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Nicholas Bhero

As an organisation grows, founding entrepreneurs are forced to delegate more decision-making to senior management. In the beginning, an entrepreneur makes all kinds of decisions and half the time they rely on their entrepreneurial gut feeling to decide on key decisions like company name, product design, product names, strategic partnerships and brand colours to employ as far as simple things like which furniture to buy.

The very same decisions are delegated to corporate executives as organisations grow. Note, these decisions are being passed to ‘Non-preneurs’ at a time when a lot more is at stake than in the beginning.

When Nokia rejected Android, who made that decision?

If you own or you are leading an organisation and you do not see the critical need to get your executives to master entrepreneurship, then you are simply treading on a thin iceberg. Every time you delegate power to these ‘Non-prenuers’, you are simply creating ticking time bombs that will one day explode in the face of your hard work and leave you with nothing.

When Blockbuster rejected Netflix, who made that decision?*

All organisations which have survived the test of time, owe their survival to the founders’ ability to raise entrepreneurs as their successors. Be it a family business, bloodline alone is not enough to justify why one should take over after you resign from that which you started.

The STIR-WUA executive certificate In innovation and transformational entrepreneurship is a perfect opportunity for organisations to expose their executives to a high pressure and demanding entrepreneurship development programme.

This one month intensive course will leave them ready to lead as entrepreneurs would or rather as capable ‘intrapreneurs’.

The programme is also a very effective staff retention tool as it teaches executives how to start, grow and probably co-own new projects within their institutions of employment in the form of products and strategic business units. This in turn translates into key staff retention, more growth and portfolio diversification for the employers.

Succession is not a question of death and retirement as most entrepreneurs are mistaken.

Succession starts as a simple delegation of tasks one used to carry out and slowly delegates to incoming employees as the organisation grows.

I once had a home-based office for one of my construction projects. I preferred to keep my gate closed, it was my responsibility to open the gate whenever a visitor came to my place.

I enjoyed watching my visitors park and would start chatting with them in the driveway, by the time we got to the boardroom our conversation would have warned us and it was always easy to start the core business talk.

When the project grew, I hired a security officer who would open the gate for the visitors. They passed through the reception and were directed to my office. They walked through my door ready to chat about business.

Everything had changed, the conversations had less laughs and were mostly about money and nothing social. I didn’t notice the loss of the social factor at the time, as I felt happier that I had grown and how my visitors now had to pass through two people to get to me.

My gate opening and reception duties had been taken over. An important culture of the organisation had been lost in growth. I had not taken time to pass on the same drive way to talk to my security and reception staff. Everything had just become so serious.

My products had gotten better but the customer experience had been lost. Even though we were now getting bigger jobs and were happy for the money, we started losing the smaller jobs which had formed the foundation of our client book.

Small maintenance jobs left our receipt book. The smaller client accounts prefer personalised experience, they want to take their time explaining the kind of work they want.

If you corner them, they don’t enjoy your service and they would rather look for a sole trading contractor.

The way an entrepreneur executes duties, even with less expertise than an employee, it always carries a certain kind of experience and strategic factors that help the organisation in silence.

The same goes for brands which distribute their products or services via third parties who have no connection to the founding entrepreneur.

Did the first ever AirBnB clients who slept on that mattress get the same experience as we are getting today?

Companies like Uber have understood the value of having your products and services represented by entrepreneurs for distribution. When Uber created their app, they could have bought many cars and hired drivers.

Would that have been a global taxi business?

Who would have taken the responsibility to protect the Uber culture without conflicting with the diversity of people in the different markets Uber finds itself operating in. In South Africa, Uber drivers get killed by the traditional taxi drivers. Would employee drivers sacrifice to stay on these dangerous streets?

How did Econet build Zimbabwe’s most subscribed bank?

When work is carried out by entrepreneurs, the sense of responsibility and accountability is phenomenal. Authority is exercised in the interest of the brand with a deliberate intention to grow the organisation.

This is not just a corporate need, all institutions including the government need to ensure their teams are built around people who have a sense of ownership and a drive to grow the institution.

Intrapreneurs with an understanding of how, ‘Their growth and the growth of the organisation are not divergent forces but rather complementary forces, which when allowed to combine, they can create the unimaginable which will not only grow but survive for generations.’

Everyone ought to have the entrepreneurial mindset, after all even employees are simply sole traders selling their skills, time and labour for a price commonly known as a (salary).

Nicholas Bhero is the chairperson and one of the trustees of STIR Zimbabwe Trust.