VincentChukwu:
The type of entrepreneur you are determines how well your business will do.
What Are The Types of Entrepreneurs?
The Innovator
The Regular
The Inventor
How Do You Tell Your Type?
Pretty simple.
You tell by identifying the basic features of each type.
After which you compare your entrepreneurial qualities to the features of each class.
This exercise helps you discover your entrepreneur type in no time.
Let the exercise begin. Below is a clear description of each type.
1) The Innovator Entrepreneur:
As an innovator, you introduce a new way of doing something. And then turns this new way of doing something into a profitable business. Compare this to the academic Innovator. First is the introduction of a new idea or thing in a journal. Then the long wait follows. The long wait is when someone practical picks up the ideas. Then works day and night to make it usable. Two classes of innovators exist. The specialist innovator and the execution-driven innovator
1a) The Specialist Innovator
As a specialist innovator, you spend your career in one industry. One unique feature of the specialist innovator is apprenticeship. As an apprentice, you spend many years under a master. During this period, y ou hone your skills and polish them to a shine. Because of the long apprentice years, many Nigerians hate this type.
In Nigeria, examples of the specialist innovator exist. One is the knowledge entrepreneur. These types are experts in technical fields. Fields like software development, medicine, engineering or accounting. Second is the skilled entrepreneur. These types are the skilled artisans and traders who spent many years learning the trade. For a third, there is the spiritual entrepreneur. These types spend many years under a spiritual mentor. Then set up a ministry after identifying a clear spiritual need. Many Pentecostal pastors made it this way.
1b) The Execution-driven Innovator
As an execution-driven innovator, you are super practical. First you look out for some profitable problems in the society. Next, you sift through a mass of possible solutions to these problems. Your goal at this stage is to make a choice from what is out there. During this selection phase, you reject most of the existing solutions. Settling for one that is feasible. The final lap is to get so many people to adopt this solution. If done well, your business becomes super successful. A living example is the richest African, Aliko Dangote.
2) The Regular Entrepreneur
This is the most popular type of entrepreneurs in Nigeria. As a regular entrepreneur, you run an undifferentiated business. You’re in business to make some money, not to solve any specific problem. Regular entrepreneurs are of two types. One is the copyist/imitator entrepreneur. The other is the bureaucratic entrepreneur.
2a) The Copyist/Imitator
As an imitator, you have less mental stress. You copy to the last detail what works for others. You bring zero of your own ideas to the business of making money. Sadly, most entrepreneurs in Nigeria are imitators. Perhaps this stems from a failed education system. A system where passing an exam depends on your ability to copy the ideas of your professors word-for-word. There is a popular cliché for this. Garbage in, garbage out. What works are what the professor say. Nothing more. In such a system, to explore contrary ideas is to court an “F”. And many with this flawed thought process go on to start businesses.
There are more examples of the imitator types than any other type. Super markets springing up everywhere like weeds. Importers of cheap products from China. Mushroom churches with no clear spiritual differentiator. Friends selling undifferentiated commodity on their Whatsapp status.
The competition in this class is super crazy. To keep up, most entrepreneurs use dodgy practices. Going from problem solvers to common criminals.
2b) Bureaucratic Entrepreneurs:
This type belong to the group of “what worked in the past will work in the future.” As a bureaucratic entrepreneur, your main worry is how stable the industry is. You avoid any opportunity with too much risk. What matters to you is a stable return on investment. You follow a set of standard rules to get a set of standard results.
This is the regular path for Nigerians with a little money to their name. The focus here is to grow wealth little by little. Problem solving is not what they think about.
Examples of this class of entrepreneurs? Vendors or contractors to large corporations. Traders in organized markets like Alaba. Franchisees (people running a business under a successful brand name). Major distributors for FMCG companies. Salary earners investing in mutual funds and treasury bills. Rural and semi-urban farmers using basic farming tools.
3) The Inventor Entrepreneur
It is hard or impossible to find an entrepreneur inventor. To make sense of this, think about this. Nigeria has 4 billionaires, but none has a patent to his name. Nor is there a popular product not patented by any of them. The richest entrepreneur in the world, Jeff Bezos, has 46 patents to his name. The richest entrepreneur in Nigeria, Aliko Dangote, has zero patents to his name.
There are many examples of inventors who are successful business owners. But because few are Nigerians, I’ll skip.
Conclusion
Now you know the types. What type of entrepreneur should you be in Nigeria? Pretty simple. It depends on a number of factors. Top of which is your education, experience, network, and capital base.
What I think? If you’re young, you can’t go wrong or broke as a specialist entrepreneur. Just choose a sector you can master in a few years. Then let the 10,000-hour rule do the magic.
Have you made the wrong choice? Is your entrepreneur type not helping you grow your business? Unlike your genotype that is set in your DNA at birth, you can still make changes.
A popular Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
https://vincentchukwu.com/what-type-of-entrepreneur-should-you-be-in-nigeria/ Wow. This is well-written and on point. I'm a specialist innovator. We'll get to the top one day! |
