Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a Roger Hamilton event in London: Entrepreneur 5.0. Roger is the creator of Wealth Dynamics, Founder of the Entrepreneurs Institute, GeniusU, Entrepreneur Resorts and a multitude of other businesses all designed to support and advise entrepreneurs. Since I know many of you are also entrepreneurs, I thought you might be interested in some of the many lessons I took away from this inspiring event.

Society 5.0

Humanity has thus far evolved through 4 distinct phases in our time on the planet. The first three phases were the hunter gatherer (society 1.0), agrarian (2.0) and industrial (3.0) ages. The information age (society 4.0) began in the 1970s and continues to this day. The way that we interact, learn, travel, communicate and do business today would be largely unrecognisable to someone from the 19th century. The evolution from society 1.0 to society 4.0 has brought about great economic progress but it has also created a wave of social problems from societal division to environmental crisis. Society 5.0 is a concept coming out of Japan positing that we are on the cusp of a 5th ‘age’ in which a combination of AI, sensor technology, social reform and robotics will empower society to promote both economic development and find solutions to social problems.

Entrepreneur 5.0

At every stage of society’s evolution, leaders have had to learn new skills and new ways of doing business. Just consider the progression from Richard Arkwright and Henry Ford to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. As the information age evolved, we saw a new type of entrepreneur come into being: the online entrepreneur, creating virtual businesses that now dominate the internet. According to Roger Hamilton, we are now seeing the evolution of Entrepreneur 5.0. As we move from the age of binary (yes, no, black, white) to the quantum era of infinite possibility: the “superhuman entrepreneur” will focus on real-world businesses that are deliver insight, impact, income, high tech and high touch.

Focus on vision

The future is ours to create. And yet everything about our education and socialisation teaches us to focus on the past. To learn from past mistakes. To look at our progress to date and use that as a predictor of where we will be in 5 or 10 years time. Roger Hamilton argues that we need to stop relying on our ‘memory muscle’ and start developing our visionary imagination. Forget the past. Envision the future, your end point, and work back from there. The past constrains you. It traps you in the same consciousness that created your current experience and challenges. His advice: whenever you catch yourself thinking about the past and allowing that to inform and shape your thinking: stop. Thank your memory for sharing that information – then forget it and focus on  your imagination and your future.

From funnel to cycle

Entrepreneurs in the information age are constantly chasing after business. They use funnels to capture as many passing prospects as they can. Entrepreneur 5.0 creates cycles – self-perpetuating, self-improving, automatic cycles that generate income and operate in a constant state of flow. The idea is based on the concept of the water cycle in nature. Step one in creating a cycle is to make it rain – capturing the attention of sufficient followers that they will then feed into the next stage of the cycle automatically which then feeds the next stage and so on, round and round in a loop. The key principles to making it rain are, according to Roger Hamilton:

1. Love your customers: don’t just know them – understand and love them.
2. Make it ‘eye to eye’ personal – your communications with them need to be in the first person, based on your understanding and love for them as individuals
3. Currency is king – not financial currency, currency in terms of relevance and timeliness.
4. Make heroes not victims – never position your customers as victims. Yes you’re helping them to solve a problem but they are not weak and incompetent.
5. Inspire them enough to share – the decision to share must be automatic, a ‘no brainer’.

Unicorns vs Zebras

We’ve all become used to talking about unicorn businesses – but 5.0 entrepreneurs will be aiming to create zebras not unicorns. Zebra businesses are interested in sustainable prosperity and fostering
community and collaboration. Their focus is on quality: quality products, quality services and delivering quality experiences. There is no ‘pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’ in a zebra business. And the ultimate measure of a zebra business’ success is not customer acquisition. The measure of a zebra’s
success is their customers’ success. The question is how can I contribute the most value not how many customers can I bring on board and how cheaply?

I have tried to summarise an entire day in just five lessons. Clearly there were many, many more and I hope that you will see those lessons coming to fruition as Actually evolves into a 5.0 business. I’ll be putting together a webinar on what I have learnt so if you’ve not already joined our community, sign up here and you’ll get all the information about that webinar when it’s ready. In the meantime, for anyone interested, I’ve included some links below about society 5.0.

Sara Price

Founder, Actually

May 2019

Additional reading

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/the-future-of-humanity-and-the-world-of-technology-society-5-0-6e4dd5952bae

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/02/japans-society-5-0-initiative-is-a-roadmap-for-todays-entrepreneurs/

https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/society5_0/index.html

https://www.globaljapan.world/article/japan-leads-world-in-education-for-society-5-0/