ENTREPRENEURSHIP:
WHY WAIT TO BE YOUR OWN BOSS?
Look into Entrepreneurship as a Career
There is a great deal of talk in Canada these days about the “skills gap,” the “knowledge economy,” and the value of a post-secondary education. Canada has a more serious deficit, however — and there is perhaps the greatest opportunity for young people — in the field of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are the people who start and run the businesses, not those who apply to work for them. And they are a breed apart. There aren’t enough in this country, but perhaps you are one of them.
When people try to explain why the United States still has (for the moment at least) the world’s largest economy, they usually think first of the country’s remarkable risk-taking environment (unless they’re on the political left, in which case they give other reasons: the legacy of slavery, capitalist exploitation, and the like). Gambling is in America’s blood, right down to bankruptcy laws that enable people to write a bad debt experience off their books, to bounce back from financial crisis, and to plunge boldly back into the world of business creation. The country is crazy about its financial high-rollers. How else can the attention paid to a high-stakes gambler and loudmouth self-promoter like Donald Trump be explained, when serious and far more important people like Yo-Yo Ma, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Boorstin, and David Frum are little known outside limited circles? There are other countries with a finely tuned entrepreneurial drive — Israel is a world leader, and places like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have well-developed business development cultures that drive their economies. But no one really does business quite like the Americans.
Canada, in contrast, is a slow mover on the entrepreneurial front. We have our great entrepreneurs — people like Seymour Schulich, Heather Reisman (ever visited a Chapters/Indigo store?), Jim Pattison (Mr. Everything in B.C.), Tom Jenkins (Open Text), the Sobey, McCain, and Irving families in the Maritimes, Peter Nygard, and hundreds of others who have done amazing work in their home regions. Few people outside the Yukon know of the remarkable business and community-building activities of Rolf Hougen. Especially impressive is Chief Robert Louie’s work with the Osoyoos First Nation in B.C.
In typical Canadian fashion, however, we often rush to point out the entrepreneurs who fall on their faces — the founders of one-time high technology superstar firms such as JDS Uniphase, Nortel, and now Research In Motion/BlackBerry (although you should keep your eyes on Mike Lazaridis’s new push into quantum computing). It is true that many of our richest Canadians inherited their money (the Thomsons, Irvings, and Westons), but many others made their fortunes in land development or in the fast-growing energy sector in western Canada.
Stop right here …
Do you recognize all or any of these names? Are you curious about them? Remember the curiosity test; you can look them all up.
For some reason, perhaps because it seems un-Canadian, young people don’t know much about the career and life opportunities of entrepreneurship. There are a number of organizations aimed at young entrepreneurs: the Canadian Junior Chamber of Commerce, Young Women in Business, the Canadian Youth Business Foundation (and their FuEL Awards initiative), and 4-H Canada (for the agriculturally minded). The Business Development Bank of Canada’s Young Entrepreneur Award program supports young business people, and many schools, colleges, and universities now offer programs specifically to train people for entrepreneurship. Shad Valley, one of the most impressive youth development programs anywhere, focuses on building entrepreneurial expertise and determination. Make sure you look at Impact, an excellent youth-run program for university-level entrepreneurs. Young people who are intrigued by the prospects and opportunities associated with running a business should check out these and other organizations. But unfortunately, too few young Canadians give much thought to entrepreneurship, instead spending a great deal of time and energy figuring how they can prepare themselves to work for someone else.
Examine Yourself: Are You a Born Entrepreneur?
University professors have intense debates about whether or not entrepreneurship can be taught. It does seem odd that these people, secure in their government-supported positions, would be teaching young people how to take risks, make business-threatening decisions, and deal with commercial reality. The consensus, however, appears to be that people can be taught to understand entrepreneurship. And — if they have the basic skills and mindset — they also can be taught how to capitalize on their abilities and convert motivation, commercial ideas, and energy into a successful business. Put a different way, a lack of guidance and preparation can make the path to successful entrepreneurship even tougher than it already is.
But maybe you are one of those who have natural entrepreneurial skills in their DNA. You are the one who is always looking for an opportunity to make money, who organized the spring break skiing trip and made a nice profit from it, who rebuilds cars and sells them for a 40 percent return on the initial investment, who took the sleepy little concession stand run by the student council and turned it into a big money-spinner, who started tweaking some computer programs in high school and ended up creating three apps that are now hosted on the Apple site. A born entrepreneur is not just the smooth-talking used-car salesperson type, although some of you out there are like that as well.
