Business Strategies

Maintaining the Entrepreneurial Spirit as the Business Grows

Written by Samuel Muriithi for Gaebler Ventures

The entrepreneurial sense that defines the nascent organization in its infancy might in some firms start to gradually grow dim as the organization begins to grow and enjoy success. The onus lies with the entrepreneur in as far as finding ways to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit is concerned as it is only by doing so that stagnancy can be avoided.

As the firm grows the entrepreneur needs to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit.

In addition, employees must remain cognizant of:

• The customers' needs
• Their reasons for purchasing
• The problems they encounter
• Their specific wants and needs
• The necessity of improvement

It is quite the case that bureaucracy and stagnation have taken over in growing firms as a consequence of the entrepreneurs' success and the means by which this was achieved. Such entrepreneurs will themselves tend to become comfortable with the status quo and become resistant to change. They subsequently adopt an authoritarian type of control whereby the management is almost always against the culture of change.

The employees start feeling alienated by this turn of events and develop a resistance to it. Attempts to change matters will often be initiated from the bottom up and once these proposals are blocked by the entrepreneur the net result is that the organization is denied of a source of ideas that may have elicited further business success.

Maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit is the only way through which such a doomed scenario can be avoided. This is only possible if the entrepreneur is able to embrace the idea of an adaptive organization. This is a firm that makes the most of various entrepreneurial traits, the most basic being the urge to stake out new opportunities and believe that more success lies ahead.

The entrepreneur who is willing to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit needs to restructure the business such that:

• All within the organization are cognizant of what the market requires and with this information be able to develop relevant and achievable goals and targets
• All in the organization realize that there is more to it than their individual roles; they ought to own the organization's broader objectives as well
• No individual role will be deemed superior or dominant and in this way it will become evident that success is comprised of a fine balance of all roles involved

In maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit and continuing to pursue more opportunities the organization needs to realize that:

• Such pursuits should be rewarded accordingly to ensure that every employee is motivated to join in the effort
• These pursuits must incorporate elements of patience and steadfastness, all encouraged by an environment where individual employees don't feel intimidated in trying to become innovative
• The global business environment is dynamic and uncertain and as such the successful firm will be the one that is flexible enough to adopt with speed to the constantly changing circumstances

Samuel Muriithi is a business owner in Nairobi, Kenya. He has extensive international business experience in the United States and India.

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