Can You Create An Entrepreneur?

In layman's terms the best way to understand what an entrepreneur is, is to consider the self-employed flower seller on the side of the road waiting for passing traffic to buy her flowers.

She only graduates from being self-employment to entrepreneur when she contacts all the hotels, wedding planners and funeral planners in her area to secure bulk contracts for supplying her flowers, and then looks to enter the export business of selling dried flowers to Europe or China, and takes a portion of her profits and invests it in something that will provide her passive income in time.

Governments, education departments around the world are paying far more attention to entrepreneurship education. It is being introduced into school curriculum's and policy is being molded around encouraging and promoting small business.

So what is the fuss all about? Do we even need entrepreneurs or an expanding small business sector? And are you not borne an entrepreneur, and surely you can't create them? It's something that happens naturally, or not?

Well if you look at what prestigious tertiary institutions have to say on the subject, like the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, it quite clearly identifies:

'One of the most important findings is that potential entrepreneurs lack the mindset and skills to become true entrepreneurs.' GEM South Africa, 2006.

Looking at this, it is quite interesting to consider that if you believe entrepreneurs do in fact create innovative solutions to solving problems both as intra-preneurs, inside large corporations, and through the small business sectors in terms of job creation and growing the economy in general; and if like me, you believe that we could do with a far more successful, dynamic small business sector in our country, steered by highly capable forward thinking entrepreneurs, and most importantly you agree that to create more successful entrepreneurs is through creating the necessary 'mindset and skills', then we have a major breakthrough!

I am not trying to simplify the wheel of creating more successful entrepreneurs, of which 'mindset and skills' are just two cogs - but just for a second allow yourself to dream. Just for a second, think of the possibilities of creating the correct mindset, like the flower seller, imagine if she understood her long-term goal.

If we were able to allow the creative juices to flow by implanting similar long-term goals in our young learners, where they understood the possibilities and had a clear idea of where they wanted to go, in simple terms. Isn't having the end point in mind half the battle won?

Then we just have to make sure the other cogs in the wheel such as skills, support and access to finance are provided. Imagine for a second this started at a Primary School age where not only are they learning the appropriate skills, but that they also understand, like the flower seller, where they want to get to.

Catch up soon....

The author, Gregory Bunyard, studied for his BCom at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa where he majored in Business Administration and Industrial Psychology and thereafter obtained an MBA from the Edinburgh Business School in Scotland. He has worked in Johannesburg, London and in the USA and has travelled the world. He is very much an entrepreneur himself - currently consulting in the investment and service sectors, as well as developing 'The Ka-Ching! Business Parenting Course'.

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