Not Save Our Souls but Save Our Entrepreneurs?
Are business plan competitions, entrepreneurship grants and even seed capital from venture capitalists really that helpful to entrepreneurs? Hear what Design Translator have to say about them.
Business plan competitions have been pretty big recently. I like to congratulate the winners and this post is in no way demeaning their hard work and excellent ideas. That being said I am pretty skeptical about such business plan competitions, entrepreneurship grants, and even venture capital seeds.
Perhaps I’m a little extreme in my views but after reading and thinking about such activities, I wonder are such activities, especially in a country like Singapore, are really molly-codding in disguise? You must be wondering WHAT? Is this guy nuts?
Please bear with me? A large majority of startups will fail, and as I’m a student of life, I feel no amount of tutoring, training, and guiding young entrepreneurs are going to do anything positive unless they actually learn by going through the motions. Practical vs. Theory.
Furthermore I feel such “grooming” activities actually imped young entrepreneurs by the simple act of allowing them to either “win” or “lose” such activities and competitions. Losing such a competition and after going through such a hard evaluation process could surly damper passion and drive? This passion and drive to try and try again? By losing, does it mean that you are telling generally overachieving young entrepreneurs that they are not good enough?
Passion and drive in the young entrepreneur is a big asset in making it big, and its no wonder that statistically the most successful entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates or Michael Dell all started before they hit 27 years old. In my opinion you should should teach young entrepreneurs to instead of winning or losing, to that they have one of the most important assets of being a great entrepreneur, and that is Time. The time to think, plan, and act. They have the time to fail and try again before the rest of the “baggage” like responsibilities or family come about that often prevent people from taking the risk of starting out on their own.
What about the winners? Have you heard about how many actor’s career go down hill after winning an Academy Award Oscar? It’s already so difficult to survive in business, do you now need the additional pressure to perform as a winner should and the fear of ridicule and shame should you fail?
I still consider myself an “Amateur Entrepreneurâ€Â, so do take what I say with a pinch of salt, but I think the solution to the problem is really in the follow through, or the lack of it that it.
Often in the news there are so much hype about success but so little about failure. Unless you are Nanz Chong, and good on her for wearing it like a badge! Nothing will bring entrepreneur aspirants out of the wood work then a network of people that helps failed enterprises and start-up learn from their mistakes. Help them pick up the pieces, move on and start again.
Personally I feel there should not be such competitions but more entrepreneurship workshops, for free even. Get people sorted out, organized, and point them in the right direction and let them go and try. Too many start-ups fail due to inertia (speaking from experience!) and don’t go further from the business plans. Hey are business plans even needed? Intel’s legendary business plan was just one page. Perhaps a one page business plan workshop?
Then as they travel, mentor them, advise them, but let them do what they want. Thats the only way to learn. If it fails, encourage them and help them learn from their mistakes. It is this type of environment with a huge acceptance of failure is what makes Singapore actually so poor in entrepreneurship.
It is no secret. It is very easy to start a business in Singapore, no doubt about it. But we are very bad at the follow through support. We are great in rowing things up, and kick starting things big, but very bad in seeing it to the end or even supporting it after go. It would be interesting to do a study of the participants that did not win such business plan awards and see how many continued with their dream and how many gave up.
In conclusion my proposal of how to foster entrepreneurship in Singapore is to set up instead of a S.O.S hotline but a S.O.E hotline.
Save Our Entrepreneurs!
Note: The article is published by the author with the same title in his blog Design Sojourn. Do check out DT’s interesting insights in other subjects as well.
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9 Comments, Comment or Ping
Design Translator
Article also at: http://www.designsojourn.com/index.php/2006/06/18/not-sos-but-soe/
Jun 19th, 2006
BL
Hi DT,
Nice article. I totally agree that the fear of failure is one of the bottlenecks why most people are not into entrepreneurship.
One interesting statistic to share. Most business plan competition winners don’t make it big. Usually, the runners up and semi-finalists made it into business finally. Even I was number 5 in the competition. But it turned out that we all started proper business in the end.
