Writing Entrepreneurs

Abstract

This article presents data from an electronic survey asking 101 entrepreneurs in Wisconsin and North Alabama about the documents they write before opening and while operating their businesses, the writing skills they value, and the audiences they consider when writing. The results demonstrate that entrepreneurs highly value writing and rhetorical skills, produce a huge range of documents, and require distinctive genres at different stages of their ventures. The results can help professional communication instructors, entrepreneurship and small-business consultants, and aspiring entrepreneurs to more effectively anticipate and meet the rhetorical challenges of opening and operating a business.

Keywords

entrepreneurship business writing genres writing attitudes survey research entrepreneurship communication training

The writing of entrepreneurs remains underresearched in professional communication. While several interesting studies have examined entrepreneurial writing and rhetoric, many research questions remain. Chief among these are questions about what entrepreneurs write and how they feel about writing and writing instruction. Even experts on entrepreneurship often hold only an anecdotal understanding of the documents that entrepreneurs require in order to launch and operate their businesses. This lack of information hinders teachers and small-business consultants—such as Small Business Development Centers (SBDC)—from most effectively preparing nascent and practicing entrepreneurs for success. As a consequence, the field has neglected to capitalize on these exciting pedagogical and research opportunities, not to mention the growing resources and exposure granted to entrepreneurship in higher education.

This lack of information persists despite a skyrocketing emphasis on entrepreneurship within and beyond the academy. The last decade has seen explosive growth in entrepreneurship courses, programs, and centers at American universities, and the students enrolled in these programs represent an entirely new audience for professional communication pedagogy. These programs developed largely in response to student interest; the U.S. Small Business Administration (2001) reported that two thirds of college students intend to become entrepreneurs at some point in their careers and an Intuit Future of Small Business Report (2007) concluded that Generation Y “will emerge as the most entrepreneurial generation ever” (p. 5). In our experience, these students want to do everything from developing apps and biotechnology to opening small businesses in the service industry. Therefore, we use the term entrepreneur to indicate the creator of any new business or technology. Some scholars (Schumpeter, 1934; Vesper, 1980) preferred a narrower definition that indicates only creators of ventures that commercialize new goods, new chains of supply, or new markets (see Carland, Hoy, Boulton, & Carland, 1984, for further discussion on the distinction between entrepreneurship and small-business ownership). But we believe that the broader definition best suits a wide range of students who consider themselves entrepreneurial.

This article reports survey results designed to help remedy a knowledge deficit about entrepreneurial writing. In an electronic survey distributed to 101 participants, we asked entrepreneurs about the kinds of documents they write, how much writing they do, the kinds of rhetorical skills they value, and the kinds of audiences they consider. The results are illuminating because they indicate that entrepreneurs produce a huge range of documents and value the role of writing in the success of their businesses. By identifying common skill sets and genres that entrepreneurs need, our data can offer professional communication teacher-specific tools to interact with this important and overlooked population of writers.

This article responds to and expands on our own previously published concerns about a lack of attention to entrepreneurship in professional communication (see Spartz & Weber, in press). Despite the rapid rise of entrepreneurship research, teaching, and programs in the academy, professional communication has largely ignored this population of writers. This inattention persists despite Doheny-Farina’s (1986) call for more research into the ways that writing shapes emerging organizations as opposed to studies of “organizations that are so well established that the effects of composing on the organization may be difficult to perceive” (p. 162). Doheny-Farina contended that rhetoric operates differently in emerging organizations and that these rhetorical operations may be more visible before the bureaucracy of the organization becomes formalized. More recently, Brender (2005) has argued that “more studies are needed in the area of entrepreneurial communication because many entrepreneurs possess skills related to their own professions but lack the business communication expertise required for corporate success in a competitive marketplace” (p. 339).

