Entrepreneurship not for everyone

He said it requires drive passion a lot of sacrifice and a high appetite for risk add- ing that for every successful entrepreneur there are probably a hundred failures.

Camps made the comments as he launched the first of a number of events hosted by the business school this week to observe Global Entrepreneurship Week 2016 the first time it was marking the week with a whole week of events according to Stacy Charles liaison officer for the Business Incubator who delivered some remarks at the start of the evening’s programme.

Camps said the school’s Business Incubator was working with several different companies including one which provides information technology (IT) services; another which develops mobile apps and several which are involved in agriculture including one in aquaphonics another working with cocoa and one in e-commerce showcasing local and Caribbean products to the world market. He said yet another was involved in social entrepreneurship which he described as taking women in situations of conflict and giving them an opportunity to create and sell jewellery. He said the incubator helps these entrepreneurs by helping them avoid the mistakes that new entrepreneurs make by providing mentorship and helping them source financing for their businesses.

By way of inspiration Camps told the entrepreneurs that he had always felt driven to make his own money rather than have it given to him by his parents and that his own journey as an entrepreneur began when he was twelve years old and he began delivering newspapers to make money. He said he and his friends eventually decided to go into business as disc jockeys to make more money and they soon realised that in order to make even more money they needed to play at bigger parties which in turn meant that they needed bigger speaker boxes. He shared some of the challenges of fulfilling that desire admitting that eventually his mother put a stop to that ambition by forcing him to abandon his dream of becoming a DJ in favour of studying for his exams and eventually shipped him overseas to take advantage of further educational opportunities.

He confessed that he sometimes regretted the end of his dream of becoming a DJ considering the strides made by local DJs.

Also delivering some brief remarks was Dr Balraj Kistow a lecturer at the business school and the programme director for the school’s Master of Small and Medium Enterprise Management (MSMEM) programme. He spoke about “Growing Your Business” and outlined the different methods of achieving growth such as organic growth expanding by growing the business’ customer base increasing sales per customer or expanding through inorganic growth which is by focussing externally or by merging with another business or acquiring another business. He led them in asking themselves the question “what is holding you back?” saying the answer might be too many competitors; too much risk; being too focussed on the current customers of the business as opposed to focusing on attracting new customers.

He suggested that the new business might be hampered by inadequate working capital asking whether the young business people had given sufficient thought to where their revenue was coming from and the timing of the income of that revenue.