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MASSEY is published by Massey University, Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North, New Zealand

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MASSEY has a circulation of 75,000.

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The makings of an entrepreneur

Want to know the ingredients? Claire Massey can tell you.

If you want a formula for entrepreneurial success then there are a host of conferences and authors eager to sell you one. There is Bill Gates’ formula : “Maintaining focus”; Anita Roddick’s: “Be passionate. But it’s also about survival.”; and Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos with “Aim to be the biggest.”

Whether this will help you much is arguable, and really for the likes of Gates, Roddick and Bezos their days as hardscrabble entrepreneurs are long over. To find out about entrepreneurship, Dr Claire Massey would advise you to go to the small and medium sized businesses that represent 93 percent of the New Zealand business economy. Here, not on the 20th floor of some high-rise, but staring the real world in the face day by day, is where to look for the entrepreneur. Most senior executives, she believes, could not cope with the hands-on culture of a small business.

Claire runs the Centre for Small and Medium Enterprise Research, based in Wellington. The Centre helps businesses, economies and communities to create and follow the right strategies.

And Claire has done her share of staring the real world in the face. When she became a self-employed clothing designer in 1981 she had a BA in Humanities from Massey, but no design experience. Her two shops in Palmerston North were wildly successful. (She opened them, she says, because she was uninspired by the clothes she was offered elsewhere.) After five years in the game, she closed the shop and did an MBA at Massey. She became CEO of the Palmerston North Enterprise Board (and later director of the Business Units group of the Palmerston North City Council). She worked as a management consultant for a medium-sized business while in London for three years. Back home, she completed a PhD, lectured at Massey and became head of its then new SME centre. She is also a director of the Palmerston North-based Training Company and acts as a consultant to government and other organisations in New Zealand, the UK and South Africa.

Claire’s family history validates one of her beliefs: that family is a key element in the making of an entrepreneur. Her great-grandfather was William Ferguson Massey – former Prime Minister, the University’s namesake and a leading entrepreneur of his day.

Says Claire, “You cannot farm successfully without being an entrepreneur.” Farms are the archetypal New Zealand SMEs. William’s progeny were entrepreneurs as well, and, in turn, their children and their children, of whom Claire is one.

If he were still around, William would have made a suitable subject for Claire’s latest book, produced with Dr Alan Cameron from the College of Business. Titled Entrepreneurs at Work – Successful New Zealand Business Ventures, the book presents interviews and profiles of 22 SME runners. William

Massey would sit well beside the likes of Wellington caterer Ruth Pretty, Mike and Doug Tamaki of Tamaki Tours, Auckland’s ‘Mad Butcher’ and Palmerston North bookseller Bruce McKenzie.

The authors are interested in what kickstarts an SME entrepreneur. Most, they note, start out in a necessarily small way. “Mention entrepreneurs,” they say, “and one immediately thinks of such people as Bill Gates or Richard Branson. However, entrepreneurship is important at all levels. But New Zealand is short of good role models of ordinary entrepreneurs who are happily and successfully making their way in life.”

The book complements the pair’s earlier publication Small and Medium Enterprises – a New Zealand Perspective, and the Small Business Directory 2002, produced in conjunction with BIZ and Industry New Zealand. The new book was a team effort. Claire and Alan and students of the University’s Enterprise Development Programme did the interviews and wrote up the profiles and Massey photography students took the photographs.

Claire believes in fostering young talent. She works closely with Massey graduate Kate Lewis and encouraged her in an evaluation of the Young Enterprise Scheme, commissioned by the Enterprise New Zealand Trust and completed this year. One objective was to find out what turns a high school student into successful entrepreneur. The results did not surprise Claire.

Kate reported that high school students with the right role models are more likely to become entrepreneurs. If a student’s parents are self-employed, then he or she is much more likely to become a successful, self-employed business operator. Siblings, relatives or even friends could also be role models.

Kate says the findings have important implications for developing policy to encourage self-employment. “If we’re serious about developing an enterprise culture in New Zealand, then understanding the environment that creates that culture is critical.”

The appropriate adoption of technology is also important to an enterprise culture. Claire’s great-grandfather owned and leased out what is believed to have been the first steam threshing machine in New Zealand.

He had read up on the new technology and he did very well indeed out of it.

In a nice coincidence, Claire is heading a team of academics examining the farming industry’s take-up of new technology. The work has been contracted by the Foundation of Science, Research and Technology. “We are examining ways in which individuals in agricultural businesses approach the decision to adopt technology,” Claire explains. “We are focusing on the competencies needed for the technological learning process.”