Entrepreneur is not a dirty word

What’s wrong with being called an entrepreneur? Lots apparently.

A few days ago I attended a workshop of entrepreneurs held by the Victorian Government and Ernst & Young to try and nut out some ideas that could be fed into policy development to assist entrepreneurs in Victoria. It was a great initiative, although I am not sure the Victorian Government collected a lot of ideas it hadn’t already heard before.

Anyway, the room contained some of Victoria’s most successful entrepreneurs and my role was to facilitate a session on: “The future of Australian entrepreneurs: Global heroes or small poppies.”

The session was loosely based around a piece in The Economist published in January that pronounced that entrepreneurship was undergoing a renaissance the world over. It described entrepreneurs as global heroes and says that entrepreneurship had gone mainstream, supported by leaders on the left and the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, and reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists.

So I set the scene, quoting from The Economist. But almost immediately we hit a roadblock. I asked the room of about 60 entrepreneurs this: “You go to a barbecue and you are asked what you do. You say I am an entrepreneur. What happens?”

Well guess what? It emerged that that conversation never even gets started, because they never refer to themselves as entrepreneurs and don’t want to be called entrepreneurs. Instead they call themselves anything but, such as chief bottle washer, business owner, shop keeper and so on.

One of the entrepreneurs commented that they still feel the word “entrepreneur” has negative connotations around the spivs, financial manipulators and thieves that operated in the late 1980s. Another entrepreneur suggested we need a new word to “replace” entrepreneur.

The entrepreneurs – sorry, chief bottle washers – went on to say that among the barriers to expansion was a tall poppy culture. In a nutshell, they felt a strange mix of emotions; ignored, marginalised or picked on for success.

I hope you can appreciate my challenge here. We were five minutes into a long session on how to develop an entrepreneur culture or policy, and no one wanted to be called an entrepreneur.

Then up shot a single hand. The hand belonged to a man who was significantly younger than the rest of the entrepreneurs in the room. He said he was very happy to be called an entrepreneur, that his friends think that entrepreneurs are cool and fashionable, and that many of them aspire to be entrepreneurs. He was obviously bemused by the attitude of those around him.

You looked at this confident young man and knew that he and his mates would change the culture. But surely we don’t have to wait for the younger generation to run mainstream businesses, and have their say on lack of support for growing businesses, before Australia can undergo its own entrepreneur renaissance.

That could take decades.