I think absolutely a PM can be a successful business owner/manager. It's important to remember though that in making that transition you'll be less a Project Manager and more a Functional Manager. As an entrepreneur your projects never really end as you always need another one starting before the last one finished.

And while PM's touch on almost all aspects of management, as an entrepreneur the full responsibility for those areas are now yours.

On the flip side, the PM's training and experience of keeping his/her eye on all the moving parts serves the new business owner well. I think it's actually easier for a PM to become an entrepreneur than the other way around. We already have the experience of managing under pressure and deadlines.

I will be unpopular with the answer. I think the role you're fulfilling at the moment hasn't much to do with achieving a success as an entrepreneur. Project management is no different here.

Being an entrepreneur is a very complex job to do. And it's all about what you don't know and how you're dealing with these gaps in your knowledge. You can be perfect in managing projects but how about sales, marketing, finding great ideas, getting funding, recruiting administrative staff etc? As a PM odds are you're not a very good specialist at development or system administration and you may need to recruit these people too. You have to deal with all these (and many more) somehow.

To answer the question directly PMs can be great entrepreneurs but they aren't more suitable to run businesses than any other roles. People with different experience would just have their gaps in different places.

And yes, I have tried it a few times in different configurations.

I have to agree with Trevor. Being a PM provides you with extra tools and forethought that is often left out when starting a business. Time management is key to any new startup. Sitting down and developing a schedule of what needs to accomplish helps provide a new startup with some direction. Also, PM's are forced by trade to think of all aspects of the startup. What are the risks, how can those risks be responded to correctly, what has to happen next and what does it effect down the road.

Starting a new business is a daunting task and takes planning. Now this is not saying a non-PM is incapable of doing this they do PM work without knowing it. Everything is a project; a PM just knows how to look at as such.

Rob

I think there is some commonality in the skills you use as a PM and those you would use as an entrepreneur or business manager - all those skills that you use to coordinate a team to focus on achieving a goal.

Starting up a business might be considered a project, but running a business is different; I think it's even more than a continuous series of related projects. The part outside the project is understanding the market your business is in and creating strategies to compete in that market.

Project Managers (at least in the projects that I have been involved in) get involved after the strategies have been created - sometimes even after the objectives for a project to execute that strategy have been outlined.

Now... that said, if you have been around long enough you'll have seen a number of successful projects that just didn't work because the underlying strategy was just wrong. As an experienced PM you might eventually start thinking "I could run things so much more successfully" - I haven't made that transition myself, but I am close to people who are employed by poorly run businesses and I definitely get the feeling that I could do better. You might feel that way too and if your PM experience has helped you learn from other people's mistakes you may be right. Even so, I think you would find yourself using a very different skill set much of the time.

As an anecdotal reference... I know of two good Project Managers who own restaurants. One is by all appearances successful, the other unfortunately was not.

Linky, I think you summed it up nicely in your comment. There is one more dimension that I'd add. This comes from Seth Godin's latest book, Linchpin.

In it he quotes Steve Jobs as saying: "Real artists ship."

The ability of a good project manager to set a deadline, complete a deliverable and ship-it by the deadline can be the crucial difference between a successful entrepreneur and someone who just has an idea.

I do not think there is any value trying to correlate a PM with entrepreneur qualities, no more than doing so for a CPA, MD, JD, master electrician, etc. I am sure there are some skills that are quite transferable, but being a strong PM does not make a strong entrepreneur or vice verse and any correlation found is purely coincidence.

I will agree with Pawel here unfortunately. I've tried to start a few businesses on my own between full time jobs, and am doing the same again now.

My skills as a PM haven't really helped me as an entrepreneur. It's really like apples and oranges because entrepreneurship just takes so many new skills that I've had to completely learn on my own. Any commonalities between the two are incidental.

The nice thing about that though is, you may be pleasantly surprised to find out you already possess entrepreneur skills and are great at it!