Top 5 Inspirational Documentaries For Entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, you should find time to relax and forget your business. You should spend time with your loved ones and recharge yourself with exercise. Watching a documentary, whether alone or with loved ones, is an excellent way to de-stress. Fortunately, there are a number of excellent documentaries for entrepreneurs to watch and learn from. You can use these to help you improve yourself. They are one of the easiest and most entertaining ways to learn important lessons.

1. Freakonomics The Movie.

If you only have time to watch one documentary, then this is the one. It was adapted from a best-selling book about incentive-based thinking. Six experienced documentarians and entrepreneurs set out to answer an important question; what makes people do what they do? Understanding the answer to this question can make any entrepreneur and business a successful one. The creators try and use different incentives to see if they can affect the way different people think.

The ultimate lesson to learn for Freakonomics The Movie is how to motivate consumers. By understanding what offers, what products, and what messages people are motivated to act upon, you can design the ultimate success plan. It will also help you understand your customers better. In this way, you should consider watching this documentary again whenever you are about to carry out any market research or proof of concept. You could also use the information from this documentary to manage your staff better since they are just as human as your customers.

2. The Call of the Entrepreneur.

When you are looking for documentaries for entrepreneurs with a positive message, The Call of the Entrepreneur is the answer. It provides the feel good factor you are missing when you’re having a bad entrepreneurial experience. The documentary focuses on the attributes of an entrepreneur, not least the courage to do something new and risky. It provides a merchant banker, a dairy farmer and a refugee from communist China who all found their own business as an example.

This documentary celebrates entrepreneurship and shows how entrepreneurs are not money hungry elitists. In fact, many entrepreneurs make just enough money for them and to pay their co-workers. However, without entrepreneurship society would not exist. Indeed, the first entrepreneurs were the first farmers, who changed the way food was gathered and produced. In time, this allowed people to spend less time gathering food and more time focusing on other things.

3. Beer Wars.

If you are a disruptive entrepreneur, then you will immediately take a liking to Beer Wars. Every day, all across the world, entrepreneurs are challenging the establishment, fighting a war for better quality, cheaper price or better service. It is a war which corporations are used to, but not necessarily one that they are winning. In this particular documentary, the battle is beer. One of the eye-opener lines in this documentary is, “…almost all our beer now comes from Budweiser, Miller, and Coors…”

There are many lessons that can be learnt from documentaries for entrepreneurs, and in this case, the lesson is to keep fighting. It is easy to say that the big manufacturers will crush any new brewery, but the truth is nothing can crush the spirit of an entrepreneur. The corporations have big marketing budgets and established shelf space in supermarkets. However, craft breweries can fight for one customer at a time, provide a quality product and have a brand which customers want to get behind.

4. Startup.com.

Depending on your age you might not remember a time before Internet. Even if you were too young or non-existent during the .com bubble, you could still learn a lot from Startup.com. This documentary focuses on a successful website, govWorks.com and on Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, high school friends, who set up the website. These two co-founders succeeded to create a company and make it worth $50 million in just one year.

Unfortunately, this immense success would not last. The constant disagreement between the two co-founders, coupled with the competition quickly catching up, led to govWorks.com being sold off. The founders sold off the website only two years after it was founded. This biography can help you realise how money is not everything in business. Without strong, unified leadership and constant innovation, even a big company can fail.

5. Steve Jobs One Last Thing.

There is no doubt that there are many documentaries for entrepreneurs based on the life of Steve Jobs. We chose this particular documentary for its honesty and its lack of the Hollywood hero effect. This PBS documentary includes several clips from actual interviews with the co-founder of Apple. It also provides the background behind the man who revolutionised the computer industry, the music industry, the motion picture industry and, of course, the telephone industry.

Whilst many entrepreneurs are innovators, people who make existing things better, Jobs was, for the most part, an inventor. He saw the world and sought ways to create new things. His ultimate goal was fairly simple. Every person has the ability to change the world and this is based on historical evidence. You don’t need to be the smartest, the bravest, the richest or the sexiest. You just need to start. It is a great lesson for any new entrepreneur, but also for de-motivated and experienced business leaders.

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