The entrepreneurial approach has become the spirit of the times in modern organizations. A growing trend in many corporate cultures is to nurture entrepreneurs and encourage them to have an entrepreneurial spirit. This report presents a single sample study and analysis of the entrepreneurial journey, focusing on the United States company which operated for over five years. A two-days interview provided relevant information for the whole process. The collected information is further presented and analyzed using academic articles, literature, and models.
Key Findings
- The Entrepreneur initially faced a dream age of learning, and after graduating and quitting her job, she started the entrepreneurial journey.
- The partnership helps to ease the financial difficulty that a new organization may face.
- Experience, skills, and creativity are significant elements for escalating the chances of entrepreneurial success.
- Networking, such as using social media platforms, plays a vital role for entrepreneurs.
Introduction
An entrepreneur is a significant person who has the primary role in all economic activity. The entrepreneur can turn opportunities to profit by providing goods and services to meet customers’ needs and improving their lifestyles (McKenny et al., 2017). This analytical report will focus on optimistic business entrepreneurs who are ready to take the risk for their resources to gain profit and hope for success in the future. Entrepreneurs are adaptive to the new market trends to have a competitive advantage over their rivals. This report will label the entrepreneur as entrepreneur X and their business partners as entrepreneur Y and Z. The SmartJewelry will be their company name for the business owners’ privacy. This report will display the pathway to success of entrepreneur X. Information for this report was gathered by interviewing both owners of the SmartJewelry company. The interview had a series of questions to collect the appropriate information for the report. The latter will include a summary of the company, explaining the main function of the SmartJewelry Company.
Additionally, the report will give the background information of entrepreneur X and his pathway to success, and then provide analysis to give a complete view of the journey. A comparison of the story and present business practices, models, and literature review will be discussed. The report used the entrepreneurial process model to formulate and prepare the interview to ensure relevant information extraction (Belitsk and Desai, 2016). The relevant information will be subsequently analyzed using other academic research and articles to capture the academic terms’ report findings. The report will then analyze the Entrepreneur’s journey to examine the idea, implementation, and development phase.
Company Overview
SmartJewelry entrepreneurship is located in the United States and is run by three entrepreneurs under partnership arrangement. An eco-friendly company designs, produces, and supplies handmade, vintage-inspired jewelry and accessories to consumers globally. It has been in the industry for five years and is expanding to new markets. The business started in rural Western Kentucky in the US, and the small town around it inspires all its products and services. In fact, its foundation and operation started in Entrepreneur X’s home and was initially funded without seeking capital from external sources. Entrepreneur X resigned from her white-collar job and started a journey of inspiration, goal, and creativity, forming the SmartJewelry Company.
Later, entrepreneur Y and Z joined the company as partners. SmartJewelry produces quality products, thus gaining a competitive advantage over its rivals in the market, and it has been successful for the past five years. The company has grown from selling products from home to online e-commerce; thus, it can supply jewelry globally. The customer only needs to log in to their website from anywhere in the world, and SmartJewelry will deliver the products to their doorstep. Additionally, the company’s product has gained popularity and has been featured in films, sitcoms, Fox News, and women’s magazines. It is easy to spot their product on TV shows such as Revenge, Pretty Little Liars, and many more (Belitsk and Desai, 2016). This shows that the company is effective in marketing and promotion.
The Entrepreneur
Even though the SmartJewelry is owned and run by three people, who started the company together and directed every activity which occurred daily, this report will pay attention to Entrepreneur X, the core founder. The paper will then link the other two, Entrepreneur Y and Z, and show how they contributed to Entrepreneur X’s journey and experience. Entrepreneur X worked for a white-collar job before she resigned to pursue her hobby, which later launches into global entrepreneurship. Today, she is the CEO of a multi-million-dollar SmartJewelry company. Most of her sales come from online sales, over 60 percent of the total sales. She succeeded with her venture due to marketing her products on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This move raised her business revenue to million dollars after a few years.
Entrepreneur X was a graduate of a recognized University in the United States. She took the risk of quitting her well-paying job to follow her passion for designing jewelry. Shortly, SmartJewelry Company came into existence. Entrepreneur Y and Z, who were her close friends, helped financially. These too Entrepreneurs run their own business; thus, they encouraged entrepreneur X to follow her dream and became partners funding the business. Currently, they both have shares in the company. At the same time, Entrepreneur Y is the studio manager who runs and controls the studio department and engages in activities such as taking photos to be posted on online social media platforms to market their products. Entrepreneur X found a market niche in women handmade jewelry and took a step in filling the gap. Due to her creativity, the customers loved and purchased her jewelry, and she became a millionaire in a short time, which could have taken her more years while working on the previous job.
