Entrepreneurs play a disproportionately important role in our economy. It’s not me saying that; it’s Philip Salter, entrepreneur and founder of The Entrepreneurs Network (TEN) in a post. I agree, but I also wonder, as does Philip, why their voices all too often go unheard by those who write policies that impact their businesses.
To understand the entrepreneurial mindset, I suspect you need at least a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. If you haven’t experienced it, you may find risk-taking and discovery a step too far.
A different set of experiences
Sometimes the reason people don’t understand others is because they’ve had a different set of experiences. I’ve learned over many years, working with businesses of all sizes, that unless you’ve run a small or micro business, whether an entrepreneurial business or one that follows a tried and tested model, it’s very hard to ‘get’ what it takes.
The person working in the big business has a job, a specialism, where they do what they’re trained to do: finance, HR, sales, marketing. In the small business world, the founder/owner does all those jobs, despite possibly only being trained in one of the disciplines or even none.
Fulfilling a need
Small business people start up their businesses because they want to fulfil a need, change the world, serve a purpose, do what they love. To make the business run though, they have to fill all the other roles as well. However, how can someone working in HR or accounts for a big corporate be expected to understand what that takes? Yet we do expect that level of understanding from our bigger customers.
If people in bigger firms don’t understand our entrepreneurial ways how can people writing the policies possibly comprehend what it takes. Many won’t have worked in a business of any size and yet we expect them to take all our requirements into consideration when they write policy.
All 5.6 million active businesses in the UK – all doing different things in different sectors at different stages of business, from start up through scale up into growth – expect policy makers to understand all the nuances of where we’re at and what we need to get to the next stage.
Think how people think
People who don’t have the same lived experience won’t be able to think the way we do. As one business journalist once put it: ‘They think the way the last person they spoke to thinks.’ That last person is usually someone from a big business.
Therefore, we must find ways to reach the policy makers and engage them to the extent they understand and care. The entrepreneurial voice has to be heard around the tables where issues are discussed, decisions made, and policies drafted.
Why is this not happening already? Because we don’t present a unified engaging voice delivering consistent messages. There are too many entrepreneurs to hear from even a tiny fraction individually. There are even too many representative bodies to hear from each of them. We need to unify and decide on the clear, concise messages that we can deliver consistently over a period of time:
- 7: the number of times you have to tell someone the same thing before they begin to hear it
- 3: the maximum number of key messages because no one ever takes away more than 3
- 1: your compelling story that backs up the 3 messages. We need to tell our stories better to cut through, impact and stick
Policy makers will hear as long as there’s not just noise. It’s time we got together to deliver our messages. As entrepreneurs surely that’s not beyond our combined innovative and creative power. There’s a budget coming in the Autumn. If we’re to continue to be disproportionately important to the economy we have to work together to get three key messages to the Chancellor about what entrepreneurs need to thrive. It’s too risky not to take the risk. We’re seen. Now we’ve got to be heard.
