Career Options Magazine

Risk-taker, innovator, trailblazer, opportunist: many words could be used to describe an entrepreneur, but what exactly does entrepreneurship itself entail? The most basic description of an entrepreneur is someone who starts his or her own business, but the concept goes a lot deeper than that.

One frequently referenced definition comes from Harvard Business School professor Howard Stevenson: “Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” What this means, according to Dave Valliere, professor of entrepreneurship at Ryerson University, is that you see an opportunity that’s “so compelling,” you have no other choice but to pursue it—even if you don’t have the necessary resources. You simply assume that you’ll find a way to get it done, he says.

The attributes of an entrepreneur

There is no “cookie-cutter” set of skills you need to be an entrepreneur, says Simon Jalbert, a participant in The Next 36, a national program for Canadian undergraduate student innovators. The one trait most entrepreneurs share, however, is drive. You need ambition and a strong work ethic in order to be a success.

“To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to love a really long work week where you’re thinking constantly about your business, and have a deep-seated passion and focus,” says Claudia Hepburn, Executive Director and co-founder of The Next 36. “Without that you can’t sell your idea to anyone, or bounce out of bed early or stay late to make it succeed.”

Jalbert agrees: “You have to find something you’re passionate about. There are days sometimes where everything is going the wrong way, and unless you really like what you do it’ll be hard to keep going with it.”

There are many other useful traits that can help you achieve your goal of starting a business. While drive and work ethic are difficult to “learn,” there are many valuable skills that, experts say, people are not born with but taught.

For example, an ability to sell is a skill that some people, mostly introverts, think they need to be born with—but this is a myth, says Valliere. “There’s research to support that you aren’t born with it,” he says. “Anybody can do this, learn this, and be successful in it. We’ve looked at successful entrepreneurs and found that all sorts of people are successful, and it has nothing to do with your personality.”

Rodney Larmand is President of College Pro Painters, a company that develops over 700 entrepreneurs a year by providing students with the chance to start their own business. Larmand says that no two entrepreneurs are the same. “Many of our people are introverted. They have drive and passion, but it’s not always evident. Our entrepreneurial experience is a catalyst for growth because we teach them to sell, lead people and communicate more effectively because it’s needed to run a business,” he says. “In the last 42 years we have proven that with the right raw material, leadership and management skills can be learned. Many of our strong leaders have an introverted side which helps them listen, reflect and build lasting one-on-one relationships, which is critical in leading others.”

Another “learn-able” skill is how to think like an entrepreneur. In fact, programs like the entrepreneurship major at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management are based on teaching entrepreneurial skills.

“It’s about seeing things that don’t yet exist and figuring out how to create them. We think of ourselves as the creative or artistic part of business,” says Valliere, who is also the director of Ryerson’s Entrepreneurship Research Institute. “Entrepreneurs see possibilities; they see things that don’t yet exist. They have a different set of mental tools.”

For example, all of the technical tools needed to create websites like Amazon or Facebook already existed before these sites were created. People may think those sites were not innovative because “anyone could have done it,” Valliere says. “They could have done it, but they didn’t. The question is, how do you develop that ability to see things before somebody does it? A lot of things are obvious after the fact.” This is what entrepreneur majors at Ryerson learn, along with opportunity identification, business planning and management of innovation.

Growing the entrepreneurial spirit in Canada

The research Valliere conducts has looked at culture as a possible cause of whether people in a society will think like entrepreneurs.

Many think that Canada doesn’t produce enough high-impact entrepreneurs who create world-class companies and products. Valliere says a country’s culture can have an impact on how many entrepreneurs are produced. “Canadians are very modest; they’re not shooting for the stars. They can, but they don’t.”

Hepburn and The Next 36 want to change the attitudes of young Canadians so that they produce more top-level companies.

“We believe that many top Canadian students don’t set their goals high enough and slide into corporate jobs where they have productive lives and good income, but don’t create value by building great organizations like Facebook and RIM,” she says. “They need the role models and the skill sets and the practice in building organizations for Canada to develop high-impact entrepreneurs. The goal of The Next 36 is to increase Canadian prosperity by developing the next generation of high-impact entrepreneurs.”

The Next 36 was inspired by “Economics of Entrepreneurship,” the top-rated course at the University of Toronto for six years. The professor of that course, Reza Satchu, helped found the program that selects 36 of the best and brightest students in Canada with dreams of running their own business.

