Member Article

Yorkshire is full of them: But what actually makes an entrepreneur?

In the past few months (when I wasn’t on my jollies) I have been to a seemingly endless amount of business events, but there were two that really stuck out in my mind because of the entrepreneurs that were showcased there.

At the Connect Gazelles Summit last year, there seemed a plethora of Yorkshire-bred entrepreneurs such as James Lambert, the recently retired R&R Ice Cream chief (previously a bull semen salesman) and travel entrepreneur Deirdre Bounds of i-to-i fame, as well as perhaps lesser known but equally impressive entrepreneurs John Graham of Go Outdoors and Simon Biltcliffe of Webmart.

Made: The Entrepreneur Festival in Sheffield was a highlight because of speakers like Michelle Mone, a Scottish entrepreneur who’d come from a, shall we say, not particularly nice part of Glasgow and worked her way up to the CEO of MJM International Ltd, which owns the Ultimo lingerie brand, and Fraser Doherty of SuperJam, a young guy, quirky and unafraid of being different, but coming across throroughly honest when describing the difficulty of setting up a business, let alone at his age.

What connected all of these entrepreneurs was that they had both had humble beginnings and achieved a ridiculous amount of success, while seeming to sound pretty normal, and let’s be honest, who loves a toff that gets everything handed to them on a platter? They can’t help it but somehow it diminishes their ‘success’ (however you want to quanitfy that.)

In my mind though, that’s what makes an entrepreneur. Working against adversity, overcoming any lack of experience or prejudice. I would have to disagree with Nima Sanandaji of The Telegraph - if you read his article, his criteria for becoming an entrepreneur are so ridiculously high that you’d think reaching that status was virtually unobtainable.

He says that starting a one man taxi firm isn’t entrepreneurial - sorry mate but if you have to look after your own money in a business, work all the hours God sends and generally keep the business afloat, and if you manage to even grow that business under such difficult circumstances as have been in the past 5 years, you easily deserve the term “Entrepreneur” stamped across your face in my book.

Entrereneurship in itself is merely the setting up of a business, developing a plan, identifying and acquiring the human and other resources and being fully responsible for the success or failure of that business. It sounds simple, but few of us could truly make it work on our own.

As Confused.com businesswoman Sara Murray has said, the face of entrepreneurialism has changed extensively in the past couple of decades - when once it was looked down as a non-job, it is now something to aspire to be, but only for those who can handle the responsibility.

This also doesn’t mean that you can only become an entrepreneur once you have hit the jackpot, having a turnover (for the 6 months to 30 June) of £2. 09 billion, like Virgin Media.

We luckily have our fair share of what I’d call true entrepreneurs in Yorkshire, but starting a business is one of the most difficult things a person can do in the world of careers, and anyone who can, who has the drive to do so, in my mind is worthy of being called an entrepreneur, whether they’re a one-man band or head of a multi-national - you can guarantee it took a hell of a lot of work to get there.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Clare Burnett .