Introduction
Justina Bright is a successful entrepreneur who runs a medium-sized business in Sydney, Australia. She is my former schoolmate. Bright has achieved tremendous success in founding and developing a company called Empire Mobile solutions. It is among the largest retailers of mobile phones in Australia. For purposes of understanding her business story, I recently interviewed her to understand her business journey and success.
Throughout our discussion, she emphasised the importance of learning basic business principles (mostly from textbooks) and applying the same to her business. Most of her arguments also highlighted the need to understand the logical part of business operations, but, strikingly, the apparent need for a blend of factors that constitute successful businesspersons also caught my attention.
About the Entrepreneur
Bright previously worked for a mobile phone company that sold telephones (before the wireless mobile telephone market started). She worked as a sales agent. Having familiarised herself with the business-to-business background, she accumulated a lot of knowledge about the Australian telephone market. Ironically, she did not understand the same skills regarding the mobile phone market.
However, this inadequacy did not stop her from starting her enterprise selling mobile phones. At the start of doing so, she planned to open only one store and be contented with it. However, her expectations were surpassed and, eventually, she opened multiple stores throughout Australia. Today, her company makes $150 million per year and has hundreds of outlets around the country.
Bright’s Success Factors
Throughout my interview with Bright, I realised that her story had more to with being at the right place and at the right time, as opposed to applying the right business principles. Indeed, her background was in the mobile phone industry and her conviction to start her business started as a quest for her business freedom. This is why she admitted that financial freedom and independence were her greatest motivations for doing so.
Two significant attributes about her business made me believe that she was an innovator in her own right. The first attribute is her quest to sell a service, as opposed to a product. Secondly, she realised, early, that the future of business, in her industry, was in business-to-customer relationships as opposed to business-to-business relationships (as was the case in the past) (Drucker 2002).
Bright’s mobile phone company was among the first businesses to open retail outlets in an Australian shopping mall (this trend has since been duplicated by other mobile phone companies who operate using the same business model). In this regard, I believe Bright’s business success stemmed from the two innovations highlighted in this paper. However, product and service differentiation strategies have managed to make her competitive in what is now a saturated marketplace (Ibru 2009). I believe that Bright’s business success mostly entails being at the right place and at the right time because her mobile phone empire started when the mobile telephone market was just picking up.
Based on the insights highlighted above, one could easily question whether her success is attributable to luck because she was there at the start of the smartphone boom. I believe this analogy is true somewhat because Bright started her business at the onset of the market boom (Hausmann & Rodrik 2003). As she admitted in the interview, her first shop experienced a huge demand boom that forced her to go to other shops, buy their products at retail price and sell them at her shop for a profit. Success stories such as that are rare for many new businesses, but are commonly associated with successful entrepreneurs around the world.
What role did Luck Play?
I believe luck plays a pivotal role in business. However, it is wrong to believe that all people should attribute business success to this fact alone. Indeed, when entrepreneurs start businesses, they often believe that they are offering a product, or service, that would satisfy an unmet need in the market. According to Okpara (2007), Bruni and Gherardi (2004), this need could also reflect the entrepreneur’s wishes, such as wealth, independence, or fame.
McClelland’s motivation theory highlights this attribute because it argues that most entrepreneurs have only three main motivations at one time, which include the need for achievement (get success with one’s own efforts), the need for power (to dominate over others), and the need for affiliation (maintaining friendly relations with other people) (Arab British Academy for Higher Education 2015). I believe Bright had these attributes and they significantly contributed to her business success, as opposed to relying on luck alone.
Her ability to translate common business logic and principles into practice also demonstrates that luck was not the only thing that explains her business success. She demonstrated this fact by saying that her differentiation strategy mostly explains why she has been able to successfully tower over her competition for the past few years (Heertje 2006). This success clearly demonstrates her ingenuity.
Joseph Schumpeter, through the entrepreneurship development theory affirms some of the above-mentioned facts by saying that “an entrepreneur is the one who is innovative, creative, and has a foresight” (Ujwary-Gil, 2012, p. 6). According to this theory, “an entrepreneur is one who introduces a new product, introduces a new product method, opens a new market, introduces a new organisation in any industry, and finds out a new source of raw material supply” (Okpara 2006, p. 66).
Bright’s case satisfies the second and third metrics of entrepreneurship (as discussed above), because she introduced a new product method (sale of wireless mobile phones, as opposed to telephones and the adoption of business-to-customer relationships as opposed to business-to-business relationships) and opened a new market, which is the wireless mobile telephone market. Similar to the entrepreneurship attributes I saw in Bright, the entrepreneurship innovation theory emphasises on innovation, and the organising ability of entrepreneurs, which she had (Acs et al. 2011). Therefore, her success is not about luck, but her conviction to succeed.
Conclusion
Some of Bright’s business success stems from good timing, but it also involves identifying available business opportunities and exploiting them. In my understanding, luck is about having a positive outcome in a situation where there are randomly moving variables in business. Therefore, I believe that the business success of my friend, Bright, is not solely because of luck, but because she made calculated decisions and had enough motivation to take action at the “right time.” In this regard, I believe successful entrepreneurs make their own luck by formulating the right strategies and seeing them through.
Money is not such a significant factor to consider in the development of successful business plans because Bright did not have a lot of money when she started her business. Instead, she borrowed some money from her relatives and used some of her savings to finance her business plan. Her financial power grew organically throughout the years. Therefore, her story demonstrates that the lack of money is not a serious deterrent to the development of a successful business.
This learning has affected me personally, in terms of being an entrepreneur because it has revealed that even I could achieve great business success if I believe in myself. Bright’s success is a manifestation of this fact because we came from the same background, but have achieved different successes in life. In this regard, I believe that if I looked inward, identified a skill or competence that I have and can use it to provide useful products or services for the public, I could develop a workable business plan that I could use as the blueprint to start a successful business. Bright did it, I could do so as well.
References
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Arab British Academy for Higher Education 2015, McClelland’s Theory of Needs. Web.
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Ibru, C 2009, Growing microfinance through new technologies, Federal University of Technology, Nigeria.
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