By: Bob Crutchfield

Last week I spent the weekend with my wife and three children at the Beach Club in Fort Morgan, AL.  While we were sitting under our umbrella and relaxing, I began reading a book called Jefferson’s Secrets, by Andrew Burstein.  It is a great book because it presents our Founding Fathers in a way that I normally don’t think about them.  Generally, I only remember their political activities during their public careers.

Jefferson, the author of our Declaration of Independence, was also a renowned architect, gardener, wine connoisseur, planter, inventor and writer.  He was very much a Renaissance man, following after the pattern of George Washington.  Washington was a livestock breeder, planter, grain miller and distiller of liquor, among other things.  It is hard to imagine what it must have been like during the post-revolutionary period with the effort required to gain access to information and to share ideas and concepts.  Entrepreneurship in that era was truly the result of human will and perseverance.

When Jefferson retired from public life after his Presidency, he was quoted as saying that he was going to devote his life to “reading, design and communication”.  It struck me that those are the same traits that drive today’s entrepreneurs.  Through research and study we seek to find a unique niche for a new product or service. We then work to design a business model that will allow us to commercialize our ideas, which creates form and function.  Finally, we attempt to communicate these ideas via marketing efforts that cross a wide range of mediums to reach the targeted audience.  And like our predecessors, the greater the benefit, utility or pleasure produced by these products and services, the more likely and significant success will be.

As we study early stage biotechnology and healthcare companies at 3TVM, we look for common denominators that are known to contribute to business success and positive financial results.  It is comforting to know that reading, design and communication are simple common denominators of business success that have continued to produce results for generations of entrepreneurs.