The really transformative entrepreneurs do not just sell, speculate, or develop (all fine things), but they also create. And they not only create new businesses, but also new products and even entire commercial sectors. The late Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mike Lazaradis, Arlene Dickinson, and Heather Reisman are great examples. Another example is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, who took some basic computer code and converted it into a $100 billion enterprise.
Read the recent biography of Steve Jobs …
Are you anything like him?
Young millionaires flourished during the dot-com boom in the late 1990s — and some of them, the true entrepreneurs, survived the bust. They took their digital earnings and invested them in new companies and new ventures. They built on their initial technological innovation, used the money to invest in other businesses, and continued on in a life of commercial creativity. They now form the foundation of the high technology industry in Canada and the United States, although they are no longer the geeks and hackers of earlier days. Most importantly, these high-tech business people made entrepreneurship acceptable and even exciting, in a way that business development, auto-parts manufacturing, and construction never did. It turned out that the most successful ones — Gates and Jobs being the best examples — were far more than techies who got lucky on the digital bubble; instead, they were savvy, high-risk entrepreneurs sniffing out profit and opportunity by staying just ahead of the global technological curve.
Consider Some Basic Questions
The starting point is important. Some people are meant to be entrepreneurs, but most are not. True entrepreneurial spirit — by which we mean the ability and drive to create, not simply the capacity to turn a profit — is extremely rare. When the two elements merge — entrepreneurial spirit and core business ability — the results can be spectacular, as people like Tom Jenkins (chief strategy officer of OpenText, Canada’s largest software company) and Mike Lazaradis demonstrate.
At this stage in your life, you can consider some basic questions:
• Do I like making money?
• Do I enjoy taking risks?
• Am I really, seriously, over-the-top, dedicated, and hard-working?
• Am I willing to “eat what I kill,” or live off of what I earn from business?
• Do I learn quickly, from both life experience and organized education, so that I can get the core skills I need to succeed?
• Do I insist on being my own boss?
If you can answer these questions with a resounding “yes,” then you should seriously consider starting your own business, during or after high school, or after university or college.
Now consider a second set of questions:
• Do I like to invent or create things?
• Do I like figuring out how things work — or do not work?
• Do I find myself a little out of sync with my classmates, seeing the world somewhat differently than others?
• Do I think I am right most of the time — and am I willing to work hard to prove it?
If you answer the second set with a strong affirmative, then you are a creative thinker, a “do-er” with real imagination and the capacity to anticipate change. This might make you an artist, a writer, a politician, or the leader of a social movement.
Now here’s the trick. If you answered yes to both sets of questions — one about your drive to make a profit and the second about your imaginative side — you might be on the path to being a true entrepreneur. If you think that this defines you, don’t neglect this aspect of your personality. The true entrepreneurs are the innovators who sustain and improve prosperity, who make their families, communities, and country better. It is a real gift to be truly business-minded. It is wonderful to be intelligent and creative. It is extremely rare to be all those things. For these true entrepreneurs, the future can be a bonanza. And our country could use a lot more people like them.
Learn from Life, Not School
High school does not create entrepreneurs, nor, with some exceptions, does university or college. Most teachers, civil-servant-like and unionized, don’t have the skills to teach entrepreneurship. If they did, they wouldn’t be teachers. They might be friendly to the local business people, and might even create some policy space for them in the school. But they are not going to do very much to turn students into entrepreneurs. Classes on business focus on the basics of law, policy, and bookkeeping — not on the blood and guts of starting, building, losing, and selling a start-up business.
Universities and colleges have stepped into the game, offering all manner of courses, programs, targeted residences for young entrepreneurs, extra-curricular activities, awards, clubs, and other related initiatives. Boot camps, like the University of Toronto’s offering for thirty-two top young entrepreneurs that works outside the conventional classroom to help young creative people convert ideas into businesses, are all the rage. Much later on, when you have at least one degree under your belt, you can think about the Master of Business Entrepreneurship and Technology program at the Conrad Centre at the University of Waterloo — an unconventional program that turns traditional business education inside out and lights a spark under budding business developers. But you are not there yet.
