Africa-Press – Eswatini. Entrepreneurship has proven to be an integral aspect of our lives.
Whether it’s street vending, a mobile money agency, or a large corporation, it all comes to one conclusion: entrepreneurship goes beyond just making profit.
True entrepreneurs understand that their existence lies in the purpose of their business. So, whether you are considering starting a new business or you are already running one, you need to understand the purpose of your business and make sure that your customers and the wider spectrum of the community understand why you exist.
Your success as an entrepreneur depends on what you are offering and why you are offering the products or services.
If your purpose is to just earn a living, you will find your business failing to grow because its growth lies in the people you do business with. Purpose-driven entrepreneurship is therefore beyond making profit and beyond the owner of the business. It is about offering value and transforming people’s lives.
What Is Purpose
Whether you are starting your business because of a brilliant idea, a great opportunity, or just to make a living, having a purpose holds the key to the success of whatever you will be doing. Purpose answers the question, Why am I doing this? To set up and run a successful business, purpose should be engrossed in your vision and mission.
So where does purpose come from? Living itself needs to have purpose, and whatever a man does in his life needs to have purpose. Purpose helps you create values and goals. Your purpose in starting and running a business is not something you need to go to school for, nor do you have to find it.
Unlike in life in general, where many preachers of purpose-driven living tell us to find our purpose, entrepreneurial purpose is what you create yourself.
When you create purpose, you give birth to something meaningful, valuable, and tangible. Creating purpose involves working hard on what you want to offer, who you want to become, and what you want the world around you to become.
Your purpose might not be to make a profit or generate an income. It might actually be to spend money on bettering the lives of other people. There is no universal purpose for entrepreneurship. Each entrepreneur has to define his or her purpose and transform it into an enterprise supported by goals, vision, and values.
Questions such as why, what, who, how,where, and when will help you create a powerful purpose. Why do you want to start the business? What do you want to offer?
Who do you want to benefit from your business? Where will your business be located, and when are you going to start it? How will you run the business?
These tough questions are crucial when starting a business, even when you do not understand what purpose means.
Solution-Based Approach
Businesses that survived the turbulence caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the global economic meltdown, among other challenges, provided solutions to the prevailing crises.
A business that is started in a community with the purpose of addressing the problems faced by the community stands a great chance of growing and staying in business for longer.
Starting a solution-based business is one way of creating a purpose for your existence as an entrepreneur. Many young people have come to me asking me to help them create a business idea, and I wonder why their businesses would be established on.
Many of them would state that there are no jobs, so venturing into business will help them earn a living. While there is nothing wrong with that, and many small businesses are basically started for that very reason, a business idea should be based on solving people’s problems.
Your need for employment is one of the problems that needs a solution, but the bigger problem lies with the people in the community.
While you address their social needs, which should be the prime purpose of your business, that business will in turn become a solution to your problems. Once it becomes a solution for your own problems, its survival is not guaranteed. You may get customers as you start, but as people fail to get their needs met or fail to understand the purpose of your existence because of a lack of value, they will leave you.
I have read and learnt that, and I also love to say that if you want to make a million dollars, you must provide a profitable solution to a million-dollar problem. Purpose-driven enterprises grow fast and become profitable. People will spend their hard-earned income on solutions to their problems.
Develop An Idea
I am sure by how you understand the definition of an entrepreneur. In summary, an entrepreneur is a source of business ideas and goes out to act on those ideas to deliver a solution to people’s problems while bearing all the risk with the aim of making a profit. An idea could be something that answers the question, ‘How? Having identified a problem for which you are willing to take a risk to provide a solution, you need to find a way of solving it.
Your idea will then help you decide the nature of your business, define your market, develop a business plan, and decide how to meet the financial, technical, legal, and other requirements to get started. An idea will help you develop your vision and create your purpose. Without an idea of what you want to do, you will not know how to do it.
Offer Value
Your solution to people’s problems should go beyond just eliminating the problems. It should go as far as improving people’s lives. A purpose-driven business provides profitable solutions to people’s problems and helps them improve their lives. Your business might not directly improve people’s lives, but it must help people in certain areas of their lives in a way that makes it easier for them to improve their lives.
If your business directly helps improve their lives by adding value, it is purpose-driven. People have their own purposes, and if you become an integral part of their lives as an entrepreneur, you grow with them.
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