How Do We Grow a Blimp?
Last Tuesday I drove to Dublin at a perfectly unreasonable hour to listen to Micheál Martin say something insightful about Irish entrepreneurship in the European context; alas, poor Micheál must have got all confused, because he ended up delivering the dullest campaign speech in the history of politics.
Amazingly, he spent eight perfectly good lifetimes expounding on the need to vote yes on the Lisbon Treaty, without ever stopping to notice that, being a room full of business owners, we were quiet probably in favour of Lisbon before he’d invited us for coffee, rolls and some pre-work haranguing. The simple fact that he didn’t just ask for a show of hands, say “that’s great” and move on to discuss something of genuine interest, such as, oh, the continuous bank-bailing the government is so actively engaged in – or the recent legislation intended to bail out all those developers who (after driving up property prices with their unchecked speculation on green-field lands) are now stuck with development sites they can’t afford to build on. (Don’t worry, Dears, the government has just extended your planning permission rights for another five years.)
Micheál then managed to sneak away before the questions and answers segment of the event, which really was too bad, because I would have loved to ask him this question:
As three-quarters of Irish people work at small businesses which employ less than ten people, and as Ireland has a distinct absence of home-grown domestic businesses weighing in near or over the billion-euro turnover mark, how do we go about nurturing a few home grown international enterprises?
The best answer to my question came from Michael Shelly of the PM Group, who observed that Irish business owners tend to (as group) hold their babies a bit tight to the chest. Suffocatingly close, in fact.
Family owned businesses are the norm here, and it is not unusual to see a business close when the founder dies. Frighteningly, this is true, and it means we are not building an economy so much as banging out a weekly pay-cheque for ourselves. We are not building value. And much as I would enjoy blaming the government – this one just ain’t their fault.
Business owners need to accept that sustainable businesses need to be transferable, and that — to build a business that will survive our own demise requires input, insight, and drive that comes from outside the privacy of our own skulls. People other than the owner need to feel invested in keeping the company alive – because, if after you’re gone, no one knows how your business operates – it won’t.
