(Enough of gags, geeky nostalgia, linguistic obsessiveness and photos of attractive young ladies: today we’re going to have a serious post about a serious topic. So sit up straight and listen carefully.)

Recently I had a great evening at the Bangor University Management Centre, listening to a talk about entrepreneurship by Dr. Colyn Gardner. As well as being the Chief Exec of the Centre, Colyn has a long history in startups. After completing a PhD in Bangor, he worked for an American bank before founding DC Gardner in the early eighties. The company has grown to become one of the world’s leading providers of training services to the banking and financial sectors.

Since selling DC Gardner, Colyn has continued to start and run businesses in the training and outplacement sectors. To add to his credentials, he’s married to Liz Davies, the co-founder (with her ex-husband, George Davies) of Next and other successful retail ventures.

It’s difficult to give a full report of what Colyn said in a single blog post. However, he kept coming back to four central points:

1. When you get a good idea, run with it to the exclusion of everything else. One of the Colyn’s major themes was that entrepreneurship requires a high degree of immersion in your project - to the point of being obsessive about it. A corollary to this is that when a successful entrepreneur has a great idea, he’s able to recognise it as such, and has the strength of character to focus on it absolutely.

2. Don’t think you have to develop a product before you sell it. Colyn observed that understanding this is one of the key differences between entrepreneurs and ‘ordinary’ people. Most people wouldn’t dream of marketing (say) a training course before they’d written and prepared it. Colyn’s point was that by the time you’ve done all the preparation, the optimum marketing moment might have passed.

3. The people who are good at starting enterprises aren’t necessarily the best at running them. This is common sense if you think about it - getting a business off the ground demands one set of skills, but running it on a day-to-day basis demands another. Colyn made the point that few people possess both, and suggested that entrepreneurial types are often precisely the wrong sort of people to manage stable businesses.They tend to take risks, get bored easily and dislike becoming bogged down in details - not ideal qualities for a manager.

4. The time to get out is when you stop enjoying yourself. Building on the previous point, Colyn argued that the best way for an entrepreneur to spot when it’s time to hand over the business to competent managers - or sell it entirely - is when boredom sets in.

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