Global Entrepreneurship Week

Zinhle Sokhela:  PCB Director

This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week.   It is a dedicated period when people throughout the world celebrate those qualities that are associated with the entrepreneurial spirit.   It is worth considering that this festival has captured the imagination of the world and now it is celebrated by over ten million people in more than a hundred countries where at least forty thousand events will be held.    All of these will be geared towards either raising the flag for entrepreneurship or encouraging people to become entrepreneurs.    The Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of KwaZulu-Natal has been responsible for arranging an event in our province for the first time.   It is a competition called Umbono and involves candidates presenting their business plans to an audience.  Preliminary rounds have been held, and the final is scheduled for Friday 19^th November.  

I want to comment, firstly, on the concept of entrepreneurship.   We use the term incorrectly in this country by referring to anyone who starts a business, or thinks of doing do, as an entrepreneur.   This loses the real meaning of the word.   It is related much more to attitudes than to specific actions.    Thus, some people who start businesses are not true entrepreneurs for they do not have the range of qualities and attitudes that set entrepreneurs aside.    A true entrepreneur is a business bungee jumper.   He or she is attracted by the excitement and inherent danger of what he or she is going to do.   The achievement of a successful jump will earn a high level of excitement, related in no small measure to the risk that has been involved.    This is the essence – the attraction of risk.   It is for this reason that a person who is given funds, say by the National Youth Development Agency, to start a business is not entrepreneurial.   It is not that person who is making the investment and taking the risk, but a remote agency.  If the business fails and the money is lost, there is no significant loss to the aspirant business person.   But if a person stands to lose money him or herself, this is a different state of affairs altogether.   It will be a strong motivator to persist in the face of adversity, and if the goal of success is reached, it will be as exciting as achieving in a dangerous sport.   True entrepreneurs make a lot of money, but they also experience failures.    Being creative and innovative carries the risk of failing with a bad idea.    Sir Richard Branson, perhaps the most famous of all entrepreneurs, knows all about ideas that did not fly.  Fortunately, he came up with enough good ones to allow him to remain unaffected by the bad ones.   His empire has been built on out-of-the-box ideas.   He did things that conservative business people thought were impossible, such as challenging the established airlines, for example.   He knew that if one were to do the same thing as lots of others in the market place, it had to be done either much better or differently.  

This is my second point.   I remember a group of young people attending some sessions that the Chamber held to tell people about business.  They were asked what kind of businesses they would like to start.  Very few came up with anything unusual.   It was a time when the Church Street Mall area had an abundance of hair salons.  Yet every second person said that she would open a hair salon.   This tendency to imitate is one of our greatest weaknesses when it comes to the establishment of new businesses.   People give little thought to the consequences of over-trading and forget the competitive nature of business.    The best business idea has not been thought of by anyone else before.  Or, if you have to enter the market where there other players, your product or service must be delivered better than anyone else is able to do, or it has to have subtle differences that will attract customers.    Very often, people who start businesses believe that they can capture the market by lower prices.  In reality, however, price is not usually a significant differentiator between products.  The reason for this is that it is extremely difficult to produce a product or service cheaper than anyone else can.   The costs tend to be fixed, unless the entrepreneur finds a revolutionary way to reduce them.    It all comes back to  creativity and innovation.

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