‘Entrepreneurs don’t need money to make impact’

Many entrepreneurs are quick to single out lack of funding as one of the greatest challenges to fulfilling their potential. But Sheena Lindahl, an American entrepreneur, believes that in most cases what entrepreneurs lack is guidance and mentorship and not necessarily funds to make their breakthrough.

Sheena, also co-Founder of Empact, an American organisation that celebrates achievements of young entrepreneurs, said: “The whole idea of “I need money to start” is a limitation that a lot of people have -- it’s a very easy excuse for why people don’t start. There are innovative ways to start small that can then attract resources.

“I think in reality funding is important and is great to have when you are launching your business, but I think there are so many different ways you can start a business with low funds,” Sheena told the B&FT when she recently visited the country to interact with some entrepreneurs.

To prove that business owners don’t always need funds to achieve their goals, Sheena cited an example of a young entrepreneur in the US who was able to overcome the “lack of funds” mentality to achieve his ambition.

“This entrepreneur wanted to build energy efficient houses -- that needs a lot of investment. He was actually rejected by lots of investors. Instead of giving up, what he did was to go round already finished houses and advise owners on how to make their houses more energy-efficient and then connect them with companies already working on energy-efficiency.

“So in actual terms, it took him nothing apart from the knowledge that he already had to go ahead and do the consultancy and get paid. At the end of the day the consultancy was paying more, so he shelved the idea of building the energy-efficient houses.”

Sheena was in Ghana recently to interact with some entrepreneurs who are battling various challenges in order to become successful. The main objective of her visit was to inspire the entrepreneurs, mostly in the outskirts of urban areas, to success.

“There are entrepreneurs that have started and have gone on to become very successful who are not people who necessarily had the highest of education or lots of money…everybody starts with different challenges and some people with no resources to start with, but it’s really about the mindset and how they move forward,” she said.

One wonders whether solutions to entrepreneurial challenges in the United States will mitigate those faced by their peers here as Ms. Lindahl’s sought to share with the recent visit.

She concedes that while challenges faced by entrepreneurs may differ from country to country, a lot of the time the responses entrepreneurs have to these challenges are quite similar.

“When you can’t get funding to finance your ideas, do you let that knock you down or do you find an innovative way around it? When things are not going the way you want, it’s quite a discouraging feeling…so it’s important for entrepreneurs to meet and share their experiences and draw inspiration from one another,” she points out.

But after spending a week with some entrepreneurs in the country, it is important to know what Sheena makes of the entrepreneurial environment. She didn’t hide her admiration for the spirit of these entrepreneurs.

“There’s a great entrepreneurial spirit here. My perception is that there’s a great hard-work ethos, like people really believe in doing what needs to get done in order to push themselves forward…and there are lot of people who have seen problems and have decided to go after them -- to me those are strong indicators. If you look at the global entrepreneurship indicators, those are things that show that there’s a lot of promise for an area,” she summed up.

But given the immense potential of the Ghanaian entrepreneur, should we be expecting the next Facebooks, Twitters, and Snapchats? Well, Sheena believes that the youths’ focus must be on creating sustainable businesses first rather than glamorous businesses.

“Africa and Ghana should not focus too much on creating the next Snapchat [a popular smartphone messaging application valued at about US$4billion] for instance, as businesses do not need to be the most glamorous to have the most impact,” she says. Most businesses, according to her, in being sustainable will provide a source of income to many youths -- a fact she says must drive entrepreneurs.

Sheena’s organisation, Empact, celebrates young entrepreneurs below the age of 35 years for their achievements. Her recent visit to Ghana -- where she travelled extensively to meet local entrepreneurs -- was to bring entrepreneurs together so they could learn from each other as well as share experiences.