Leveraging Governance in Entrepreneurship-Part 1

We would like to bid our readers compliments of the season for the year 2023 and wish them luck in all their undertakings personally and in their official capacities in different aspects of their lives.

At this beginning of the year, we hope they have reflected on last year’s activities of their businesses and based on that, have made resolutions of new business strategies for the new year.

While the year is still at its cranking motion of the business activity, we venture to start a new topic but not new in its contextual sense. It is new because we are transiting from the previous topic to the new heading but with familiar issues.

This topic serves to give the analysis of the symbiotic relationship between governance and entrepreneurship. According to Wikipedia, entrepreneurship is “the creation or extraction of economic value”. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values than simply economic ones.

From the governance viewpoint in the context of King IV Report, corporate governance is defined as: “the exercise of ethical and effective leadership by the governing body towards the achievement of the following governance outcomes: ethical culture, good performance, effective control, and legitimacy”.

To advance this further, entrepreneurship is the propensity of an individual to become creative and act with foresight, being intuitive and agile to anticipate the new opportunities.

Entrepreneurial management then becomes the practice of being adequately innovative to establish innovation inherent in entrepreneurship structure. There are many entrepreneurs who own many business ideas and aspire to start business or to create and develop products of their ambitions.

However, they take too long to start due to their lack of leadership and management of small businesses. This need of essential skills now requires a strategy. Wikipedia further defines entrepreneurship strategy as: the means through which an organisation establishes its fundamental set of relationships with its environment. It is a strategy characterised by widespread and more-or-less simultaneous change in the pattern of decisions taken by an organisation.

Based on this introductory background, the entrepreneur takes financial risk to venture into business with the hope of making profit or return on investment. Sometimes if they want to be euphemistic (toning their language down), they call it a calculated risk; in other words, a lot of trade offs have been considered. They sometimes say, the higher the risk, the higher the returns.

However, to be frank, the entrepreneurs sometimes take too long to give up even when the business is on the verge of collapse. This is where governance comes in to set the safeguards frameworks on ethics and the management of risk and hence the issues of risk appetite, risk tolerance, etc.

In one of the above paragraphs, in the King IV Report, we listed the governance outcomes as: ethical culture, good performance, effective control and legitimacy which are the outcomes of the governance frameworks.

There are several ways in which the entrepreneur starts the business. However, there are three main ways of finding a business idea which are: spotting a gap in the market, copying a successful business concept, and merging these two concepts. It should be borne in mind that not all business ideas become successful businesses; please note a business idea is not the actual business and it is rather a business raw material.

In addition, there is no need for one to sit down or sleep to meditate with a view to finding a business idea. Therefore, if one is really in need of a business idea, one should stay always alert. It may come when one is having a shower, one is in a toilet, one is sleeping, coming as a dream or a vision.

This may be the Heavens calling; the Bible says, in the book of Amos Chapter 3 Verse 7: “Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing without first revealing His plans to His servants the prophets.”

This scripture’s emphasis should be, surely, threatening the lives of those who hate prophets. In fact, there are additional five scriptures that emphasise the need for hearing from the prophets if one wants to know about one’s destiny including one’s career including the estimated one’s tenure of life.

Going back to the issue at hand, to reach the real business idea resulting in a real business itself is a sigh of relief. “There is nothing in the world as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” (Hugo, nd).

The three main ways of identifying a business idea are each discussed in turn as: spotting a gap in the market. In other words, one finds that there is a certain product or service that ought to be pervading the market in abundance and it is not available.

In the next article, we will be continuing in this topic. We extend our warm gratitude to our readership’s continual feedback.