So, You Want To Be An Entrepreneur

If we go back to the numbers 99 per cent of businesses are small and medium, I like to suggest we flip to default and govern for the small and medium and figure out what it means for the large.

How do you think the educational system will help alleviate these challenges?

I think the educational system usually makes it worst. I think we need to change the education system so that professors teach about a small business environment as much about a corporate environment. We need more researches on small and medium businesses because that is most of the businesses in the workforce and half the assets are in small and medium size businesses.

Do you think there is a far way to go in terms of research and articles to teach students?

I think it’s coming along very nicely. There is a good body of research in the entrepreneurship field. Personally, I would like to see it spread across the other business disciplines.

Can you give an example of the other business disciplines you are thinking of?

Sure! Human resources, what does it take for a small business to hire someone? Marketing, what do you do when you can’t call down the hall to the marketing department? Economics, how many people actually understand that large businesses are less than 1 per cent of the businesses in the United States. It’s almost everything that is done in business needs to be thought of in a different way. This is not my original statement but small businesses are not mini-me’s of large businesses, they are different.

We’ve been talking about education in entrepreneurship. Now I have a few questions on what happens after students graduate. How do you think entrepreneurial programs prepare students for the expanding world?

It’s a really good question. I think it varies greatly by program. A little earlier, I said a lot of programs strictly teach by a business plan method. I think that can be expanded upon, I think if people stop thinking about entrepreneur as a type of person, am I one or am I not. What does that mean? For example, if you take Michael Dell, Michael Dell was an entrepreneurial when he started Dell. Is he still an entrepreneur? He runs a large company, is he still an entrepreneur? Or when did he stop? How do you decide that type of thing? But when you can identity what the tasks and skills are for an entrepreneur that you can do.

I think the good [programs] recognize that it’s about creating values and creating new demands. I think it helps people think about what’s possible, how can I make what I think is possible actually happen?

What do you think is the relationship between city size and a start of business?

That is a critical question. There is a contradiction; in some ways small cities need it most because what other options do they have? The old school “let’s recruit a big business to come here,” it’s ludicrous. All that gets is big companies moving from city to city. It doesn’t play to a national strength to begin with. What we often hear from people who live in small cities is that they want to find a way to create a job environment where the kids may go away for school but they can come back and have great and exciting and interesting careers and they want to live there. So for the small cities, it’s absolutely critical to figure those types of things out. For the big cities, there is a difference between what researchers call the Necessity Entrepreneurship, which is “I’m doing it because I don’t have any other choices, there are no jobs, I have to feed my kids” or what we call Opportunity Entrepreneurship which is “I have this idea, I always wanted to run my own company and I’m going to go for it.” Those are very different things, but people have to be entrepreneurial to do either one.