The field has been slow to recognize entrepreneurial writing as a discrete rhetorical enterprise, one that often overlaps with more traditional business and technical writing but still poses its own set of challenges. Fortunately, some existing scholarship outlines the unique rhetorical needs of entrepreneurs. O’Connor (2002) argued that entrepreneurs develop a unique approach to sensemaking that permeates their work: “Entrepreneurs plot themselves and their companies. Literally, they write marketing, strategic, and financial plots for their companies; and in everyday conversation, they narrate their dreams and their plans for extraordinary professional success” (p. 37). Unlike writers in existing organizations who inherit narratives that have evolved over the history of the organization, entrepreneurs must create an overarching narrative for their venture and then align their communication efforts with this narrative. Martens, Jennings, and Jennings (2007) furthered this narrative research by arguing that entrepreneurs must use social ties and storytelling to build a resource base; in addition to constructing clear identities for the nascent firms, these narratives “elaborate how the proposed means of exploitation will attenuate risk (without providing overly complex explanations), and invoke familiar elements to contextually ground those that are less familiar” (p. 1125). This particular rhetorical need to use narrative to develop a resource base—one often built from nothing—differs substantially from established organizations’ needs to protect, develop, or extend already functional resource bases.

De Clercq and Voronov (2009) likewise identified entrepreneurship as a distinct “habitus,” one integrated within larger social contexts but requiring specific rhetorical skills. They focused specifically on the importance of credibility for entrepreneurs because “newcomers often lack the familiarity and credibility that typifies the interaction among incumbent players, their ability to carry out a venture successfully may depend largely on their legitimacy in the eyes of others.” Complicating this bid for legitimacy is the demand for entrepreneurs to frame hypothetical ideas as both plausible and revolutionary, which creates the rhetorical challenge “to manage such potentially contradictory expectations—that is, the need to ‘fit in’ and ‘stand out’” (p. 396).

Research suggests that entrepreneurial communication poses unique rhetorical tasks and challenges. By creating entrepreneurship courses and programs, many universities also categorize it as a discrete area of study, one that implies unique writing needs. But professional communication scholars still have significant work to do in understanding those needs. By developing a full-fledged research agenda on entrepreneurial writing, professional communication can extend its own knowledge and engage new students, faculty, and community populations.

Scholarship on Entrepreneurship Writing

Surveys of entrepreneurship writing are rare. Most empirical research on entrepreneurship writing looks at business planning (e.g., see Brinckmann, Grichnik, & Kapsa, 2010; Burke, Fraser, & Greene, 2010; Delmar & Shane, 2003; Gibson & Cassar, 2005; Honig & Karlsson, 2004; Karlsson & Honig, 2009; Kraus & Schwarz, 2007; Liao & Gartner, 2006; Mainprize & Hindle, 2007; Perry, 2001; Risseeuw & Masurel, 1994; Shane & Delmar, 2004). These studies use surveys and other empirical methods—including interviews and data analysis—to determine how often U.S. and international entrepreneurs write business plans and how those plans contribute to their success. Many of these studies suggest that business planning correlates with entrepreneur success. For instance, a meta-analysis by Brinckmann, Grichnik, and Kapsa (2010) found that business planning benefits ventures although the study also stresses other contextual factors that affect the relationships between planning and success. Other researchers have analyzed how entrepreneurs’ rhetorical and presentation strategies affect how venture capitalists and judges of business-plan competitions evaluate these entrepreneurs’ business plans and pitches (Blazkova, 2011; Chen, Yao, & Kotha, 2009; Clark, 2008; Der Foo, Kam Wong, & Ong, 2005; MacMillan, Siegel, & Narasimha, 1986; Mason & Stark, 2004; Pollack, Rutherford, & Nagy, 2012; Tsai & Lai, 2011). Some research has further focused on entrepreneurial use of particular documents, such as patents (Graham, Merges, Samuelson, & Sichelman, 2009), vision and mission statements (Baum, Locke, & Kirkpatrick, 1998; Ran & Duimering, 2007; Toftoy & Chatterjee, 2004), marketing documents (Hutchinson, Quinn, & Alexander, 2005), sales letters (Mustafa, Kahar, Bunari, Zakaria, & Habil, 2012), written pitches (Jones, Livne-Tarandach, & Balachandra, 2010), codes of ethics (Montoya & Richard, 1994), corporate narratives (O’Connor, 2004), and storyboards (Smith, 2011).

