First of all I would like to describe what does entrepreneurship means for me. I understand entrepreneurship as a process of organizing or managing a business in a daring way with an innovative point of view, and a lot of risk taking.
At this point, we can compare if this description matches with owning a small business. From my point of view we can say that there are plenty of small business owners which can be classified as entrepreneurs. But on the other hand we have owners of other kinds of business as traditional business which also takes risks owning a small business but their ways of managing those activities are not focused on innovation. For example a traditional shoe maker who has being doing the same business for the last 30 years its not an entrepreneur, he might used to be 30 years ago but anymore.
To conclude, this terms have lots of things in common and sometimes both go together, but there are differences between them.
Question 4: If you start a company, will you expect to always be in control, or will you be willing to share control with others if that will help the company grow and make all the participants wealthier?
In my opinion, from the very begining you can have the control of the company, but as soon as it starts to grow and become a larger institution you will need to delegate control in other people so the management will become more efficient and will let the company grow faster and in a better way. If you do not share control with others there will be a point where the company gets stocked in terms of growth.
Question 7: What are the growth issues entrepreneurial companies face?
In terms of growth, one of the most important issue is the decission of letting investors get into your company as stakeholders or not. This issue will really determinate how the company is going to grow. This same issue will also take place further on when the company is big enough and you have to decide if an IPO will help you company growth or it is worthless.
Another issue I would like to mention is the location of the company. There is a moment when the growth expectations of the company starts to decrease because the location of the company does not allow it to keep growing. In this case you will have to face the problem if it is worth to change the location to a place with better growth expectations or it might have to many risks for the company or even may be start to expand the company to other places to keep growing.
I think your understanding on the comparison is quite similar with Natalia’s. So I want to ask you the same question: do you think acts that help the company adapt can be count as innovative? And could you explain a little more about why the shoe maker might be an entrepreneur 30 years ago?
When you say “If you do not share control with others there will be a point where the company gets stocked in terms of growth”, what do you think are the reasons for being stocked? Lack of funds? Entrepreneurs could not manage?
When you discuss the growth challenges, you actually talks about the control issue. That is smart and very true indeed. What do you think is the influence of technology advancement on the location issue you mentioned?
I think that any innovative change, is a change that in the future will help the company. But not every change that helps the company has to be innovative.
It is just a possibility, but 30 years ago the shoe maker started to make shoes with a absolutely disruptive process that nowadays every shoe meker uses..
About the share of control, as human beings we have limited capacities so for a single person is impossible to manage all the company control when it has a cosiderable size. So there is a point when you have to choose to keep growing and share control, or keep all the control and stop growing.
There is no doubt that the technoloy advance has help a lot to companies that for any reason are not located in the main economic capitals. It depends a lot in the kind of bussines, but I fairly agree that tecnology advance has helped all the companies facing location problems.