Entrepreneurs Are Born, Not Made!

Melanie Veness:  PCB CEO

I am passionate about trying to address unemployment - both from a socio-economic perspective and from a fiscal sustainability point of view.  So how do we make a difference? Obviously, we can either choose to try and stimulate existing business in order to create jobs, or we can try and help create new businesses.

In this respect, our Chamber has embraced two projects - we will host a LEAN manufacturing congress in October in a bid to help existing business to become more efficient and therefore more competitive (and hopefully expand), and secondly,  we have launched our new SMME Desk in partnership with ABSA to asist small enterprises. 

In order to avoid making mistakes that have already been made, we've spent some time trying to unpack why existing SMME interventions don't seem to be making much difference with regard to the survival and sustainability of small businesses.  According to Wikipedia, Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, which can be defined as "one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods". 

I think that a large portion of the failure of current programmes can be attributed to the assumption that anyone can be an entrepreneur. I would argue that this is definitely not the case. It takes a very special kind of person to be a successful entrepreneur. According to SMME expert Bill DAlessandro, successful entrepreneurs are non-conformists, are motivated by achievement rather than money or power, have a preference for innovation and a high uncertainty tolerance.  Entrepreneurs are not risk averse, they are gutsy and they are tenacious to a fault. They are reactive, quick thinkers and they are "do-ers".

The question is, can you teach someone to be a non-conformist? Can you lecture on uncertainty tolerance? No – entrepreneurs are born, not made. Research suggests that you cannot become an entrepreneur – you ARE an entrepreneur. 

Sure, entrepreneurs need a wide range of business skills to make their businesses work - HR, marketing, finance etc, but it is not enough to teach people these skills. If they don't have the personality traits to make them successful in the first place, then the training isn't going to make a blind bit of difference.  As a friend recently pointed out, wearing designer clothes doesn’t make you successful any more than standing in a bathroom makes you a shower.

So if entrepreneurs are born and not made, why do we offer entrepreneurship support? The support is not to create new entrepreneurs, but to cultivate and enhance the entrepreneurial spirit that already exists in people. There are important entrepreneurial skills that must be learned – the ability to see and articulate a vision, opportunity identification, team leadership and motivation etc.

We can conclude that while entrepreneurs are born, they need certain skills and training to be succesful. In other words, entrepreneurs have inherent personality traits that drive them to succeed, but they may need a set of learned skills to enable them to apply their natural gifts effectively.  In terms of support programmes, it is fair to observe that the selection of a suitable candidates is possibly more critical than the delivery of the support.

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