Lone Wolf Syndrome: Starting a Business Alone

Lone wolf
A lone wolf in the business world needs a pack to validate its purpose.

If you’re starting a business as a lone wolf, you could be stuck there forever. Clients or employees won’t join up until they feel it is safe to do so.

Most entrepreneurs start businesses today with the belief that they have to be the leader, steadfastly breaking new ground, finding customers, and generally taking care of all the business.

After all, most of the training today is about leadership – how to think it, how to act it, how to be it.  

But it’s been proven time and time again in organizational development theory that a person with an idea is not a business. It takes at least one, and usually many, to validate that leadership. In fact the first person to join that lone wolf to validate the idea and create a pack.

This is the essential lesson from an entertaining TED video entitled Leadership Lessons From Dancing Guy, in which a lone, somewhat strange man at a gathering begins dancing and, eventually, a huge crowd joins in.

Its organizational development point is that a person with a single idea is really just a loner with a dream until someone and validates that idea. This first follower then calls on others to join up. Soon more and more join and an entire tribe exists.  

This is commonly how businesses are built in the modern age. Someone has an idea for a business and pursues it, but doesn’t get very far because he or she is really a lone wolf.

However, when that first follower validates the idea, either by joining the lone wolf or by subscribing to the business idea as a beta customer, then an organization or a business is born.

Yet much business training still concentrates on selling the idea to masses of customers before it’s been validated. Founders create a business and immediately begin trying to sell to prospects or customers.

Leadership Lessons From Dancing Guy shows that they might be much better off concentrating on getting one passionate follower on board, and only then trying to attract a crowd.

Crowds don’t follow loners, despite the general belief. They see a loner as an outsider, a non-member of the tribe, and so ignore him. Somewhere in our atavistic psyches, it’s considered dangerous to connect with a lone wolf.

But once one brave soul accepts and so validates that lone wolf, others will start to drift in as well. They see a new tribe building and want to be part of it.

How have you conquered the lone wolf syndrome in your business? Or have you?