Saturday 26 March 2016

Encouraging Our Entrepreneurs

The retail revolution has been described as an amazing opportunity to reinvent the way we do business. Customers are said to be ready for innovation and excitement as they abandon the old ways of shopping and look for new stimuli. The Queen Victoria Market is full of entrepreneurs but are there barriers to their creativity?

What are the things that stop you from being entrepreneurial? What are the things that would make your entrepreneurial ideas easier to implement? What is standing in the way of you achieving change? Is it finance? Is it knowledge? Is it red tape? What help do you need?

Last week this website posted an article about training courses for small business, and gaining knowledge is certainly part of the puzzle. But, as one trader put it recently, sometimes it is just reluctance to reveal new ideas that holds us back. Revealing your new idea requires a degree of trust in the system and perhaps that trust needs some work. A system that actively encourages entrepreneurial input and sets up protective guidelines for the entrepreneur may need to be set up here at QVM.

Of course not every new idea needs approval. The New York burger store that introduced spectacular milkshakes at twice the normal price didn't have to go through an approval process, except perhaps that they probably needed council help to manage the queues outside their store each day. That would be a nice problem to have. (See separate article)

Let's push this conversation. Success in an uncertain retail future will require big doses of entrepreneurial flair. We do need to provide the right conditions for that entrepreneurial flair to grow. What is holding you back?