The ABCs of how to become an exceptional entrepreneur

It has often been said that entrepreneurship is the one profession where there is no apprenticeship. It does not matter how many books you read, how many certificates you acquire, how many companies you have worked for, or who your godfathers and mentors are. It also does not matter who advises you. There is no substitute to actual practise and experience.

In as much as the advice you are getting from friends, experts and your past experiences has potential value, the crucial decision of starting a business of your choice should be yours and yours alone. Whereas you need to observe due diligence by carrying out a feasibility study to confirm or plant a mental conviction, the future of whatever venture you start cannot be predicted through research or opinion of anybody irrespective of experience or profession. This is because as long as you are not duplicating or imitating others, your ideas are as unique as you are, and their potential no one including yourself can tell until you have tried. Here are certain traits that are a trademarks of an entrepreneur.

Initiative
Once you have strong conviction about a business idea, the noblest thing to do is go ahead and implement it. Do not be discouraged by critics; as long as you have products to sell, let the customers be the judge.

Emerson in his essay on self-reliance put it correctly when he wrote that, “There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature and none but he knows what that is not which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

Safaricom’s astronomical growth that saw it become the most profitable company in East and Central African with more than 12 million customers in less than a decade baffled both critics and shareholders.

It achieved a multi-year growth projection within a few years of opening business. No one expected so many people in Kenya, where more than half of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, to spend money on expensive airtime and related gadgets.

Google, the biggest search engine in the world, was created by two Ph.D students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin working for a project at Stanford University. When they discovered the business value in their creation, they abandoned their studies to exploit it, but not without great challenges.

They started working out of a friend’s garage. With users attracted to its uncluttered design and speedy performance, Google continued to rise while many of its dotcom competitors went bust.

An entrepreneur is more than someone who just invests money, oversees or manages business. An entrepreneur must first and foremost be someone who initiates an undertaking; a self starter; willing to come out of his comfort zone and overcome his fears and weaknesses. An entrepreneur is driven by conviction and the desire to make a difference which must be greater than the challenges and risks associated with the venture.

Decisiveness and determination
Entrepreneurs are action oriented. Robert Kiyosaki wrote, “After one of my demoralizing business failures, I went to rich dad and asked, ‘So what did I do wrong? I thought I designed it well?’ ‘Obviously you didn’t,’ rich dad said with a smirk.

“The world is filled with wannabe entrepreneurs. They sit behind desks, have important sounding titles like vice-president, branch manager, or supervisor, and some even take home a decent paycheck. These wannabe entrepreneurs dream of someday starting their own business empire and maybe someday some of them will.
Yet I believe most will never make the leap. Most will have some excuse such as, ‘When the kids are grown’, or ‘I’ll go back to school first,’ or ‘When I have enough money saved.’”

Entrepreneurs do not entertain or craft excuses for not making a decision once an opportunity arises. They rise to the occasion and follow their convictions rather than procrastinate and wait for the right time.

Responsibility
An entrepreneur must accept the outcome and take responsibility for their decisions. What you get in life is a direct result of what you do. The law of cause and effect states that there is a cause for everything.

Entrepreneurs do not blame the economy, politics, cartels or some other forces that influence are predominant in business. They take personal responsibility because they believe that they have the power to make decisions that can produce the desired results despite of those obstacles.

Willingness to take risk
An entrepreneur must be willing to face risks head on. Business is naturally a risk undertaking. Some risks can be avoided by wise planning and adequate research but others are inherent in business.

No matter how much research you do or how much meticulous planning you undertake, you can not predict fully how you will perform in the market. No business is immune to failure and no investment is 100 per cent secure. In most cases the higher the risk, the higher the returns.

Persistence
Most businesses take time to stabilize and bear fruits for the entrepreneur. This is where persistence is required. It has been observed that most people give up just when they were about to succeed. Entrepreneurs have tenacity to hold onto something they really believe in through thick and thin.

Innovation
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management said, “Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practised.

Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.”

This statement underscores that entrepreneurs are born and that they are some people tailored for entrepreneurship. In my conviction, we only have fast learners and slow learners, but provided we learn what we are capable of learning based on our passion and talents, we are bound to succeed.


Kiunga is the author of The Art of Entrepreneurship. mkiunga@queenexpublishers.co.ke

ARE YOU AN ENTREPRENEUR OR A BUSINESS-PERSON?

The term business-person and entrepreneur are sometimes used interchangeably although they mean different things
An entrepreneur is a person who conceptualizes, initiates and materialize a business process which is entirely unique and original. In other words an entrepreneur is someone who starts a business from a fresh idea and makes it work or applies an existing idea differently.
Merriam-Webster defines an “entrepreneur as a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.” The key words here are initiative and risk.
A business-person on the other had is someone who start a business on an existing market platform laid by the entrepreneurs. In this context entrepreneurs are business people but not all business people are entrepreneurs.
Being an entrepreneur is a difficult task. You have to discover your way through the market and get your brand or the product established. A businessman needs to be smart and invest in an established brand at the right time to make money.
How can a business-person become an entrepreneur? By injecting freshness, uniqueness and creativity in their business.
This is because it is easier to survive tough times as an entrepreneur than as a business-person. In entrepreneurship, there is less competition because products on offer are unique and easily differentiated. You have probably heard the classic idiom, “Don’t re-invent the wheel.” Personally I believe this idiom is fundamentally flawed and grossly mis-applied in dozens of situations.
It says that if something works, it should not be changed.
Nonetheless, almost all situations, the wheel is never perfect and there are better designs, better ways of doing something. In this case it makes sense to re-invent the wheel. As Mark Twain once said, “Even if you are on the right path, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” In late 1990s Barclays Bank introduced unsecured loans, a very unique product at a time when many banks were dealing with high rates of loan defaults and non-performing secured loans.
Other banks decided to adapt a wait-and-see approach on this ‘weird idea’ . I was personally amazed when a whole sales team from the bank invaded my office with forms ready to give anyone money without collateral.
New ways
It took almost half a decade before other banks realised there was money to be made by giving unsecured loans. What is more, the security they held so dearly did not guarantee repayment. By then Barclays had grown tremendously, establishing itself within the unsecured loans niche where it has remained unchallenged.
Another example is Equity Bank. Although it existed as a micro-finance institution for close to 20 years, it only attracted national and global attention in the late 1990s.
During that time Kenya was experiencing its worst post-independence financial crisis in the banking industry with most institutions closing their countryside branches. To make profit, they had to charge customers very high ledger fees and raise the minimum account balance.
But Equity amazed both its competitors and customers. As relatively new establishment without financial expertise and muscle, it started opening branches in the very places where the big banks where shutting down. In total defiance of logic, the bank waived ledger fees and set up almost negligible minimum operating balances. Once again, the rest of the industry adopted a wait-and-see attitude.
After redefining the banking rules and succeeding, other banks followed suit. It did not invent banking, but invented new ways of dealing with customers and new services that suited the mass market. Equity lived up to its slogan, “The Listening Caring Financial Partner”, moving from business to entrepreneurship.
In his book, Diary of a Mad Businessman, Delano White writes, “Business innovations generally start within small businesses. The greatest innovations are not thought up in corporate boardrooms. They originated in dorm rooms, working lofts and basements. Creativity drives business and our society. Without the initiative taken daily by ground business owners, society would be at a standstill.”
What we need to improve our economy and our lives is more entrepreneurs and fewer business-people.
This article is derived from The Art of Entrepreneurship by Murori Kiunga.
mkiunga@queenexpublishers.co.ke