But we have found no studies that examine the entire range of documents that entrepreneurs and small-business owners require to launch and operate their business. Similar research about the writing attitudes, habits, skills, and documents of other professions has been conducted. For instance, Spears (1996) examined documents and interviewed practitioners to discover the writing attitudes and common genres of nurse managers. Stowers and White (1999) surveyed accountants about the level and importance of communication skills within their profession. Rife (2010) surveyed online writers about their perceptions of copyright law. Smeltzer and Thomas (1994) performed a meta-analysis to determine the writing skills, processes, and anxieties of managers. These studies on the writing practices of specific professionals inform our own research on the work of entrepreneurs.

While professional communication scholarship has often overlooked entrepreneurship (see Spartz & Weber, in press), some scholars have examined the writing done in new ventures (see Doheny-Farina, 1986, 1992; Mara, 2008; Nunally & Saad, 1993; O’Connor, 2002; Winsor, 2006). This research finds that entrepreneurs use writing and documents in complex ways to achieve a variety of goals. Brender’s (2005) ethnography of entrepreneurs found that they built on their experiences of writing one genre to write others, and as “entrepreneurs learned to write their own professional versions of business genres, they gained confidence in their ability to make business decisions independently” (p. 337). Researchers in business and management have also used rhetorical theory, narrative, and discourse analysis to examine entrepreneurial practices (Clarke, 2011; Gaddefors, 2007; Holt & Macpherson, 2010; Martens, Jennings, & Jennings, 2007; Ruebottom, 2011; Watson, 2009), demonstrating the ability of rhetorical and professional communication approaches to address entrepreneurial knowledge. Although this research provides an instructive look at entrepreneurs’ writing, it does not offer a comprehensive look at their writing needs and attitudes. Our empirical research aims to fill that gap.

Method

To systematically examine the writing and communication of entrepreneurs, we conducted field research that integrated two distinct but related efforts. This research was approved by our respective institutional review boards. First, we carried out qualitative research interviews. Second, based on findings from these interviews, we developed and administered a comprehensive formal survey to entrepreneurs in our respective regions. Our work supports that of Anderson, Brockmann, and Miller (1983), who indicated the positive outcomes that conducting research into workplace writing has for the field of professional communication: building theory, supporting curriculum design, and informing the practices and problem-solving strategies of practicing professionals (p. 10). In line with Halpern (1988), while we search to better understand and ask “new kinds of questions about how people communicate at work,” we further endeavor to offer insight about entrepreneurial writing by “suggesting incongruities or gaps between what we thought we knew and what is really the case” (pp. 38-39).

Qualitative Research Interviews

During the first phase of our study, we carried out qualitative research interviews with practicing entrepreneurs (for a detailed discussion, see Sparth & Weber, in press). Following Kvale’s (1996) discussion of qualitative research methodology, we established interviews to help us determine the types of documents, communication and writing skills, and writing tasks that are necessary for entrepreneurs to launch and operate their businesses. By conducting one-on-one interviews with business founders, we hoped to discover a variety of documents (genres) that practicing entrepreneurs consider relevant. Ultimately, we were able to interview entrepreneurs (N = 8) in a variety of industries: engineering, technology development, software, architecture, green construction supplies, bike and ski sales, professional recruitment services, and restaurant management. We asked the participants 11 questions about how they would describe their business; the documents necessary to fund, start, maintain, and grow their businesses; the writing skills they value; the education or training they received; and the advice they would provide aspiring entrepreneurs on the writing and persuasion skills necessary for the various stages of an entrepreneurial venture. We used the data from these interviews to help create the lists of skills, traits, habits, and genres included in the survey that we disseminated in the second phase of our research.

