Entrepreneurship is tough but fun

Weekender
BUSINESS
South Australian serial entrepreneur David Bartholomeusz facilitated the entrepreneurship programme at the Adelaide Business School.

By THOMAS HUKAHU
DO you one day want to run your own business?
Do you want to one day focus on what really interests you, rather than getting instructions from someone else?
Then you may want to learn something about business and entrepreneurship.
That could help you create a good plan and invest in it to make your venture successful.
In the past two months, I was fortunate to have been involved in programmes that allowed me to study concepts in business and entrepreneurship from experts here in Adelaide, South Australia.
So, from this week onwards I will share with you some things that I have learned to possibly help you learn a few key concepts in business and entrepreneurship.

My interest in business

As you may have noticed already, I have some interest in all sorts of subjects.
One of my interest areas is economics as related to business and entrepreneurship, if not the practice, at least the concepts behind how they are successfully managed.
I often tell people that my goal in Grade 11 was to major in economics in university, possibly because my father was managing shops for Burns Philp, which was a major retailing and wholesaling company back then in the 1980s and 1990s.
Back in the late 1980s, I ensured that in Grade 11 I was among the top students in economics in Aiyura National High School.
However, my course advisor in Grade 11 advised me to study science (biology, chemistry and physics) instead of majoring in economics, saying that I had very good marks in the science subjects and should study those.
“You can always study economics or business later if you want to,” the deputy principal of the school, and course advisor at the time, told me. “Studying science gives you more options to choose from after you finish Grade 12.”
He was right in saying that.
Even now, after having completed university study programmes in science/mathematics, education and even media, I can possibly take up a study programme in business or entrepreneurship to get back with my plan decades ago. (That is a possibility.)
Furthermore, studying science and having an interest in business and entrepreneurship has enabled me to understand and follow avidly the development of new technologies in the world.

Business and entrepreneurship

It is often the case that many people use the terms business and entrepreneurship (or businessman and entrepreneur) together.
The two are related but are not the same.
The website digitalmarketingdeal.com tells us that: The businessman is the owner of a specific business who doesn’t create any new idea of business but follows the old trends of the occupation. They only govern the business which they occupy.
“An entrepreneur is a person who creates business. He is a man of high intelligence and creativity.
“He uses his mind in inventing a new product and launching it in a market.”
So, that means, if you want to run a PMV bus service in your local area or open a trade store, you are a business person.
However, if you want to present to people a new app to help them organise their day-to-day activities better, then that is entrepreneurship.
Being involved in business uses existing models of making money, while entrepreneurship involves new ways of doing something, and putting a price tag on them.
In entrepreneurship, people often talk about a start-up, meaning establishing a business.
A start-up for an entrepreneur involves more risks than for a businessman who is starting a venture by using well-known and existing models.
You should keep those concepts at the back of your mind as you continue reading the rest of the article.

Advantages of being in business

You may have known already that business and entrepreneurship are important, not only to individuals who are involved in them but also to a nation.
Here are some reasons why people go into business and entrepreneurship.
Firstly, they become their own boss. They do things that are closer to their personal goals than taking orders from an employer.
Secondly, like small and medium enterprises (SMEs), their aim is to make a profit. And if they are successful, then they have more money to spend on things they want, or support causes they believe in.
Thirdly, they solve problems for clients. That is the essence of good entrepreneurship. They must identify a common problem and design their enterprise to solve that problem and put a price tag on it.
Fourthly, as an employer, the business provides jobs for people. This is of great benefit to a society or nation.
Fifthly, businesses pay taxes to the government as well and that can help the state provide better services to its people.

Signing up for the ThincLab programme
Earlier this year, I noticed that the Adelaide Business School of The University of Adelaide was running a short entrepreneurship programme through ThincLab, the school’s start-up community.
ThincSprint (or Sprint-6) is a four-week programme that helps participants investigate their market segments and problems.
It aims to help identify their minimum viable product by engaging solution strategies and key metrics to remove barriers.
The short course, which is run at Nexus 10 along Pulteney Street, teaches participants through face-to-face and online workshops, online resources to develop a Lean Canvas Model.
The Lean Canvas Model is like a business plan designed by entrepreneurs to identify problems and challenges, and strategise to create and sell their products.
Each selected participant paid $200 to learn in the short course.
Fortunately, students of the university (like me) and its alumni, if selected, were not required to pay the fee.

