The Entrepreneurial Process

The Entrepreneurial Process (BUSM 1311)

Semester 2 2016

Brief on Reflective Summary (Assessment Task 1)

Introduction

Time flies so quickly. The midterm break is round the corner. I still remember my dad told me to be a successful entrepreneur like him since I was young. At that time, I still don’t understand what is entrepreneur. When I ask people what is entrepreneur? The answer is obvious and it would be starting up a new business just like what I’m thinking. Before I enter the university, I also plan to start up my own business in my home country. But after I enter the entrepreneur program, I realise that the concept of entrepreneurship has a wide range of meanings. 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 start-up company, offering a product, process or service for sale or hire. An entrepreneur is someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise (Sobel, 2016). However, after I enrolled in this programme, I understand that an entrepreneur has another important role which is taking good care of social responsibilities. This is what make entrepreneur different from a business man. This obligation make them way more successful than ordinary someone who just aim for profits maximisation.

The pathway that entrepreneur takes

‘Deciding which direction to take is something everybody struggles with at one point to another’ (Kushlev, 2015). We know that choosing the correct pathway is hard as we could not predict whether it is correct or not until we get to experience it. Just like what we are deciding on our study course. If we decide to study this course whether we like it or not, we still need to study unless we change our course but don’t forget about that. We need repay the school fees again as there are no refund.

Firstly, the entrepreneur always like taking risks (Fredick, Connor, Kuratko, 2016). Everyone would know that setting up your own business would be a risk as no one can guarantee that the planning will not go smoothly as you expected. After attending the course, I have figured out that risk can be differentiated into four types. One of the risk that entrepreneur will concern about is financial risk. It is because starting up a business, we usually need a certain amount of capital but they don’t have enough money. Therefore, they usually do is to borrow money from parents, loan from bank, friends or their savings. That is why there is a risk when entrepreneur wanted to start up a business. What if the business goes wrong or fail, all the money that they invested would gone. At the meantime, the entrepreneur would force to sell their properties to repay their loan and liabilities. It may even cause the family broken too. Besides, family risk is also consider part of the risk (Fredick, Connor, Kuratko, 2016). As we know that the entrepreneur would need to scarify their time, energy and emotion on their business. This would lead them having less time to spend with their family. As time getting longer, there will be a big gap between the owner and his family as they have not been talking to each other. The entrepreneur has no choice focusing on their business until it is stable to operate by his employees.

Besides, they should also willing to change and adapt new things (Toren, 2016). Everyone knows that business environment is dynamic whilst technology is changing rapidly from time to time as the old is being replaced by the new. This is because everyone is improving their lifestyle. If we don’t change, we might not be able to compete with our competitors just like the case of Apple and Nokia. Nokia used to be one of the global leader of mobile phone (Nokia) but now Apple has become the global leader of smart phone. This is because Steve Jobs is able to change the mobile phone into smart phone which it has a lot of functions besides giving a call. Therefore, the customers would eventually buy it. In my point of view, changing and transforming is one of the key factors that every entrepreneurs should not hesitate. We should understand the market’s needs and wants and make changes according to the market needs. Market leaders and monopolies will not be able to stand firm forever, eventually they will be replaced. The Nokia group will be a very good example in this case.

Furthermore, we also must learn from our mistake and not to make the same mistake again. We must be humble and able to accept criticise from other people such as stakeholders. Their feedback provide us information and problems that we face and we should look into. This could make us stronger and prevent business failure. Let’s link this statement to our real life. In our workplace, we always get complain from our customers about bad services, broken goods, low quality and others. Why do they want to complain? This is because they wants their supplier to improve and solve the problems. If the suppliers do not want to get rid of these problems, it may cause the customers to run away and seek for new supplier which can provide better quality and services. Thus, an entrepreneur sees customers as his source of duty and fulfilment.

In addition, a person that is eligible for an entrepreneur title must pay attention on social responsibilities and welfare besides seeking for profits. An entrepreneur