Formal Electronic Surveys

During the second phase—on which this article primarily focuses—we administered to existing entrepreneurs a comprehensive electronic survey developed using SurveyMonkey.¹ To target entrepreneurs and more widely distribute our survey, we developed relationships with SBDCs, business incubators, and entrepreneur groups in southeastern Wisconsin and Huntsville, Alabama, by meeting with stakeholders to discuss our research and plans for moving forward. Using their membership lists, the directors of our regional entrepreneur groups disseminated our survey to entrepreneurs, accompanied by a letter or e-mail calling members to assist with our endeavor. Drawing on the resources in our local and regional communities provided our research with the needed, embedded ethos that comes from these entrepreneur-related groups,² and we were able to survey more than 100 entrepreneurs (N = 101).

Survey Participant Information

Our participant pool (N = 101) represented a variety of successful entrepreneurs, 85% of whom had reported being in business for more than 1 year, with 40% of those having been in business more than 10 years. It included 34 females and 65 males, with age-groups ranging from 18 to 21 (n = 1) to 65 and over (n = 8), the largest group (n = 34) falling in the 45 to 54 age-group (2 participants declined to answer age and gender questions).³ Of the 96 entrepreneurs who reported the location of their business, 45 were headquartered in an urban setting whereas 32 and 19 reported suburban and rural locations, respectively. Although the size of these entrepreneurs’ businesses varied, the majority reported owning stage-one businesses employing between 0 and 9 people (n = 73), with 24 entrepreneurs owning stage-two businesses employing 10 to 99 people. Only 4 participants employed over 100 workers. The majority of these business owners (n = 71) reported an annual revenue of less than $1 million whereas 30 reported an annual revenue of more than $1 million. Only four of these entrepreneurs’ businesses are publicly traded, two of these generating less and two more than $1 million in annual revenue. Our participant sample was quite diverse and fairly representative of the spectrum of entrepreneur types and experiences in our regions. Despite soliciting responses from this diverse population of practicing entrepreneurs, we make no claims that our sample represents either the general populous of entrepreneurs or even all entrepreneurs in our respective regions. As such, because we employed nonprobability convenience sampling methods, we detail data from our participants holistically to offer an illuminating snapshot of the writing needs and habits of a sample of working entrepreneurs. That is, when analyzing our data, we identified no marked or substantial differences between subgroups (regional, business type, size of business, etc.), so we do not distinguish between subgroups when reporting our data here.⁴

Survey Content Information

The survey itself comprised five sections: background information, writing training or education, documents for opening a business, documents for operating a business, and writing traits and habits. Table 1 lists the questions from each section that generated our data. While we were able to gather responses from 101 participants, several skipped a question or two.

Table 1.

Formal Survey Questions.

Survey Section	Questions Analyzed	# of Responses
Writing training/education	What type of writing education or training have you had?	99
Documents for opening a business	What documents/texts did you need BEFORE opening your business?	95
Documents for operating a business	What documents/texts do you use in the operation of your business?	95
Writing traits and habits	How important are well-written documents to the success of your business?	88
	How important were the following writing skills in developing your business?	94
	How beneficial would improving the following writing skills be for your business?	94
	Who does most of the writing in your company?	93
	How often do you consider each audience when writing?	94
	How confident are you in your abilities to write the documents necessary to fund and maintain your business?	94
	How confident are you in evaluating your audiences’ reactions to the documents you produce?	93

Ultimately, we used the resulting survey data to examine our research questions related to document types and the writing attitudes, skills, and habits of entrepreneurs. While we collected data from all 25 survey questions, those listed in Table 1 are the most salient for the purposes of this article. Using descriptive statistical methods, we analyzed the means and percentages of the data generated from these 10 survey questions.

Results and Discussion

In this section, we detail select, relevant results of our survey (e.g., we omit much of the demographic data) to adhere to our twofold intent of alerting the field to the complex needs of writing entrepreneurs and providing professional communication instructors with tools for engaging entrepreneurs. Specifically, we report and discuss results in the following three major areas: writing attitudes and habits, writing skills and audience considerations, and document genres.

Writing Attitudes and Habits

Our survey asked several questions designed to measure practicing entrepreneurs’ attitudes regarding their on-the-job writing. Specifically, our questions were aimed at determining the importance of written documents in emerging businesses, the confidence that entrepreneurs have in their own writing abilities, what writing these entrepreneus do, and how often these entrepreneurs write. The results of these questions indicate that the participants feel that writing is a necessary part of effective entrepreneurial performance.