At this point, you are pretty much on your own. Unless you have a favourite teacher with an entrepreneurial bent (there are a few), a family friend who serves as your mentor, or entrepreneurship running deep in the family, there will not be a lot of help for you. Entrepreneurs stick out from the crowd — there will not be many classmates who understand what motivates you or who share your passion for business or creativity. You should seek out people who think as you do. Real entrepreneurs in the community — the Big Men and Women about Town — are probably your best bet as mentors. These successful folks are often among the very best supporters of young entrepreneurs and can be a huge help in the future. They are often surprisingly accessible. They knew what it took to launch their careers, and are often on the lookout for bright, talented young entrepreneurs.
Start Small — and Young
While there are many examples of successful entrepreneurs who came to private business later in life, most entrepreneurs seem to have a lifetime fascination with the field. The central characteristic of young business leaders is that they are willing to work hard to get rich. These days we have almost lost one of the most important points of entry for such people. Not so long ago, when almost every house in town had the paper delivered, pre-teen boys and girls by the thousands walked Canadian streets each morning, delivering the daily paper. The job of a paper carrier involved running a mini-business: selling subscriptions, delivering the paper (sub-contracting when away on holiday), collecting money, keeping the books, dealing with deadbeat subscribers, and, eventually, pocketing the profits. This is almost gone now. Adults deliver most newspapers — kids deliver the free flyers, which is not at all business-like — and there are so few subscribers that many of those delivering papers drive from one to the next. The really difficult and character-building parts — which involved collecting money, recording income, and paying bills — have all been replaced by online billing and payment systems. There were other options: shovelling snow, mowing lawns, running a juice stand in the summer, and so on, and some of these are still around.
The main point is simple. Even pre-teens could get a start in business. You are probably all puzzled by this, because most of these junior entrepreneurial opportunities have evaporated over the last twenty years. This does not mean that there are no jobs for young people — thousands of people work in family businesses or local stores, restaurants, and service outlets. And there are still babies to be sat — current rate where we live is upwards of five dollars an hour. But that’s not entrepreneurial; it’s more like getting paid for doing chores.
We have seen a slow and steady decline in tiny owner-operated businesses, the kind that taught hard lessons about commerce — getting even well-to-do adults to pay their newspaper subscriptions on time was often challenging. Think of the shifts that have occurred. New Canadian adults have taken many of the jobs formerly done by young people. Online billing and payment systems have eliminated the need to collect payments personally. Parents are much easier on their children and often provide them with an allowance that covers more than they could earn through operating a small business. Few young people go door to door to solicit snow-shovelling or lawn-mowing business — and the ones who do are often college-aged or new Canadians, and only rarely teenagers.
So getting experience in entrepreneurship is a little harder than in the past, but is far from impossible. Starting young is essential, in business as in athletics, music, writing, or any other worthwhile endeavour. Malcolm Gladwell’s observation that achieving excellence and pre-eminence requires some 10,000 hours of practice holds for business as for anything else. If you want to hone the skills of a high-achieving business person, you have to practise, learn, practise, and, when you are feel you are almost there, start practising again and again.
This is easy to understand in the context of hockey, music, or painting. Very few people become right-wingers on the Montreal Canadiens without countless hours of practice. The first violinist in the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra might have been a child prodigy, but that skill was then developed, sharpened, and improved through years of practice. We don’t think about marketing, human resource management, investing, bookkeeping, product development, supply chain operations and logistics, innovation, and risk-taking in the same terms, but becoming a successful business person or commercial leader is no different. You have to work at it.
You can follow the standard pattern in Canada — coast through high school and then head to college or university for a diploma or degree in business. Then, armed with a college or university credential, you will do what most young Canadians do, which is search for a job with a decent employer. Postponing your plans to become an entrepreneur makes sense in one regard. In today’s business environment, you will likely need advanced technical or professional skills. Including some advanced education in your development is a wise idea. But you need to develop the basic habits and mindset early. If you wait till your mid-twenties to begin, your dream of starting your own company, launching a new project, or becoming a true entrepreneur will almost certainly never be realized.
Start now. Hit it hard. Find a business opportunity. Do your research. Plan carefully and thoughtfully and then move on it. You might start very small, mowing lawns for the neighbours, washing cars, or providing some other basic service. Be good at it. Deliver a top-quality service or product, and do it with full attention to your customers and your business. Hire someone to help you. Set up proper books. Figure out the licences and regulations. Take the idea of launching a business very seriously; give it the same amount of attention you might later spend launching a college, polytech, or university career.
