An Entrepreneur Can Be Made as well as Born

The following essay is by Mr Kian Petit, the secondary school winner in

the Young Business Writers Award, which is sponsored by Ericsson, orga-

nized by Dublin City University and supported by The Irish Times.

The term “entrepreneurship” has become very fashionable over the past

decade. It is associated with enterprise, small businesses and job creation.

High-profile entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Gillian

Bowler have become well-known media personalities.

Small business has become an important engine of job creation and

the European Union had taken a particular interest in encouraging a

higher rate of small business start-ups. The general work climate has

become less secure, leading more people to consider the option of self-

employed or contract work. Within Ireland, attitudes towards enterprise

are changing, and government policy is now geared towards giving more

incentives to would-be entrepreneurs.

The term “entrepreneur” has its origins from the French word entre-

prendre, meaning to undertake something. Entrepreneurs were viewed

as people undertaking risk.

Cantillon (1755), an Irish businessman living in France, was the first

economic commentator to identify an entrepreneur as a person who

takes on uncertainty in the hope of making a profit. He observed that

some traders “buy at a certain price and sell at an uncertain price, and

those who cope with this are the true entrepreneurs.

John Stewart Mill (1862) described the entrepreneur as a bearer of

risk and supervisor of business enterprise. He introduced the word en-

trepreneur to the English language, using it to refer to an individual who

founded a business.

Many studies have tried to analyse the psychological make-up and

personality of the entrepreneur. The most widely known psychologi-

cal theory is that entrepreneurial behaviour is the result of a need for

achievement.

In the Irish context, a study by O’Connor and Lyons, contained in

the book Modern Management – Theory and Practice for the Irish Stu-

dent, found that the most common personal traits among the entrepre-

neurs they surveyed were: a strong self-image, a need for control and in-

dependence, a need for achievement, calculated risk-taking and seeing

money as a tool to achieve aims rather than an end in itself.

Generally, the entrepreneur has the following distinguishing charac-

teristics: the ability to recognise an opportunity; the ability to marshal

resources in response to an opportunity; and the ability to undertake

risk, which by its nature implies being willing to live with the conse-

quences of failure.

Dr Michael Smurfit, the highly-respectful and highly successful Irish

entrepreneur, once said: “I must, I can, and I will.” Any other attitude is

doomed to instant failure, he said.

Richard Branson is a good example of someone who possesses the

above characteristics and is perhaps one of the world’s best-known en-

trepreneurs.

There are two Richard Bransons: the public man is informal, friend-

ly, idealistic, happy-go-lucky, attached to his family, guided by strong

principles and concerned to improve the society he lives in.

The private man is a ruthlessly ambitious workaholic, a hard bargai-

ner, an accountant with an instinctive feel for minimizing the losses on

each new venture, and a gambler who prefers to put his assets at risk every

day rather than retire to a life of luxury on what he has already made.

He is an empire-builder who keeps the inner workings of his busi-

nesses secret.

And where did it all start? At 44 Albion Street, Shamley Green, Sur-

rey, where a 17-year-old Branson, out of school and looking for some-

thing to do, established Student, a student magazine, and his very own

record company selling records from the local phonebox. From there,

many years of diversification later, he has his millions his mother told

him he would get as a child.

I believe that one can be taught the criteria and attitude to be an en-

trepreneur at any age. Richard Branson’s childhood was full of parental

observation and in his autobiography he tells us of tests set by his parents

even before the age of 12, when he was woken early in the morning and

told by this mother to cycle to Bournemouth, which was 50 miles away.

Even at the age of four, Branson remembers his mother stopping the

car on the way home and telling little Richard to find his own way back

through the fields.

On the other hand, Michael Smurfit was taught these essential cri-

teria through his school years and, unlike Branson, Smurfit has three

university qualifications.

So it is quite clear to see that one can be taught the necessary infor-

mation and also one can be taught to adapt to a certain way of thinking

and a certain essential attitude.

A Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, said: “If you can

conceive it, you can achieve it.”

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