Figure 1 charts the results for the questions regarding document importance and participants’ writing confidence. These results characterize the degree to which the participants value documents as integral to their businesses. The data demonstrate that these practicing entrepreneurs (n = 88) greatly value writing, with 90% of the participants rating on a Likert-type scale well-written documents as either very important or extremely important to the success of their businesses and only 3% reporting that documents are not very important. These results suggest that entrepreneurs consider effective writing to be an essential component of entrepreneurial success. Although our study did not measure the effect of communication on business success, entrepreneurs overwhelmingly see writing as enhancing the performance of their business. These results align with other studies that have correlated effective communication practices with greater resource acquisition and improved business and entrepreneurial performance (Baum et al., 1998; Baum & Locke, 2004; Gassenheimer, Baucus, & Baucus, 1996; Leonard-Barton, 1984).

Figure 1.

A chart of the survey results for the questions concerning the importance of written documents and participants’ confidence in their own writing abilities.

The implications of these results are numerous. Entrepreneurship and business students could greatly benefit from seeing practicing entrepreneurs’ attitudes about the importance of writing. By exemplifying writing’s significant role for entrepreneurs, our data might encourage students to pursue courses in professional communication that further develop the skills necessary for carrying out tasks of practicing entrepreneurs. These results might also help instructors and program administrators sell the importance of their writing courses across campus (see Shaver, Bowles, & Beemer, 2009) and to community consulting services such as SBDCs and regional business incubators.

Besides valuing writing as part of their businesses, our participants (n = 94) expressed a fair amount of confidence in their own abilities to write the documents necessary to build and maintain their ventures. As shown in Figure 1, a mere 3% expressed a lack of confidence, with 62% being either very confident or extremely confident in their abilities to perform the writing necessary at various stages (i.e., prelaunch and operation) of their ventures.

Not represented in Figure 1 but also noteworthy, entrepreneurs (n = 93) expressed considerable confidence in their ability to evaluate audiences’ reactions to documents, with 78% of the participants reporting that they were confident (30%), very confident (37%), or extremely confident (11%) and only 7% expressing that they were not confident. But these confidence levels were noticeably lower than their confidence levels for writing ability (see Figure 1). This result suggests that professional communication instructors might make their courses more valuable for aspiring entrepreneurs by focusing on rhetorical strategies designed to gauge audience needs and responses to texts.

As shown in Figure 1, the participants regard themselves as capable, competent business writers. These data contrast with those gathered in the initial interview phase, in which several entrepreneurs conveyed frustration about their writing skills and indicated that they lacked the confidence and skills necessary to write as effectively as they wanted. The survey result of participants’ strong confidence in their own writing ability may be linked to several factors: Because most participants do their own writing and spend a substantial amount of time doing so, they have accumulated significant on-the-job writing experience. Furthermore, these findings may reflect limitations of the population sample; the participants we surveyed were all successful entrepreneurs currently operating their own businesses, so the results likely reflect their increased confidence and competence as compared to aspiring entrepreneurs or those whose ventures never succeeded. This limitation precludes any conclusions about the writing confidence and attitudes of less successful entrepreneurs. Moreover, because the participants chose to respond to our survey invitation without any incentives, the population may also represent entrepreneurs with an above-average interest and ability in writing and its role in operating a business.

Not only do our surveyed entrepreneurs find well-written documents to be important to their business and express confidence in their own writing abilities, but they also do their writing in-house and spend a fair amount of time doing so. Figure 2 charts these two trends, with participants (n = 93) reporting that they either complete the writing themselves (72%) or have another employee—either a writing specialist (5%) or not (15%)—write the necessary documents. In fact, only 2% of the participants reported hiring outside writing or communication specialists to do their company’s writing. Participants responding in the “other” category (5%) indicated that they used a collaborative approach or that they split the writing responsibilities with their partners or other relevant stakeholders.

Figure 2.

