Thanks Rob. Your, Phil’s and others’ comments are helping me to think about this, though more thinking still to do :-)

This is partly about semantics. To my mind someone who sets up one business or multiple businesses is an entrepreneur. If they are purely passive then they are an investor, but if they set up and are involved in any way they are an entrepreneur, even if it is primarily run/ managed/ built by someone else.

So this ultimately comes back to leverage (which in some cases we could call delegation). In your case it sounds like you need two people who are fully hands on in each business. For others who have set up multiple businesses, it is an issue of being able to find people who have the talent and enthusiasm to run each business. That is harder, as Phil points out in his post, as you want people who feel ownership of the idea and venture. But it is still possible.

I describe myself as ‘Founding Chairman’ of my companies. I am the founder and am an entrepreneur. But (in theory) I should not be running these companies, just helping to shape them.

I personally struggle with this issue however as our business is a start up (www.staff.com started in April last year), however we have two different parts of the business, global recruiting and a SaaS product. Related products, but I’m always trying to evaluate this question of focus.

Thanks Phil, very interesting to see your new model.

I will think about it more, but perhaps you’re right that ‘parallel entrepreneurship’ is the wrong frame for this, and ‘company builders’ is a lot more accurate. Indeed you’re not running lots of ventures, you’re providing the framework which enables the parallel ventures, each one driven by entrepreneurs.

Whatever the best way of thinking about this, I am sure this broad model – with all its manifold variations – is going to rise dramatically as an enabler of value-creating entrepreneurship.