Creativity is one of the key traits possessed by Entrepreneur X. This is the skill behind her success in the jewelry business. According to Qian (2018), creativity enables companies to gain a competitive advantage of opportunities, which develop as environmental conditions change. However, few organizations can utilize this opportunity. With more experience, Entrepreneur X gained the skills necessary to deal with the customers and to increase her product to meet consumer demand. Many customers loved the eco-friendly product and are proud to wear it on important occasions such as weddings and while filming a movie. Entrepreneur X’s characteristics were examined during the interview and compared with the successful characteristics of Entrepreneurs by Steve Spinelli, as shown in Figure 2.
It is clear from the figure above that Entrepreneur X is a risk-taker, optimistic, creative, and uses a methodological approach, building her business empire slowly and steadily, rather than an entrepreneur who acts on his or her feelings. It is true that the most important quality for successful independent entrepreneurship is activity. In addition, it can be said that it is an important attitude for entrepreneurs to take risks and change the method if it is not effective (Belitski, Caiazza and Lehmann, 2019). People who are reluctant to perfect their skills may never be able to make their business successful.
Even after starting the business, Entreprenuer X has been very proactive. She has been attending courses and seminars to sharpen her skills. Successful entrepreneurs are constantly learning. Skills and past career are important in management, but these are not the decisive factors that determine the success or failure of management. The important consideration is to continue learning before and after starting a business. Entrepreneur X should continue to enrich her knowledge about various fields of study. The shortcut to success is to immediately output what she has learned and turn it into usable knowledge (Iftikhar, Ahmad and Audretsch, 2020). Good knowledge is a weapon to confront experienced senior managers. A person who is well-informed can identify gaps easily and solve business problems with ease.
From the interview, I learned that Entrepreneur X’s motivation is also strong. Successful entrepreneurs are highly motivated and avoid defrauding. When an entrepreneur starts a business, he or she may feel lonely or anxious. However, successful entrepreneurs have a strong mental power to act even in difficult times. When faced with loneliness and anxiety, it is important not to break one’s heart. Therefore, it is necessary to make efforts to maintain a good mental and physical health.
I also noted that she has the ability to listen to people’s stories and express their opinions, as well as create a good rapport. One of the important abilities of a successful entrepreneur is communication ability. She has the skills to listen to other people’s stories, understand their essence, and accurately convey her intentions and emotions. Some people have different opinions and ways of thinking. However, if she can communicate with such people, she may obtain better ideas.
Opportunity Identification
Entrepreneur should create an organization that accepts innovation and sees change as an opportunity rather than a threat. The first step in making innovation attractive is to institutionalize the disposal of existing ones if they lost their vitality and productivity. The second step is to analyze the current situation on the assumption that all existing ones have a life cycle. The third step is to clarify what kind of innovation must be introduced, in what area, and by when. The fourth step is to decide how many resources to allocate to it based on the information obtained. At the present time, people are no longer just satisfied with the state of eating and dressing warmly, but have begun to pursue a refined, personalized, quality, and tasteful high-end life (Webb et al., 2020). Since what people enjoy in modern society is often the process, it is necessary to improve service quality, provide customers with more refined and quality services, and even make their own services not only meet customer needs, but also exceed customer expectations.
Another unique way of building entrepreneurship is by working on corporate image. Although the building of corporate brand is important, brand communication cannot be ignored either. A corporate brand that has not been disseminated is just a name imagined by entrepreneurs, and it is impossible to bring brand effects to the company (Ramos-González, Rubio-Andrés and Sastre-Castillo 2017). Currently, in the process of dealing with the fierce and rapidly changing market competition environment, the quality of products and services and the efficiency of upgrading are extremely important.
In terms of corporate brand dissemination, many companies choose to seek out well-known singers, movie stars, athletes and other media representatives. The marketing effect they bring to the company is indeed considerable. However, under the same pattern, innovation is needed, and entrepreneurs should be proactive, flexibly use the effective resources such as human, material and financial resources to realize the promotion of the corporate brand. For example, the company’s brand can be disseminated through personal Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WeChat and other online social platforms to achieve bold innovation in brand communication methods. At the same time, “I speak for myself” approach may attract more consumers’ attention.
In addition, there are too many service industries to be promoted and developed. Therefore, there are still significant business opportunities in the service industry. Entrepreneurship is about finding value in doing something entirely new. The term entrepreneurship was coined in the economic world, but as long as all other social activities use economic resources, they are not limited to the realm of the economy and apply to them (Lex et al., 2020). It is already known that entrepreneurs in education and medical care are almost the same as entrepreneurs in economic activities.
