Entrepreneurs and ideas 2

Who is an 'Entrepreneur?

An entrepreneur is that fellow who, rather than working as an employee, runs a small business and assumes all the risks and rewards of a given business venture, idea, or good or service offered for sale. An entrepreneur is a business leader and innovator of new ideas and business processes.

 Entrepreneurs play a key role in any economy. These are the people who have the skills and initiative necessary to improve any economy. The reward for taking the risk is the potential economic profits the entrepreneur could earn.

 Yes, I know that’s hard. It's a lot of work. And that, folks, are what makes entrepreneurship so friggin' hard. And so friggin' necessary. What can I say, that’s life. Besides, look on the bright side:  You get to do what you want and you get to do it your way. There’s just one catch. You’ve got to start somewhere. Ideas and opportunities don’t just materialize out of thin air.

The only way I know to get started is by learning a marketable skill and getting to work. In my experience, that’s where the ideas, opportunities, partners, and finances always seem to come from. Sure, it also takes an enormous amount of hard work, but that just comes with the territory.

If you want to do entrepreneurship right, let me share the story of an African lady  you’ve probably never heard about,  her name is Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu.

Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu, 34, grew up in Zenabwork, a poor village in the suburbs of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

She came up with her business idea after she noticed most of the artisans in her community, who made beautiful footwear, remained jobless and poor.

Today, her company, SoleRebels, is one the most popular and fastest growing African footwear brand in the world! It sells its ‘eco-friendly’ brand of footwear in more than 50 countries including the USA, Canada, Japan and Switzerland.

SoleRebels’ footwear is unique because it is 100 percent made by hand using locally-sourced and recycled materials like old car tyres and hand-loomed organic fabrics.

A few years ago, SoleRebels became the first footwear company in the world to be certified by the World Fair Trade Organization.

By using local craftsmen, Bethlehem has built a global brand and a hugely successful business that has created jobs and improved livelihoods in her local community.

She started SoleRebels in 2004 with less than $10,000 in capital she raised from family members. Today, the company has more than 100 employees and nearly 200 local raw material suppliers, and has opened several standalone retail outlets in North America, Europe and Asia.

Despite its very humble beginnings, SoleRebels now makes up to $1 million in sales every year, and according to her projections and expansion plans, the company could be making up to $10 million in sales by the end of this year (2016).

Buoyed by her success with SoleRebels,  She recently launched Republic of Leather, a new business that trades in luxury leather products like bags, belts and other non-footwear leather accessories.

Bethlehem was selected as the Young Global Leader of the Year 2011 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and was a winner at the Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship in the same year. Bethlehem and her inspiring success story with SoleRebels have been featured severally on Forbes, the BBC and CNN.

As an entrepreneur, the sky is your limit. You can achieve anything you want! We can all be Bethlehem, start thinking and creating…

See you at the top!

Entrepreneurs and Ideas (1)

Entrepreneurship has traditionally been defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which typically begins as a small business, such as a startup company, offering a product, process or service for sale or hire, and the people who do so are called 'entrepreneurs'.  It has been defined as the "...capacity and willingness to develop, organize, and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit."

 While definitions of entrepreneurship typically focus on the launching and running of businesses, due to the high risks involved in launching a start-up, a significant proportion of businesses have to close, due to a "...lack of funding, bad business decisions, an economic crisis or a combination of all of these"  or due to lack of market demand.

In the 2000s, the definition of "entrepreneurship" has been expanded to explain how and why some individuals (or teams) identify opportunities, evaluate them as viable, and then decide to exploit them, whereas others do not, and in turn, how entrepreneurs use these opportunities to develop new products or services, launch new firms or even new industries and create wealth.

At the heart of every successful business is a great idea. Some seem so simple,  we wonder why nobody thought of them before. Others are so revolutionary we wonder how anybody could've thought of them at all.

#What's bugging you?

Ideas for startups often begin with a problem that needs to be solved. And they don't usually come while you're sitting around sipping coffee and contemplating life. Ideas tend to reveal themselves while you're hard at work on something else.

I will like to share a brief story about Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh, who invented Sugru.  Intimidated by her surroundings and fearful that she was out of her depth in the prestigious corridors of the Royal College of Art, Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh hid herself away in the school workshop with a vague idea of finding a new, fix-everything material.
One of her series of experiments as she pursued her master's degree in product design was to combine bathroom sealant with wood-dust powder. It made balls that bounced when she dropped them.
"It was just a surprising moment. I made something that looked like wood and it bounced," she said. "I just wanted to create something that looked interesting or behaved in an interesting way, which could then lead me somewhere else."
Just over a decade later, those lab explorations have led to Sugru, a mouldable, setting silicone rubber that has been compared with Blu-Tack and Sellotape in terms of its significance.

The material can be shaped for 30 minutes after being taken from the small sealed packets it comes in, before it cures in the air into a strong, durable and waterproof substance that will stay stuck to almost any surface and can withstand extremes of temperature up to 150C.

The rise in popularity of Sugru, initially among the tech and "maker" community, has seen it used as a car engine sealant, in a school children's project to send a camera into space, and to personalize ski poles for a north pole adventurer. The youngest member of the British Olympic fencing team, James Davis, used a foil personalised with Sugru in the 2012 games.

It has been a long road to fruition for Ni Dhulchaointigh, who left the RCA with a rough idea of wanting to create a "really, really functional version of Blu-Tack that would be permanent and have lots of benefits". A summer show for graduates' ideas showed her that the public also had an interest in what she was planning.

"I had in mind this culture of people feeling empowered to improve their stuff, to fix it and that is the most difficult thing and the most exciting thing," she said.

What an amazing invention! We can all be Jane, Start thinking and creating...
See you at the top!