The learning benefit of a year or two spent running a small business is immense. You will be laying the groundwork for later ventures into commerce, while you are also going to discover whether you thrive — or shrivel — under the pressures of running a proper business. Some young entrepreneurs take a big leap, buying into a more sizeable business and running the company while continuing their studies. (If you can stomach an old Tom Cruise movie — and this one is actually pretty good — watch Risky Business. The business model is lucrative but hard to sell to your parents — he turns the family home into a brothel when his folks are away. But, as he soon discovers, there is form and structure to every successful business.) Our point is simple. Entrepreneurship is both a skill and a passion. You have to develop the skill and feed the passion. You can and should start young and start small.
Don’t jump without preparation …
It takes real guts to take the first step, to launch into business. If you cannot bring yourself to jump, or at least to take a significant step, you will have learned a great lesson about yourself.
But, if you are going to jump, do your homework first. Plan carefully, with close attention to the details:
• Is the idea sound?
• Do you have the money?
• Who is going to do the work?
• What is the market and audience?
• Do you need a business licence or any other approvals?
Review everything with a mentor, preferably a business person who has been down this path before. And with the work down and the planning well in hand, do it.
Venture nothing, gain nothing.
Be Prepared to Take Risks — and to Go Back to School
Business is about risk above all else. It involves taking a calculated gamble about commerce and personal choices. You are putting it all on the line — your money, your time, and your reputation. Once you hang out your shingle (putting out a sign to announce the start of a new business, typically in law or medicine — another reference that means nothing these days), your name and your business idea are open to the public. What you thought was a terrific idea — delivering cakes and cookies to children’s birthday parties — could easily go down in flames. These days, the Internet makes it easier to hide your commercial experiment. Your attempt to make money by being the 694th iPhone application offering fart sounds could collapse in digital humiliation, but the odds are very good that few people will learn of your embarrassing experience. Remember, too, that most successful business people started and failed several times before they found their niche.
Being a young entrepreneur holds a great deal of promise. You will find out whether you like the field and whether you have the nerve, work ethic, and determination to succeed — and the brains to know when to shift gears, close down shop, move to another business idea, or adapt to changing circumstances. The chances are quite small that you will, as a teenager, find the business that will propel you through life. What you will find is whether entrepreneurship is for you, if not immediately then when you have prepared yourself better for the real challenges.
So, to encourage you, here are the top five lessons that we think you will gain from running a small business when you are young:
• You will figure out if entrepreneurship is for you. Most people will never be entrepreneurs. You need to find out whether you have what it takes, and whether you have the ideas and the creativity to look at the work around you and find a way to make money.
• You will discover the strong connection between work ethic and personal outcomes. If you work harder, you will likely make more money. Slack off as a small business owner and your income plummets. This is one of the most important life lessons.
• You will find out if you have good business sense. While there are many technical aspects to running a successful business, the key attributes are less formal. You will find out whether you have the instincts to identify opportunity, the strength to bargain hard, and the integrity to build a proper business.
• You will discover your openness to risk. Business is about taking calculated gambles on a daily basis. If life in a risk-filled environment is stressful and unnerving, you’d better plan on a different career.
• You will quickly learn that ideas and work ethic are not enough on their own. You will need technical and professional skills — keeping the books and paying taxes is essential. Being a smooth-talking, hard-working, amiable salesperson is not sufficient on its own.
Teenage businesses can bring in hundreds of dollars a month, enough for a lot of iTunes downloads and regular visits to the movieplex. Really successful ones — and there are hundreds of such young business people out there — can make thousands of dollars a year. With a little family financing, hard work, and some good luck you could have a solid business in operation.
But you may find out that this is not enough. One of the big discoveries for many budding business people is that they need additional skills — technical, professional, or commercial. Having money is much better than the alternative, but is often not sufficient on its own. For people wanting to make the most of their careers — and to push their business abilities to the maximum — commercial success often leads to college or university for the specialized training that is required for real success.
Don’t be surprised, therefore, if you find out that your success as an entrepreneur leads you to an accelerated program of self-improvement and further discovery. Indeed, now that you’ve experienced that remarkable combination of risk, effort, intelligence, and commerce, you might well find that you are much more motivated to do well academically than those around you. After all, you’ve learned all about opportunity costs and are making significant sacrifices to be back in school — and you have your eye on a much bigger prize, particularly the wealth and freedom associated with being an independent business person.