A chart of the survey results for the questions concerning who does the writing and how much time is spent writing for the company.

Likely because these business owners find it valuable, have confidence in their abilities, and are doing the writing themselves, the participants reported spending a considerable amount of time writing per week. Excluding e-mail, the bulk of our respondents (83%) reported writing for their businesses either 1–5 hours (48%) or 6–10 hours (34%) weekly. Notably, 8% of surveyed entrepreneurs write for 20 or more hours weekly. These numbers are similar to Anderson’s (1985) finding that a large percentage of writers (38%) spend at least 20% of their time writing. But based on these data, entrepreneurs may write slightly less overall than do members of other professions. Mabrito (1997) reported that manufacturing supervisors spent 8–14 hours per week writing, Ede and Lunsford (1990) found that technical and business professionals spend 44% of their time writing, and Sageev and Romanowski (2001) found that engineers spend an average of 32% of their time writing.

Clearly, the entrepreneurs in this study do a lot of writing and find it integral to their performance throughout the life of their ventures. These results indicate a distinct demand for writing-centered courses in entrepreneurship curricula (either in higher education, SBDCs, or other training programs) that respond to the recognized need of this previously unidentified group of writers. As a field, professional communication is uniquely positioned to help prepare and train our local and regional business owners.

Writing Skill Results and Audience Considerations

Our survey asked a group of questions related to the writing skills of practicing entrepreneurs. Figure 3 charts the results in response to two questions. The results for the first question, “How important were the following writing skills in developing your business (1 being unimportant, 5 being extremely important)?” indicate that our participants (n = 94) highly valued a wide range of skills: All eight skills received an average rating higher than 4 (very important) on a 5-point Likert-type scale. Of these skills, establishing credibility appears to be most highly valued, receiving an average of 4.55 whereas writing clearly followed closely behind with a 4.52 average. While still distinguished as very important with a 4.13 average, organization received the lowest rating of the listed skills, which might be attributed to the terminology being less clear to participants than were the terms for the other seven skills. Participants’ interest in this set of communication skills suggests that entrepreneurs perceive writing as a tool for advancing the interests of their ventures.

Figure 3.

A chart of the survey results for questions concerning the importance of and benefits to improving certain writing skills.

Although these entrepreneurs expressed considerable confidence in their writing abilities (see Figure 1), this finding should not be interpreted to mean that practicing entrepreneurs are not interested in additional writing education because the majority of the participants reported that improving a wide range of writing skills would benefit their business. In responding to the second question, “How beneficial would improving the following writing skills be for your business (1 being not beneficial, 5 being extremely beneficial)?” participants (n = 94) again gave the lowest rating to organization but that was the only skill that received a rating lower than 4 (very beneficial). As shown in Figure 3, writing clearly garnered the top rating with a 4.28 average, with writing persuasively (4.19) and establishing credibility (4.18) rated just slightly lower.

Another notable result of our survey is the degree to which these practicing entrepreneurs exhibited a clear appreciation for writing for specific audiences, indicated by their overall average rating for level of audience consideration of 4.27 (very important). Figure 4 charts the types of audiences they find most important to consider when writing. Their responses reflect an emphasis on client/customer-specific genres: In response to “How often do you consider each audience when writing (1 being never, 2 rarely, 3 sometimes, 4 often, and 5 always)?” on average, participants reported considering prospective clients/customers (4.49, often) and current client/customers (4.47, often) the most often. Of the audiences our participants rarely or sometimes consider, shareholders (2.10) and investors (2.17) received the lowest average ratings, likely due to the low percentage of enterprises started with investors (21.3%) as compared to those that are self-funded (70%).

Figure 4.

A chart of the survey results for the questions concerning audience consideration (n = 94).

