To succeed, entrepreneurs must be lion-hearted

To succeed, entrepreneurs must be lion-hearted – Oshinowo

BY OLUSEGUN OSHINOWO

Olusegun Oshinowo

Mr. Olusegun Oshinowo is the Director-General, Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association. In this interview with Okechukwu Nnodim, he says it is a Herculean task to set up a business in the country and make a success of it due to too many variables

Is it easy to start a small business in Nigeria?

In looking at this, I think we’ve got to be comparative because Nigeria is not an island on its own. We have other countries that are interested in promoting entrepreneurship among their citizens and for us to come to a conclusion as to whether it is easy or not, we’ve got to compare our situation with other countries. In doing this, we should not confine ourselves to the African continent alone. I think we should be looking in the direction of emerging economies; we should be looking in the direction of countries like China, Brazil, and Indonesia, to see how easy it is in those climes to set up businesses compared with Nigeria.

Now by reason of the fact that Nigeria is a developing economy, opportunities actually abound in this economy for entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship starts from opportunities, which is when somebody is able to define the needs of the society and launches himself into the process of wealth creation in order to meet those needs. But the success of any business, whether in Nigeria, Europe or Asia, is a function of quite a number of factors or variables. One of which is what I have mentioned: the availability of opportunities. Then you need to identify the other factors and all of them have to work together to ensure that whoever has embraced entrepreneurship actually makes success of it.

So what are those other factors that we need to look at?

We need to look at the enabling environment. And when you are talking of the enabling environment, you will be looking at the quality of infrastructure which you have as a country. Access to water, good roads, power, and telecommunication system and so on, before you now touch on the issue of your policies. How enabling are policies in support of entrepreneurship? And if we are talking of policies, there are so many policies but I will simply focus on three categories of policies. Take your fiscal policy as number one, which has to do with your taxation and tariff system. You need to look at that whole gamut of fiscal policy and then your tariff system, to what extent are they supportive of entrepreneurship?

You have to look at your monetary system, which borders on the interest rate of your economy and equally borders on how well you are managing inflation. Because inflation and interest rates have to go hand-in-hand, for you to effectively manage your interest rates, you should be able to really curb inflation. Then you need to look at your regulatory policies, and there a whole gamut of regulatory policies. So by the time we put all these together, you will discover that it will take a lion-hearted man or woman to embrace entrepreneurship in Nigeria and make a success of entrepreneurship.

This is because apart from the abundance of opportunities, which could form the basis for entrepreneurship, all those other factors that I’ve mentioned are not working positively to encourage entrepreneurship in Nigeria. And those who are actually practising entrepreneurship in this country have to be celebrated for it is a Herculean task to set up a business in this environment and make a success of that business, on account of the factors that I earlier mentioned. There are so many other things which I have not mentioned.

From your experience, what are the qualities of an astute entrepreneur?

The first is that as an entrepreneur, you must have the eyes of an eagle for you to see opportunities. And how will you see these opportunities? It is the ability to know the needs of the society. But the fact that something is a need in a society does not necessarily mean that when you embrace it, it will turn into a profitable business for you. So you could see a need and could also find a large number of people that actually have the desire for that, but that does not really mean that it will turn into a business success for you. Hence, it will take an entrepreneur to really understand the fact that needs and wants are too sides of business opportunities, and not to regard wants as a difficult terrain for making success, because wants, in fact, could be a much better platform to make business success than the former.

The second issue is the passion. Everyone is not called to be an entrepreneur. Why are you into entrepreneurship? Is it on account of the fact that you cannot get a job? What are you cut out to do? Do you really have the passion to want to run a business of your own? So passion is equally important. Thirdly, knowledge and competencies are important. In order to guarantee your success in entrepreneurship, you’ve got to learn the ropes. And there are many ways you can learn the ropes. You want to understudy, be a protégée of a successful entrepreneur, or go through school of entrepreneurship. Through knowledge and competence you will be able to know how to market your financials, how to manage your market challenges and all that. But people just take this for granted and then jump into entrepreneurship. With all the passion and access to the best of financial resources, if your knowledge and competence base is faulty, you will make a shipwreck of your entrepreneurship pursuit.

Are there additional qualities?

The fourth thing is resilience. This is extremely important, but we Nigerians are too much in a hurry. You get into business today and tomorrow you want to start counting millions. Every business has its gestation period. So the fact that you are not making money in a short time does not mean that that business does not have the potential to succeed. So you’ve got to have an understanding of the normal gestation period for the type of business you have gone into. But people don’t take note of this. I know you will say I’ve not mentioned one very important factor, which if you talk to most people that wants to become entrepreneurs, that’s the first factor they will mention. And that factor is capital. I intentionally kept that till the end, because if you have the capital and those other things which I’ve mentioned are not there, you will simply end up wasting your resources.

So capital is important, but we shouldn’t put that first. The moment you can get all those other things that I’ve mentioned earlier right, it becomes easier for you to mobilise capital. And when you want to mobilise capital, people simply restrict their focus on only the financial institutions. Whereas there are various ways by which you can raise capital for your business. But if those fundamentals are not right, how are you going to convince people to come and invest in your business? When all the fundamentals are right, and you now want to identify what I call – business promoters, yes, you have the idea and don’t have the money, but if you are able to talk convincingly, you will get people to invest in your business ideas.

Source: Punchng.com