In today’s Globe & Mail there’s an inter­est­ing story — no, not about Con­rad Black — in the Small Busi­ness Sec­tion about the begin­nings of a startup, Torque Mar­ket Intel­li­gence. The piece is titled, “Day 1: A con­sult­ing com­pany is born,” and it promises to chron­i­cle the jour­ney over its first three months.

On the first pass, two obser­va­tions are immediate.

1. Excel­lent coup on land­ing a gig diariz­ing the whole startup in “Canada’s National News­pa­per.” I can’t think of many things they could do in the first three months to gain as much expo­sure to the mar­ket they want for as lit­tle cash.
2. The chron­i­cler, Mark Healy, really needs a good head­shot. I hon­estly don’t know a ton about this, but I can spot a bad photo when I see one. Given the first obser­va­tion, a bit of cash here would be a good idea.

Nei­ther of these is what really caught my eye when one of my cronies emailed me his high­lighted copy of the arti­cle this morn­ing, though. Of the num­ber of things I could pick up on, I want to land on the open­ing two sen­tences, of all things:

So, the first thing you should know is: we’ve done this before. Start­ing and build­ing up a pro­fes­sional ser­vices firm, that is. Entre­pre­neur­ship is like a disease—once you catch it, it’s tough to get rid of.

Well. Just last evening, a few of us (includ­ing the afore­men­tioned crony) were sit­ting at The Fyxx on Broad­way dis­cussing related matters.

Is entre­pre­neurism a dis­ease? I want to say yes. At one point in yesterday’s con­ver­sa­tion, I asked the room what career num­ber they were on… and we prompted one of the gang to include a cou­ple he’d for­got­ten. Me, I’m start­ing my third… after train­ing for one that I haven’t yet pur­sued. Dur­ing the past three months, I’ve been in the midst of a tran­si­tion away from being involved in the daily grind of a tech­nol­ogy and cre­ative con­sult­ing firm which we took from basi­cally noth­ing up to 15+ staff, build­ing a large broad­band ISP net­work along the way. In con­sid­er­ing my next career, I’m faced with the real­iza­tion that I have a dis­ease… and it’s one that will tend to make me not a very good hire in a lot of com­pa­nies. One of the symp­toms is that I will inher­ently under­stand the busi­ness too well, know­ing some of the intri­ca­cies which will appear obvi­ous to me, even if they aren’t to the prin­ci­pal. That is to say, I’ll tend to under­stand it well enough to spot a num­ber of tweaks and strate­gies that should be con­sid­ered to the busi­ness model, the processes, the mar­ket­ing and brand­ing, the tech­nol­ogy, and the HR pol­icy. Just to name a few. A lot of employ­ers, whether they are own­ers or mid­dle or senior man­agers, aren’t com­fort­able with this. To many of them, think­ing belongs in a box, and those of us who are infected with — and are car­ri­ers of — the entre­pre­neur­ial bug, are a threat to their way of doing business.

Entre­pre­neurism is actu­ally a bad enough dis­ease that once you’ve caught it, you don’t even have to be all that good at it in order to stay with it. For the truly infected, even busi­ness fail­ures (whether com­plete or just by degrees) don’t tend to put one off com­pletely, and that’s quite telling. Sure, I’ve got it, though thank­fully I haven’t had to suf­fer a busi­ness fail­ure… just set­backs along the way. Once you’re a car­rier, you’ll find that you’re largely blind to the con­sid­er­a­tion of alter­na­tive means of employ­ment, and when you brush up against those who don’t have it, they may not fully under­stand why you feel com­pelled to do what you do.

But yes, entre­pre­neurism is a dis­ease. And I’m actu­ally glad to have it… how weird is that?