Interesting from the start

The first meeting was the induction session on Feb 22.
The successful participants who were selected, including me, the only Pacific Islander, introduced ourselves to the others after the two lecturers (Eloise Leaver and Zrinka Tokic) welcomed everyone.
The group included working professionals who were doing their own side hustle, something done outside their normal working hours.
A few were undergraduate students at the university who were already thinking big ideas and were knowledgeable about business concepts, with a number of them coming from the computer science discipline.
I met a European woman who joined the programme to see how she can get her team in a non-governmental organisation to move forward with their plan.
I learned things not only from the facilitators but also in getting to know some of the participants and their start-up ideas.

Key pointers in the first session

In the induction session Tokic congratulated us the participants from taking up the program and making time available to learn.
She stated that the entrepreneurial journey was tough, but still filled with fun.
She encouraged people to be hungry in their journey to start up something but reminded them that they must be responsible and committed.
“Your start-up is your journey, it is your responsibility,” Tokic said.
It was clear in that session and in others that when someone is working on a start-up, the success or failure of the venture will depend on that someone.
There is no boss or manager who will cop the blame when the start-up fails.
The start-up person will cop the blame.
That was a key take-away point.

An entrepreneur talks
A week later, we, the participants, returned to Pulteney Street and the guest facilitator was Australian serial entrepreneur David Bartholomeusz.
During that session and the next, I learned that Bartholomeusz could have spent his years as an academic but then saw that entrepreneurship was closer to his heart than writing research papers and lecturing university students.
What he taught us were completely new concepts.
As a participant said later, that whole-day session on March 1 was enough to help many participants on their entrepreneurial journey because Bartholomeusz was someone who lived and worked as an entrepreneur and not theorising about academic concepts. (The latter sessions in the 30-day programme were to finalise a Lean Canvas Model.)
Bartholomeusz welcomed all the participants and said they were a chosen few.
“You are that one out of 100 people who want to create jobs for other people,” he said.
“To be an entrepreneur, you do not need to be smart, but you must be resilient.”
He also reminded the people that they should be responsible for their venture.
“Growing your business is your job, not ours,” he said.
It was clear that the entrepreneurial journey must be taken seriously and an entrepreneur must be willing to put in the time and effort to see that the journey is successful.
There will be no manager above or staff below the entrepreneur to take the blame if something goes wrong.

A start-up is like a scientific test

I will end this article with one of the most interesting statements that I heard about a start-up.
If any participant did not understand how different a start-up was before Bartholomeusz’s session, I think that became crystal clear afterwards.
What the entrepreneur said was: “A start-up is like a scientific test. You design an experiment and then go out and perform the test.”
Coming from a science/maths background, it was clear to me.
A test could be a trial and error experiment.
You come up with a hypothesis so you design an experiment to verify the proposed theory.
If your results show that your hypothesis is wrong, you go back to your desk and revisit your theory and come up with another experiment.
Then you go out and test that again.
According to Bartholomeusz, that is a true start-up.
It was clear to me that a start-up demands that the entrepreneur needed more guts than most people. S/he must design the experiment and actually go out and perform it.
And, a failure is part of the learning process.
Failure to prove a hypothesis is progress, it is not failure in itself.
The four-week duration for the ThincSprint programme was sufficient for participants to draw up an experiment with their business ideas and develop a Lean Canvas Model.
In real life, if the plan is not successful, the entrepreneur will have to start another four-week programme, possibly with a new product, and use develop another Lean Canvas Model to test the hypothesis.
That is the essence of what serial entrepreneurs do.
When a hypothesis is verified, that would mean the business can now increase production and possibly broaden their targeted markets.
Bartholomeusz also mentioned that often an entrepreneurship may be a partnership between two people, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple.
Jobs was the business mind of the firm while Wozniak was the inventor who tinkered in the lab to create new products.

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