The Entrepreneurial Librarian

Not long after I began working as a library director, one of my customers (who later became a board member) commented to me that I was, in fact, an entrepreneur. When I expressed surprise and some hesitancy in accepting this remark she explained that my management style was one of research & survey, trial, evaluation, adjustment and trial again. This is, she explained, very much what a successful entrepreneur did when starting and growing a business. Since she held a top level position in one of the country's largest communication's companys and dealt with business customers daily, I did not question her understanding of the term.

Having been a business major, many eons ago, I chalked the use of this style up to a bit of lecture from some long forgotten class that was running like a subroutine in my brain. In the years since, I have discovered something interesting. Good public library directors, ones whose libraries grow and develop, ones who garner public support and who make their organizations a fundamental part of their community, are at their core - entrepreneurs. They use this same model to keep their business not only functioning but growing. Their businesses maintain position as a core part of their community because they are constantly meeting the community’s needs, they grow and change and are considered vital to the quality of life in the area they serve.

But not all of us are natural entrepreneurs. Not everyone sees all the pieces of the puzzle of a successfully run business. Not everyone will even agree that running a library is like running a business. Actually - It is not like a business, it is a business. And while the “for-profit” business models we read about and learn from fall apart when we try to place them point-for-point on our business, there is no reason to discard them wholly. We are a community service organization – yes. We are a public service place – yes. We are a destination – yes. We are an educational support organization - yes. But we are also a business, it need of planning (strategic, financial, succession and otherwise), a customer base and all the other needs of any businesses.

The purpose of this blog is to explore the world of the public library as a business and the successful library director as an entrepreneur. How well does this business model fit the library sector, what adjustments need to be made in our “not-for-profit” world and what can we, as library administrators, learn to help us keep the public library business growing and thriving and drawing new customers every day?