Making new Greek Entrepreneurs
by The Greek Analyst | Originally published on The Greek Analyst.
Guest post by The Greek Analyst | Originally published on The Greek Analyst.
🕴️ Making new Greek Entrepreneurs
A few weeks ago, I was reading the latest Global Entrepreneurship Report by GEM.
Some key findings stood out to me about Greece today:
Not many new entrepreneurs
The percentage of adults in Greece who were already starting or running a new business was a modest 6.7%, fourth lowest in GEM jointly with Lithuania, but an improvement on the 4.9% of the previous year.
Low entrepreneurial profile in public
Entrepreneurship had a fairly low public profile in Greece, with [only] one in three adults knowing someone who had recently started a business (second lowest proportion in GEM behind Thailand), less than one in two adults seeing good opportunities to start a business and few more considering themselves to have the skills and experience to be able to start a business themselves.
Serial entrepreneurship is lacking
In all but one economy (Greece), those who have exited a business in the past year are more likely than the general population to be expecting to start a business, and, in many cases, much more likely.
These are some startling findings at face. Let’s dig a little bit deeper.
Behaviors & Attitudes of Greek entrepreneurs
How do the entrepreneurial behaviors and attitudes of Greeks compare to the rest of the world? Well, in most cases we score below average.
Self-perceptions. According to data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), Greeks believe they have fewer opportunities available to them. We are also very afraid of failure. This might be a key reason why the intention to start a new company is so much lower in Greece than in most other countries.
Activity. Even though we have many owners and managers of established businesses (primarily SMEs), we have a low proportion of the active population that is actually building new early-stage entrepreneurial ventures today.
How is that possible in a country where business making, maritime trading and retail markets run in its historical DNA and small business ownership is so high?
A few hypotheses:
Economic: The crisis was brutal. It decimated entire business sectors and its pains are too recent to forget. This has raised the perceived risk of starting something new and reduced the ability of people to leave their salaried jobs. High taxes also make exceptionally expensive to start, set up and run new a company — what brilliant mind thought of 50-100% tax downpayment by default each year?
Cultural: Instead of something similar to the “American dream” (i.e. no matter who you are or where you come from, you can make it), we get lost somewhere between “it’s only who you know that matters” and “I hope the neighbor’s goat die.” We do not celebrate winners and love to hate on losers. The Greek society is also too informal. This has led to many small (often, family run) businesses that are not able to scale and fewer successful large companies to emulate.
Political: We do not have the right institutional framework for new businesses that operate in a global world to thrive in. Greece is too bureaucratic and has a very complex legal framework that changes all the time. Entrepreneurs cannot properly plan for the future of their company and always see the state as an unpredictable adversary (unless they feed of it).
The “missing entrepreneurs” of Greece
OECD has a very useful but relatively unknown metric it has started tracking: the number of “missing entrepreneurs” as a share of actual entrepreneurs within a country.
By “missing entrepreneurs”, OECD mean the untapped entrepreneurial potential from under-represented members of society (i.e. women, youth, seniors, the unemployed, immigrants and people with disabilities).
Surprisingly, Greece has the lowest percentage!
This might seem like a paradoxical finding, but if we think of the large number of existing (family owned) SMEs in the country, it should not be as surprising.
Still, there is so much more that we could be doing in Greece. According to OECD:
If everyone was as likely as 30-49 year old men in business creation, there would be an additional 55 000 early-stage entrepreneurs. Of these “missing” entrepreneurs, virtually all would be women.
Clearly, we have a very long way to go when it comes to women entrepreneurship.
We also have an amazing opportunity to expand the pie, if we make it easier for women to enter the marketplace. To that end, it’s very positive to witness some of the recent efforts of the government to enable that transition.
Changing the narrative
We hear a lot about the rise of Greece’s tech scene. There are also other sectors that present fertile grounds for new entrepreneurs, such as manufacturing and agriculture.
Many older Greek companies that have survived the financial crisis are now thriving. There is a special kind of resilience tied to their success — this is why I refer to them as donkey enterprises.
I often go back to this post by Nikos Tsafos (now Chief Energy Adviser to the Greek PM). It talks about stories of entrepreneurs creating successful businesses in Greece at the peak of the crisis about 7 years ago.
We need to listen to these people more often and talk more about their stories.
It’s all about changing the narrative.
Most young Greeks today are contemplating what to do with their future. Do we want to push more of them abroad? Do we want to keep them in Greece trapped between a terrible corporate environment or an all-consuming public sector?
We should enable an alternative path — that of a successful Greek entrepreneur.
Once the richest man in the world, Aristotle Onassis was the most famous Greek entrepreneur of the 21st century.
Onassis might have been a complicated man, but he was a very clear business genius. A risk-taking maverick who inspired an entire generation of Greeks to build a better fortune through global entrepreneurship.
Try to think of even one example of similar caliber since his death 50 years ago.
It’s hard, right?
I believe it’s time to change that.
If you agree, help me spread the word by sharing this article with anyone you think can help Greece make not 1, not 2, but tens of new Onasses over the next 50 years.
It might sound crazy today. But sometimes crazy is all we need to get started.
