Entrepreneurship is hot. It is exciting. Many want to be entrepreneurs immediately upon graduation from schools. I have a word for you: NO. Yes, you are not likely to thrive in Nigeria if you start any business immediately upon graduation. Besides capabilities, you need to learn, build networks and test the waters to find your navigation path.
While you can hire people as you grow a business, it is very likely you would do most things at the beginning. So, it makes sense to learn how to do some of those things while working for another person.
Entrepreneurship is a high intensity call – it is not a vacation. If you decide the school-CEO path, in Nigeria, you will likely run a “small business” and not a “startup”. But no matter what, good luck even as I tell you to search for a job and learn how things work before you become the boss! Yes, work for someone and get a decent level of experience before you open that shop!
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Of course, that does not mean that you cannot move from a college dorm straight to running your own business. Possibly, some might have done it in Nigeria. Yet, life is largely a statistics – there are more successful business people who worked for others than those who jumped into the Founder/CEO role immediately upon graduation.
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Comment 1: Thanks for this insight, Prof Ekekwe. This your view is consistent with your earlier evaluation of the success of Igbo Apprenticeship System(IAS) otherwise known as stakeholder capitalism in your groundbreaking article in HBR. Speaking of IAS as fertile ground for Founder/CEO training, I imagine that the system could provide entrepreneurial immersive experience for our young graduates going into business in Nigeria. Not every student will land a job in oil industry or Broad street (the usual suspects and every graduate’s dream) upon graduation, and such experience could easily prepare these outliers as future job creators than job seekers, thereby mitigating the mounting and scary underemployment and unemployment ratio in Nigeria. This experience is even crucial because Nigerian formal sector is not formal. Successful managers often combine practical training with patience and some street smartness, which IAS provides in abundance. My point is that time has come to make IAS module a requirement in our schools all the way from high school to graduate level bridge the gap. I need to go back and read that article again, lol.
My Response: The principle works in religion, trading, and all domains of business. You cannot run a church on day one. Most times, someone has to pastor you before you break out,.
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The fresh out of school entrepreneurs, will they hire their peers as employees or experienced professionals? If they hire the latter, how will they lead them, or will the experienced professionals be the ones leading the wannabe entrepreneurs? It is not hard to determine what will implode or fail from the beginning.
If you have never worked in a corporate environment, you are already limited in matters of decision-making and culture, even communication will be a challenge. Learning on the job only applies if there’s a job to learn from.
Well, if you have your funds to experiment with, anything is possible; but if people will invest, they want to be sure that you are capable of holding things together, some form of track record will be demanded.
Even if you want to setup a super store or supermarket with your own money, you still need to learn where and how products are sourced, the profit margins, pay grades for employees; any one who failed to learn before setting up the shop, you will learn them via your losses.
There is a process to every meaningful and repeatable outcome, but if you consider carelessness as a virtue, then anything goes.