Management of entrepreneurial ventures and business development

Management of Entrepreneurial

The specialized literature is filled with the description of the skills and aptitudes an individual needs in order to become a good managers. Helen Meek, Richard Meek, Francis Nicholson and Andrew Sherratt (2009) for instance state that a manager has to be integer, self-motivated, ethical, responsible, creative and ambitious. Leonardo R. Silos (2003) argues that a good manager has to possess the ability to efficiently interact with people, but has to be able to combine it with technical expertise. Eric P. Bloom (2009) mentions three categories of skills: interpersonal skills, business skills and good judgment. "Being a good manager is more than just wanting to be a manager. It requires special skills that may be very different from those you learnt in school. Beyond the technical knowledge associated with the group you are managing, there are also three basic types of skills required to be an effective and competent manager: interpersonal skills, business skills and good judgment" (Bloom, 2009).

Regardless of the traits and skills considered pivotal in the formation of a good manager, fact remains that these skills can be divided into two specific categories:

Innate features, and Learnt characteristics.

The innate characteristics are those with which the individual is born and which can support his future development as a good manager. Some examples in this sense include an enhanced attention to details as a result of perfectionism or the ability to easily interact and communicate with people. The second set of characteristics is acquired by the manager through sustained cognitive processes, such as educational attainment in the years of school or professional training programs on the job. A good manager possesses both categories of skills and is able to interconnect them in a means which results in a high quality managerial act.

In a context in which not everyone is a born leader, the training programs play a crucial role in the formation of the individual as a business professional which can understand the mechanisms, develop and implement the most suitable strategic decisions and resolve the issues which are incurred along the business processes.

Training is generically defined as "a planned procedure designed to improve the effectiveness of people at work" (Institute of Leadership & Management, 2007). Training programs are often time consuming and tedious to implement, but in spite of these immediate disadvantages, they generate long-term advantages. Cyril Charney and Kathy Conway for instance argue that some of the most notable benefits of training implementation include the following:

The reduction of business errors

The reduction of customer turnover

The increasing of the ability to generate revenues

The reduction of the employee turnover, which in turn generates higher morale and lower personnel expenditures

An increased ability to develop and implement the adequate strategic decisions

Increased operational efficiency and as such increased organizational productivity (Charney and Conway, 2005).

The importance of training is as such crucial for all professional individuals, but even more so for those who intend to launch a new venture on their own. At a generic level, the training programs would generate the same benefits for the entrepreneur as well as for the average organizational managers. As a parenthesis, the average organizational manager is understood as the individual occupying a managerial position within a company or even a corporation, and being paid by the respective entity to assume the role and responsibility of organizational manager.

Nevertheless, aside from the traditional aspect and importance of training the manager, the individual who launches a new venture is in a more imperative need of training. And this situation is the result of various particularities of the new entrepreneur, such as the following:

The new entrepreneur is often confronted with more severe resource limitations than the corporate manager.

The new entrepreneur may have centralized the life savings and all available resources in the venture, meaning as such that the risks he faces are more severe and more damaging.

The new entrepreneur often single-handedly plays the role of CEO, CFO, resource manager, human resource manager and so on. But their traditional expertise in all of these fields concomitantly would be restricted. This once again reveals the need for sustained training programs.

The entrepreneur would be faced with the need to run the new venture through multifold lenses, such as the organizational needs, capabilities and restrictions; the features of the customers -- such as purchasing powers and demands -- or the features of the industry in which the company operates.