The Seed of Enterprise

Leon Fear runs Fear Group, a global strategic research and investment business

Often people ask whether an Entrepreneur is born or made.

The answer for me is simple. Entrepreneurial skills can be taught but the true essence of an entrepreneur is part of your DNA, or not as the case may be.

You can be entrepreneurial in someone else’s business or organisation, it doesn’t have to be your own.

SME’s, meaning any business with 250 employees or less account for a huge section of the UK’s economy. Over two thirds of private businesses in Britain are family owned. That’s around five million businesses.

What drives these businesses and the entrepreneurs behind them to carry on, often for generations?

Guaranteed wages and a lovely new car certainly aren’t likely when you consider the odds stacked against most businesses.

Entrepreneurs are usually goal driven. Without a goal, whatever that might be, there is no motivation and without motivation there is nothing.

The happiest people I know have goals. Most people who don’t want anything, whether it be something material or otherwise, are usually pretty miserable.

Making sure that free enterprise is allowed to get on and create the jobs to enable the economy to grow is absolutely essential and creates the revenue needed to fund our vital public services. 

Creating growth in the economy is crucial as you cannot keep on borrowing money with no mechanism for paying it back.

If a business or individual does this, in the end it goes bust; if a country does it, the national debt grows, often quietly without anyone really realising until it’s so big the very issue is buried from one generation to the next because frankly nobody knows what to do about it.

Often people complain about there not being enough funding for public services but where does this money come from to start with? It is a point often missed and certainly not one taught whilst I was in school.

No one ever taught how everything is paid for, the roads to be surfaced, the street lights, the police, fire and our amazing ambulance services on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week – full of unsung heroes working around the clock.

They should be paid more and be better respected in society.

To do this, we must allow private enterprise to rise and pull forward to create the revenue that pays for everything we all want, need and have often come to expect.

We should be able to expect it, but just like a farmer expecting their crop to produce a harvest, we must first sow the seed of enterprise before we reap the harvest of modern life.