on his hands.  For that reason, printer-publishers tended to produce newspapers, one sheet “broadsides” on topical issues, and annual publications with predictable sales figures. Franklin published all these types of material, but when his calculations convinced him that his investment would be returned, he was prepared to take the risk.

 Once an apprentice reached majority (usually at 21), they became journeyman printers, and were free to leave Franklin’s shop to set up business on their own, if they could find the seed capital.  Rather than risk one of his journeymen finding the backing to become a local competitor, Franklin came up with a basic franchising idea. He provided trusted journeymen with the necessary equipment and materials to set themselves up as his printing partner in another colonial city, where there wasn’t yet a printing industry.  They paid him back with one-third of their annual profits for the next six years – and they expanded Franklin’s market penetration.

 Franklin saw the world around him in terms of how it could be improved upon, either by enhancing an existing tool, or by inventing a new solution altogether.  This translated, in business terms, to not only seeing gaps in the market, but also coming up with creative ways to plug them.  For example, Franklin noticed that almost a third of his fellow settlers in Pennsylvania were German-speakers, and promptly launched the Philadelphische Zeitung – the first newspaper printed in German in the colonies.