Document Genres

To uncover the specific types of writing that entrepreneurs conduct, we generated lists of document genres that entrepreneurs used both before opening a business (35 genres) and while operating the business (51 genres). The two lists include 19 overlapping genres (for a full list of the identified genres and their frequency of use, see the Appendix). Figure 5 highlights some distinct differences that we found in the participants’ reported use of these overlapping genres (e.g., business plans are used by 68% of respondents before opening and 54% while operating their business). Of the genres that participants reported using both before and after opening their entrepreneurial venture, most of these genres were used by more participants while operating their businesses than before opening it, with the two exceptions being the business plan (13.7% more use before opening) and market analysis (10.5% more use before opening). Only permit applications were reportedly used by the same number of participants during both venture phases. The level of difference varies considerably for many genres, with proposals having the largest disparity, with 46.3% more participants using this genre while operating their business (72.6%) than those using it before opening the business (26.3%).

Figure 5.

A chart of the participants’ writing-genre use before opening and while operating a business. Note. * indicates sections of the employee-manual genre.

While business plans are common projects in entrepreneurship course work, our previous research suggests that other documents and rhetorical situations are underemphasized in entrepreneurship programs (Spartz & Weber, in press). Our data illustrate that while teaching the business plan is obviously important to entrepreneurs—it is a foundational document for venture planning and seeking financial support—a singular focus on this written genre is insufficient for entrepreneurship education; entrepreneurs do more writing and produce more genres than what the existing entrepreneurship research typically suggests. Entrepreneurs may also produce a greater variety of documents than do writers in established organizations (see Couture & Rymer, 1993, for a review of research on the genres that writers typically produce). The sheer number of identified document types at both venture stages indicates that a more robust recognition and understanding of common entrepreneurial documents could help entrepreneurship and writing instructors. With this broadened knowledge, professional communication educators can plan projects that prepare aspiring entrepreneurs for a wider range of composing and rhetorical tasks.

One of the most notable findings of this study is that the purposes of the document types tended to shift after a business opened and was operating. That is, the documents clearly moved from being strategic documents in the before-opening phase to being audience oriented in the operating phase of the business. While the shift in purpose, or genre type, is not especially surprising, it demonstrates that entrepreneurship writing education should consider not just foundational and strategy documents but also operating documents, such as service descriptions, manuals, and proposals. Nascent and practicing entrepreneurs alike might find an instructional focus on operating documents extremely beneficial. While typical resources such as SBDCs and Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) provide prelaunch writing assistance for new businesses, they offer limited writing and communication guidance for operating a business. Professional communication instructors and programs are uniquely positioned to help fill this void in entrepreneurial education.

The participants reported needing and using a number of genres specifically for customers or clients (see Table 2). These entrepreneurs indicated using a greater number of such genres for operating their business than for opening it although they reported using 10 of those genres during both phases of the venture. In total, our participants reported using 11 genres targeted specifically toward clients or customers before opening and 22 document types while operating their businesses. Of the 10 overlapping genres, only 2 were reported as being used more prevalently at the prelaunch stage—company blog (30.5% vs. 12.6%) and surveys (28.4% vs. 13.7%). The participants’ reported use of the remaining eight genres exemplifies their shift toward a focus on customers after they began operating their business. Letters was the genre that participants reported using the most often while operating their business (70.5%) with 43.1% more participants reporting that they used letters while operating their business than did those reporting that they used letters before opening (27.4%). Another often-used genre is the contract. While contracts are used at both venture phases, 37.9% more participants reported using this genre while operating their business (67.4%) than needing it before opening (29.5%) their business. Although we could have drawn more comparisons if our survey had listed all the potential genres after both the before-opening and the while-operating questions (see Appendix), we instead used the results of the initial interviews to help determine what genres belonged in which category. The participants’ shift toward using customer- or client-centered documents for operating their business and their articulated interest in further developing audience-related skills align with the rhetorical focus on audience-analysis skills emphasized in our professional communication classes.

Table 2.

Client-Specific or Customer-Specific Genres That Participants Needed Before Opening a Business and That They Used While Operating the Business.