Remember that You’re Also Helping Your Country
It’s not entirely about you, either. While entrepreneurship can lead you to an exciting and rewarding career, there are also vital nation-building elements to this kind of activity. We live in a globalized and highly competitive world. Canadians compete for business — and therefore for jobs, wealth, and stability — with entrepreneurs and innovators in countries around the world. Those places that win at the entrepreneurial game — and again we draw your attention to places like Israel, Taiwan, and Singapore that are doing particularly well right now in this regard — stand to prosper in the coming years. Canadians, in contrast, have fallen back on our natural resource wealth to sustain our very high standard of living.
It is instructive to consider the history of the Region of Waterloo in southern Ontario. The Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge area — Canada’s Technology Triangle — has been a leader in innovation for many years. Time and again over the past decades, the Region of Waterloo reinvented itself, in keeping with the changes in the national and global economy. Twenty years ago, the automobile sector was riding high in the region. Starting about a decade ago, this industry took a battering from which it has not yet recovered. Even before Mike Lazardis and Jim Balsillie took Research In Motion from being a small paging company into the elite world of mobile Internet and messaging, local entrepreneurs and investors (many of whom made their money in land development) started to build a high technology economy. Waterloo is now known as Silicon Valley North — home to hundreds of start-up companies, angel investors, serial entrepreneurs, and one of the most mutually supportive business climates in the world. If you live nearby, look at Communitech (an impressive business development initiative), The Hub (an incubator for start-up operations), and the digital media campus in nearby Stratford.
There are some new groups developing across the country, in places as diverse as Fredericton (aided by some impressive leadership from local entrepreneurs Desh Deshpande and Gerry Pond), Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, and Saskatoon. There are government and banking programs by the dozens, as Canadian governments and financial institutions seek to promote business development. But the country needs more. In particular, Canada requires many more young people to consider entrepreneurship as a career. For some, this means nothing more than gut-wrenching risk taking — a flyer on local real estate that might turn into a lucrative land development business. For others, years of advanced study in engineering, applied science (love that biotechnology, nanotechnology, and quantum computing stuff), and business are required to make a move into their highly technical sector. For all of these future business leaders and entrepreneurs, it requires a particular type of mind — one that is freed from the need to follow the well-trodden path to the human resources office or the employment centre, that finds risk energizing, that builds off of a formidable work commitment, and that has real staying power.
If Canada is to flourish in the twenty-first century, it urgently needs builders, thinkers, risk-takers, creators, and innovators. It needs the young people with the verve and enthusiasm to tackle the challenges and complexities of the global economy. These people — and perhaps you are one of them — have the ideas or business drive to create new companies and produce the thousands of jobs that the country requires to sustain its enviable standard of living. We do not do particularly well in this regard at present, in part because we spend so much time and effort preparing young people to work for others. We are a nation of employees, not investors, of middle managers and civil servants rather than entrepreneurs.
Canada Needs Thousands More Kumal Guptas
Kumal Gupta is a former University of Waterloo student, one of the founders of the Impact program for young entrepreneurs, and the CEO of Polar Mobile, a company that helps content producers move their information onto mobile devices. Kumal started Polar Mobile when he was an undergraduate — a time, by his own admission, when he was often too busy with his business activities to devote much time to his studies as an engineer (although he did graduate).
With the persistence of the true entrepreneur, and while still in his early twenties, he wormed his way into some of the leading information companies in North America and persuaded them to try his media product. If you read Elle, Hockey News, Wired, the Toronto Star, or any of some four hundred other publications on your mobile device, you are probably using a Polar Mobile product.
Perhaps most importantly, and a time when many budding entrepreneurs have taken their ideas and talents to the often more lucrative (and warmer) environments in the United States, Kumal and his company have stayed in Canada, using this country as a base to serve customers in a dozen nations.
You will know if you have what it takes in terms of drive, energy, and determination. If you don’t, that’s okay too — we don’t either, and we’ve had happy and productive lives. Business is not for the faint-hearted, and entrepreneurship is not for the weak. Nor, interestingly, is it restricted to the smartest or those with the best grades (one of the standing jokes about universities is that they are where A students teach B students so that they can work for C students). Entrepreneurship is more about mindset and work ethic than it is about intellectual capacity and high school grades. If you have it, or if you think you have, immerse yourself in the sector. Hang out with those motivated by business. Figure out where opportunities and your interests collide. A successful young entrepreneur in Ontario in recent years found his opportunity in selling male cosmetics online, identifying an unfilled market niche and profiting from it. Explore and try it out. The country’s future might well rest on your success. And if you do really well, you can make a point of hiring some of the brainiacs from high school to work for you.