I recently had a long conversation with my hairdresser (an apparently inescapable element of a simple act of grooming) which made me think about the cultural aspects of entrepreneurship. Annie is Vietnamese and her family fled Vietnam in a leaky boat more than 20 years ago, with no particular objective other than to get away from their home country. They then spent 3 years in a refugee camp in Thailand before finally being allowed to migrate to Australia.
I was marvelling at the energy and enterprise of this family. Annie and her sister began a small hairdressing business straight out of hairdressing school – she could have gone to University but this would have delayed her business career. The sisters sold that business after 3 years and set up another in a more affluent suburb where they could charge more for their services. The business is very successful and flawlessly run – they are always on time with appointments; they hardly ever refuse an appointment – working back rather than lose business; their data-base enables them to remember their clients’ children and dogs; and they both know all the salon’s clients so they can cover for each other whenever they take a rare holiday. Mum and cousins help out with the manual work.
The family has just opened a restaurant where the sisters pitch in after the salon is closed to help their parents and the other family members who are employed there.
They all work such long hours but there are no complaints, they are all enormously proud of what they’ve achieved and driven to build the existing businesses and open new ones.
I asked Annie where that drive to be in business comes from. From an Australian viewpoint, her answer seems strange – it comes from needing to feel secure. She explained that, in Vietnam, it is very hard to find work. Unless you have your own business, or have a relative with one, you will have great difficulty making a living.
For Annie’s family, being new to the country, that same impetus applies in Australia. By having their own business they don’t need to rely on someone else to give them a job – they provide their own.
From their perspective, business failure is, relatively speaking, not a huge risk. If you work hard enough, and the family support you, you will succeed. You are then in a position to support the family.
The traditional Australian view of going into business focuses on risk. Certainly in recent decades it hasn’t been hard to find a job. You can live a very comfortable life as an employee. Having a business means having to risk some of your own money, work long hours and put your house on the line. The trade off between risk and reward often fails to justify taking the risk.
There is a well-known formula which prescribes that, for change to occur, there needs to be a level of dissatisfaction with the current situation that, together with a vision for the future and a plan to achieve that vision, outweighs the cost of change.
In ‘the lucky country’ that level of dissatisfaction with the current situation often just isn’t enough to outweigh the risks of changing from being an employee to running your own business. In terms of the formula, therefore, you need to have a very compelling vision, and a clear plan to implement it, in order to compensate for a mediocre level of dissatisfaction. On this analysis, our businesses will more often spring from a burning ambition to bring a business idea to life, or be your own boss, than a need to put food on the family’s table and a roof over their heads.
Perhaps this partly explains our “tall poppy syndrome”. The level of comfort that allows us to choose not to be enterprising makes us suspicious of those people that are. Risk-taking entrepreneurs are often seen as “sharp” - people who see themselves as different from the rest of the pedestrian population. And when these tall poppies fall we say “See what happens when you try to try to get above the rest of us. You should have been content in your comfort zone like we are.”
Newcomers to our country, especially from non-English speaking countries, often don’t have a comfort zone. For them, being in business isn’t about risk but about security. Business failure just can’t be contemplated and so, whatever sacrifice is needed in terms of time and effort, they’ll do it. Work/life balance is a luxury for people who feel secure. It will, in many cases, be a luxury their children and grandchildren will have, once they are educated here, speak the language, and develop networks and qualifications.
Many of today’s professionals, including me, don’t have to look far back up the family tree to find ancestors who came here from overseas, established businesses and worked night and day to give their children an education and a choice in how to make their living.
We can only be thankful that the enterprising spirit created by necessity in other cultures is transplanted here – even if it is only for a generation or two.