It is believed that entrepreneurship carries significant risks, but it is riskier to stay in resource optimization in areas where innovation is inevitable. Logically, entrepreneurship is the least dangerous field. However, entrepreneurship is still risky because many of the businesspeople have no methodology and do not follow rudimentary principles. Opportunity identification sets entrepreneurs aside from other business individuals since they are the brainchild of major innovation. The Opportunity Identification factors leading to the decision to launch SmartJewelry from Entrepreneur X’s perspective are assessed in Figure 3 using the Five Cs of Opportunity Identification (Danseco, 2013), linking this theory to the Entrepreneur X circumstances while she was an employee.
Using the principles above, entrepreneurs can identify different types of gaps. The first is performance gap. When demand is growing but performance is not improving, the gap is seen clearly. Performance gaps are often a macro phenomenon for an industry as a whole or for the social sector as a whole (McKenny et al., 2017). Small and medium-sized professionals usually take advantage of the gap as an opportunity for innovation. Those who take advantage of this opportunity will benefit in the long run, as other companies are busy bridging the gap between rising demand and poor performance and are unaware that someone is taking advantage of the growing demand. To use the performance gap as an opportunity for innovation, first clarify the problems to be solved and use existing technologies and resources (Welter et al., 2017). There is also value gap, which, as the name suggest, entails identifying things that people value most and then providing it to the people.
Recommendations
First recommendation for Entrepreneur X is that the company should adopt the concept of simplicity. In other words, it means decomposing complex issues or ideas into simple elements and thinking about each one. As SmartJewelry expands, Entrepreneur X ought to select the matters which seem to be as important as possible from a large number of judgment materials, and try to consider those matters from multiple approaches. In addition, as the company expands, Entrepreneur X should start seeing things from different angles. The company should re-examine its approaches from a new perspective and constantly challenge change. Successful entrepreneurs have a solid axis in their business that enable them to solve business issues amicably. Any venture will inevitably decline if one continues to do the same. Business can be maintained and developed by constantly changing without fear.
Entrepreneur X should also have managerial qualities of entrepreneurs on planning, organizing, supervising, controlling and coordinating. Entrepreneurial spirit includes focusing on unexpected success in addition to problems which have arisen in the business and holding regular strategic meetings. In addition, the top team should meet with young people on a regular basis, conduct hearings on opportunities, and provide the requested information (Frisch et al., 2020). These aspects permeate the entire organization with an entrepreneurial perspective, acceptance of innovation, and greed for new things. The company should also systematically measure the outcome of innovation (Packard and Burnham, 2021). It should give feedback on the results to expectations and know what they are good at. Additionally, it should regularly inspect the entire innovation activity, as well as evaluate the overall results of innovation in terms of goals, market position, and the relationship with the entire company. It may not be possible to quantify it, but it can be judged.
Another recommendation that Entrepreneur X should take into consideration is that the development of a venture requires an entrepreneur to master the direction, and the management of a business idea requires a businessperson to make a decision. It can be said that the entrepreneur’s thoughts and personal behavior will have a large impact on the development of the initiative (Manning et al., 2020). The image of the entrepreneur plays an important role in the construction of the corporate brand image. The individual behavior of the entrepreneur will affect the image of the entrepreneur. Therefore, the way the innovator behaves affects the business brand. In practice, magnates often ignore the impact of their personal conduct on commercial brands. The idea that artificial branding is the result of planning is more common. Therefore, entrepreneurs do not pay attention to the constraints of their own performance in daily life or work. Under the background of the information age, the actions of entrepreneurs have attracted people’s attention. Once the more abominable behavior is mastered by the media, it will become a hot spot for consumers, which will affect people’s perception of the company’s brand and reduce it.
Entrepreneur X should also aim for a niche market in order to improve the company’s competitive advantage. A niche marketplace is a small place with few competitors and specific needs. Such markets have the disadvantage of a high risk of failure, but a shrewd entrepreneur can monopolize and win the hearts of many customers if they make the right choice. Successful entrepreneurs in niche businesses do a thorough analysis and choose the suitable place which has potential for growth (Wadhwani et al., 2020). A good niche market with a future could be small at the moment but can be expanded horizontally.
Conclusion
To conclude, SmartJewelry shows a strong indication of survival shortly, focusing on customer satisfaction and producing a quality product. A recommendation for the organization is to integrate into cloud computing. This will help the business be scalable and accessible across countries without inconveniencing customers while shopping and making an order online. Additionally, focusing on the mantra would also enable the organization to devise a more suitable goal that will be appropriate in the future. This theory has proven to be efficient and effective in practical scenarios. Entrepreneur X should acknowledge the fact that entrepreneurship is a skill that is cultivated and nurtured. As a result, there is need to keep updated with the emerging trends and to be ready to identify any emerging market gap.
References
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