“That course made us think Canadians really needed a program that takes the best students who show the best promise, ambition and achievement,” says Hepburn. “We thought we could put together a program that didn’t exist in Canada, or the rest of the world, which offers an extraordinary set of experiences and relationships to change the trajectory of their growth.”

The 36 aspiring entrepreneurs are selected from over 1,000 applicants—university students in their third, fourth or fifth year of study—and are placed in groups. Most spend the first five months working remotely on their ventures while they finish their degrees. Then, in the summer, they all come together in Toronto, where the groups live together and work on their projects. Each group is given a mentor, someone from the business world who knows the industry, such as Jordan Banks, the managing director of Facebook Canada. They attend special classes taught by top professors from the Rotman School of Management, Harvard Business School, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the Richard Ivey School of Business.

The students work on mobile, high-tech or Internet-related ventures, because they are the easiest and cheapest to start in nine months, says Hepburn. Tuition is covered by donors, such as founding patrons and top Canadian business leaders Jimmy Pattison, W. Galen Weston and Paul Desmarais. Investors contribute up to $80,000 toward the students’ ventures.

Hepburn’s advice to interested applicants and future entrepreneurs is to always act with integrity and professionalism. “You have to present yourself as credible, which means following through on the commitments you make,” she says.

Even if you don’t have access to the same resources these students do, with a great idea and a solid plan, it isn’t as difficult to attract an investor as you may think, says Valliere. “Investors can’t just let money sit in the bank,” he says. “They want to give the money to somebody, but it has to be somebody worth giving it to. If you have found an opportunity and have a plan to exploit that opportunity, you’ll find somebody.

“But you have to have done your homework and have a real plan—something that’s feasible and not too risky,” he says. Having a well-thought-out business plan is crucial; otherwise, you may be entering hazardous territory.

The risky side of entrepreneurship

“Entrepreneurship is a very risky thing to do and a lot of businesses fail,” says Hepburn. “You can’t be too idealistic and caught up in your own way of thinking. You need to respond to market signals for when your product isn’t wanted.”

The public often assumes that entrepreneurs are big risk-takers, Valliere says, but it only looks risky from the outside. “Entrepreneurs don’t like to take risks….They have extra information; they know something that we don’t. So we teach how to do that—how to figure out what no one else knows yet,” he says.

Larmand says the College Pro Painters program—running for over 40 years—can help minimize risk by providing participants with mentorship and education on how to run a business. Students lease a franchise for one year and learn the ins and outs of entrepreneurship as they go. An intense training program takes place during the school year to prepare students for work in the summer. They learn how to market their services, hire employees, deal with customers, draft estimates, create budgets, manage finances and resolve conflicts, among other business skills.

College Pro ensures its student entrepreneurs speak with past participants to gain a sense of how the program works. “That way they’re able to understand the challenges, and the ups and downs,” Larmand says. “People excel based on how quickly they learn. You have to understand you’re going to make mistakes.” Entrepreneurs make a lot of mistakes, and good entrepreneurs don’t repeat them. Success comes from how quickly you learn from those mistakes, he says.

Some students may be wondering if their degree will make them good entrepreneurs. The bigger question is, do you need a business degree to be a success? Larmand says no. “No more than half of our students are in business,” he says. “A lot of arts students find they really like running a business. The non-business students learn where they want their life to go and how to get into the business world. And I think a lot of them will source out an entrepreneurial role in a corporation, like being a high-level manager.”

Benefits of entrepreneurship

At the end of the day, having that drive and passion will be your most important key to success as an entrepreneur. If you’re doing what you love, and doing it on your own terms, you can achieve what many are striving for: being your own boss.

“Entrepreneurship is a good method of achieving all sorts of goals: making money, improving the world, and having a fun and interesting career,” says Valliere. “A lot of people do it for the autonomy; they don’t want to have a boss. They want to do their own thing and set their own hours. Or maybe they want to create a legacy.”

Achieving success and autonomy means you need to be proactive and self-motivated. “If you have to be directed by others, you’re not really entrepreneurial,” says Larmand.

The sooner you start thinking about your ideas, the better.

“It’s never too early to start thinking about how you can solve a problem and make life easier for people,” says Hepburn.

 

Jordan Adams is a Carleton University journalism graduate.

 

For more information, please visit: ryerson.ca/ent, tedrogersschool.ca, thenext36.ca, collegepro.com, careeroptionsmagazine.com