Genre Needed Before Opening a Business	Percentage	Genre Used While Operating the Business	Percentage
Client-Specific or Customer-Specific Genres
Service descriptions	30.5	Service descriptions	57.9
Company blog	30.5	Company blog	12.6
Contracts	29.5	Contracts	67.4
Product descriptions	28.4	Product descriptions	50.5
Surveys	28.4	Surveys	13.7
Letters	27.4	Letters	70.5
Advertising copy	20	Advertising copy	30.5
Marketing collateral	20	Marketing collateral	31.6
Service guarantee	3.2	Service guarantee	17.9
Thank-you notes	3.2	Thank-you notes	37.9
Business description	62.1	Company Web page	77.9
		Fliers	43.2
		Facebook page	36.8
		Personal biography	33.7
		Press releases	33.7
		Fact sheet/one sheet	32.6
		Newspaper/online advertisements	32.6
		White papers	26.3
		External newsletter	22.1
		Twitter feed	21.1
		FAQ	17.9
		News/magazine articles letters to editor	10.5

Note. The gray area (top half) indicates overlapping genres.

A final point that is relevant to both professional communication instructors and practitioners is that the participants reported a subset of genres that require more than just linguistic skills. Of the varied genres used by these business owners, several surfaced that we consider to be visually intensive. Eight document types ranging from business cards (used by 70.5% of the participants before opening their business) to a company Web page (used by 77.9% while operating their business) demand rhetorical skills beyond linguistic (see Figure 6). The only overlapping genre is marketing collateral, which is used by 20% of the participants before opening and 31.6% while operating their ventures. This emphasis on visually intensive documents echoes Brumberger’s (2007) finding that writers devote a significant portion of their workplace writing time to composing visual genres.

Figure 6.

A chart of the participants’ reported use of visually intensive genres.

Our proposed expansion of genres and rhetorical situations, then, should also include a focus on these visually oriented genres and composing skills because the data demonstrate that entrepreneurs require a wide range of visually dominant documents. Professional communication’s emphasis on visual rhetoric, document design, and decision architecture efficiently translates to teaching entrepreneurial rhetoric in that entrepreneurs clearly need to be effective visual communicators and craft a host of documents that require esthetic sensibilities and approaches.

Conclusion

This study has addressed a significant gap in professional communication research about the documents that entrepreneurs write and their attitudes about writing. Our data provide both a concrete depiction of the multiple genres that entrepreneurs need and more abstract information about how they perceive their writing and rhetorical tasks. That is, our data provide a picture of how entrepreneurs write on the job: They write regularly, producing multiple genres and composing a lot of documents themselves. And the data show that these entrepreneurs value writing and the numerous traits that make writing effective. Our picture agrees with previous research that identifies entrepreneurship as a unique rhetorical situation involving high stakes and a huge range of documents often written by a single author or team. This understanding of entrepreneurs and their writing attitudes, practices, skills, and genres has been largely overlooked in both business and professional writing scholarship.

Still, much research about entrepreneurship writing remains to be done. Another survey similar to this one could be replicated on a larger scale within a specific industry (e.g., software start-ups) or across cultures. Ethnographic studies like Dohney–Farina’s (1986) could continue to observe entrepreneurs as they write and make rhetorical decisions. Collecting data about how entrepreneurs develop their writing skills as they grow their businesses or about the ways in which writing skills affect venture success would be informative. And research could also investigate how entrepreneurs employ in their writing the training they received from college courses and entrepreneurship support centers such as SBDCs; it could further consider how writing instruction for entrepreneurs could be improved in the university setting and beyond.

We hope that this study will be useful to the various stakeholders helping to prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs, including universities, business schools, SCORE and SBDC consultants, and the local and federal government. This preparation only becomes more important as the number of young, aspiring entrepreneurs grows. As more academic entrepreneurship programs and centers emerge to help entrepreneurs achieve success, professional communication instructors can offer valuable instruction in neglected genres and rhetorical tasks. Such instruction will involve teaching the mainstays of rhetorical and professional writing theory and practice as well as curriculum specifically catered for entrepreneurs. This study demonstrates the importance of writing to entrepreneurship and provides possible documents, audience considerations, writing traits, and rhetorical skills that can be emphasized in the classroom.

Footnotes

Appendix

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: $500 Penn State Research Development Award, Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona.

Notes

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