The reason is because after being defeated, we told ourselves that we are going to make it to show that the judges made the wrong choice. Btw, the only company that made it IPO (billion dollar company) in MIT-$100K business plan competition, Akamai, is a semi-finalist (i.e. they did not made it to the last ten). All the other winners of that year, we don’t hear from them anymore.
Jun 19th, 2006
Ken
2 points.
1. “It’s easy to start business in Singapore.” That’s the paper work part, easy. But it’s hell tough to get business going.
2. Fundamentally the core of the Singapore system, society (or what call you) is not condusive to entrepreneurship. Period. There are certain ways that can’t be changed (not in short to middle term at least) so be glad that some changes are happening.
Jun 19th, 2006
Design Translator
Hi BL,
I suppose you can call it the Winner’s Curse?
Hi ken,
I totally agree with you. It will be nice at least to analyse the factors that make our society so poor in entrepreneurship. Makes a good list for perhaps a entrepreneurship course for the people attend to realise the sub-conscious factors they wil have to deal with should they take this path.
Jun 19th, 2006
BL
Ken,
Yes, you are right that it’s easy to start a business in Singapore, but it’s difficult to maintain it. One problem is that most entrepreneurs have this misguided idea that they don’t need an accountant, a lawyer and a financial banker to get their enterprises sustained. Hence it explains why most startups fail.
yours sincerely,
BL
Jun 20th, 2006
Grace
Hello,
I came across this site by accident… via tomorrow.sg.
Just want to say that as the coordinator of a BPlan competition with top VCs in the Silicon Valley, I believe that these events really help to encourage entrepreneurship. Saying that losing is discouraging is ridiculous because if you have truly tried pitching your plans to VCs, you’ll know how hard it is to even get an audience with them. These competitions are a way of getting access to the VCs and if you can’t take losing, then why bother being an entrepreneur in the first place? The point of these competitions is the EXPOSURE. Not the winning or the losing since as you pointed out very aptly - winning doesn’t guarantee that the business actually takes off.
I can’t speak for such competitions in Singapore but we have recently helped the HK University of Science & Technology (www.chinaentrepreneurship.org) to organize their own competition. And even as a coordinator, it was an incredibly invaluable experience for me to have had the opportunity to meet these top executives based in HK.
Jun 21st, 2006
BL
Grace,
Thank you for your reply. Hope that you will drop by more often here. Actually, the most appropriate and good comment on business plan competitions come from Douglas Abrams, the chief judge from Start-Up@Singapore, “There is no such thing as losers in a business plan competition, there are only winners and learners.”
Best regards,
BL
Jun 21st, 2006
darius
haha this is a fun one - DT - i agree with you!
though i think the real problem is not that competitions and grants and general incentives are bad, it’s just that it creates an illusion of achievement to those who get them.
To me, these are weapons, not medals.
Entrepreneurs should view them as chance to learn, chance to get exposure, chance to get some prize money and freebies. these opportunities can be very useful. weapons are not evil by themselves, just how you use them makes all the difference.
but the dangerous thing is that it is easy to see it as a medal, to see it as achievement and slack off. to let it rush to your head and forget about the real business building.
the real medal is satisfied, repeat, paying customers, until then, it’s just a vapour-enterprise, no matter how many awards you win.
( afterthought - what us singaporean see as molly coddling is seen as good business enviroment by some of my friends in China - if they get the chance, they will grab all the incentives they can get and yet not forget to focus on real business building )
Jun 22nd, 2006
Design Translator
Hi all,
See thats the thing and I can only speak from my experience in the past. The main worry is that i dont want people to think the only way to start business is to win or even take part of such competitions.
For my naieve mind then, thats what i thought.
Thus the hyping or over hyping of such activites, in my opinion counter productive to entrprenaurship.
The other concern darius as your brought up is that such activites is contrary to being “hungry” enough to survive in the business environment. I personally see that in china, such activities are few, and thus the people there struggle and yet are hungry and thus as my point become great entreprenaurs. Again such compeitiions are contrary to the hunger. Why? Simple, you get people teach you how to be a businessperson, they fix your business plan if there are problems, give you money to start etc etc. So dont you think this is molly-codding all over agian?
Jun 22nd, 2006
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