I remember a few years ago googling ‘What is an Entrepreneur?’, and the definition given was ‘a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit…’.
The reason I googled it was because I wanted to find who or what defines an Entrepreneur and provides this person with this kind of title.
I have often thought of an Entrepreneur or Entrepreneurship as a recipe with a lot of risk, a hell of a lot of hope, a bit of confidence, a substantial amount of creativity and a great whopping lot of passion . With this comes the desire to also be an opportunist – one who is willing to go out there and invest time and effort in finding that ‘niche’ and that ‘something missing’ in society to then create the perfect recipe for a business that if all goes well will provide beneficial profits.
Having being raised in a small family that was very steeped in te ao Māori, tikanga and te reo rangatira, my sister and I were fortunate to have also been brought up with the ability to live between the both worlds of ‘Māori’ and ‘pakeha’. The purpose I guess was about having the comfortability and choice to grow and be present in both worlds giving us a wider perspective on what’s going on and how to make a choice that will benefit us and how we live life – I guess…
Although our parents weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths, they’ve made sure that we didn’t go without. Through the efforts of our grandmother, before passing in 1986, she set up a Whanau Trust and Committee with the aim of increasing whanau engagement and increasing opportunities for our future generations and future security. And through the combined efforts of the whanau contributing to that, we are fortunate to have been successful with businesses, ventures and assets that each whanau member has brought to the Trust and managed by the Committee.
I guess through looking at what’s been done, our grandmother set us up to carry a legacy which is very entrepreneurial in looking at the recipe I initially listed, however; although we have this asset in place to assist us, I am still not sure whats in the make-up of an entrepreneur as what my grandmother has done is not what we classify or term as being “business”. I guess its just been ‘a thing’. A thing that we have done for so long as a whanau that its termed as community for the benefits we gain, are then often given back to the community via way of supporting sponsorship’s, internal family funeral cover, but mostly marae and hapu development.
But again, despite the success of this being able to bring whanau together, create internal opportunities for whanau by whanau, I guess we haven’t seen the opportunity of commercializing this to create a better position where the profits are used to further better personal gain, however the idea of labeling this as Entrepreneurial is something that I’m still uncertain of. I am however, hoping that through either this current venture our whanau have or initiating and developing another one on the horizon is something I am keen to learn about and define my initial question of ‘what is an Entrepreneur’, and hopefully define and label myself as being part of the “Entrepreneur Clang…”.
At the moment, its still ‘Entrepre…what?’.