Entrepreneurs need to start up a pressure group fighting for their interests
If you are a doctor, an accountant, a farmer or a teacher, there are pressure groups, professional bodies and trade unions that speak out on your behalf.
If you are an entrepreneur, however, you are on your own. You have no voice, nobody to represent you on TV and the radio, nobody to express your concerns to government, nobody to explain to the powers that be that the latest regulation, tax or gimmick from Whitehall or Brussels will merely make your life even harder. This is a ridiculous situation. There are more entrepreneurs in Britain than ever before, and they will be creating the companies that will allow us to begin rebuilding our prosperity.
The UK needs an entrepreneurs’ union — a slick, professional pressure group relentlessly fighting for wealth creators and promoting mass entrepreneurship as the answer to the crisis of confidence that is currently engulfing capitalism.
Big businesses are well represented by the CBI and others; large multinationals also have the resources to fight for their own interests independently. Established smaller firms have their own groups.
But Britain is in urgent need of a savvy, hard-hitting campaign that speaks up for entrepreneurs, a distinct group of business leaders who tend to be very different, in temperament, attitude and interests, to the more managerial, career types who run long-established blue chips.
The main difference between corporate managers and entrepreneurs is one of risk and responsibility. Somebody who spends their life working for big companies – manufacturers, retailers or banks – will never have had to risk their own capital.
They usually enjoy a fundamental separation between private life and work; they may be given stock options but in psychological and practical terms remain employees, not owners. While they will be accountable for their budgets and performance, their remit will usually be relatively narrow.
In some sleepy large organisations, being a manager can be only marginally different to working for the public sector – there is a huge amount of support, an HR department, an extensive IT helpdesk, an office maintenance division, lots of training, company pensions, cars and canteens.
There is nothing wrong with that, of course, but if you don’t show up for work one day, little really changes; the organisation carries on like a super-tanker. The buck stops with the CEO, who is usually surrounded by the corporate equivalent of a civil service.
The life of an entrepreneur is radically different: setting up a business from scratch, fundraising, finding and retaining staff, dealing with endless problems and navigating IT and office crises is an astonishingly challenging process.
Nothing is more terrifying than having to meet the payroll every month, come what may. Salaries sometimes have to be paid directly from owners’ bank accounts; the job is all-consuming and all-defining. Entrepreneurs are never off duty.
Permanently dissatisfied with the status quo, they are agents of creative destruction. Those who create and grow new businesses, more than anybody else, know what it takes to get things done, to invent new products and more efficient processes.
They have first-hand experience of the obstacles facing disruptive newcomers, all of the blockages that make it harder for start-ups to succeed and grow. They tend to be more optimistic than average; a successful entrepreneur, almost by definition, is somebody who comes up with solutions to problems, often before anybody else has even worked out that change is necessary.
Yet, compared to just about every other group in society, such people have no real voice in the public arena, even though we are in desperate need of fresh ideas to reinvent our economy. A tiny handful of media-savvy figures are occasionally wheeled out by broadcasters but they tend to be unrepresentative.
This is a terrible shame because entrepreneurs have a great message. They tend to hate corporatism — when big firms and politicians collude — and suffer most from misguided labour market regulation, punitive, incomprehensible taxes and all the various barriers to competition created by costly red tape.
In many cases, entrepreneurs’ views will clash with those of bosses sitting at the top of UK Plc, who might privately quite like state-approved oligopolies and cartels. Start-ups are desperate to break into the energy markets and banking, for example, and have lots of good ideas about lower prices and better customer service.
There is another reason why wealth creators need to play a greater role in the public debate. Entrepreneurship is the way that ordinary citizens can embrace capitalism and make a real difference to the world around them; it is the proof that business and capitalism can work for outsiders and ordinary folk, not just for those who are already powerful and wealthy.
It is therefore the answer to Ed Miliband’s Left-wing critique and a powerful demonstration that the market economy can empower and liberate the little guy. In the years ahead, widespread entrepreneurship will probably also be the best way to create jobs and opportunities across the country, with a new army of start-ups trading globally via the internet.
The lack of a pressure group advocating all of this is becoming increasingly bizarre for another reason. There were a record 2.17m firms registered for VAT in Britain in March, up 0.9 per cent or a net 18,000 on the year; the previous peak was 2.16m in 2008.
Separate figures show that around 400,000 new businesses have already been registered in Britain so far this year, putting the country on course for half a million new firms in 2013, according to StartUp Britain.
Based on this total, the group estimates that 523,410 new companies will be formed this year (a gross figure), much higher than last year’s 484,224, according to an analysis of Companies House filings.
Not all of these firms are led by fully-fledged entrepreneurs, of course: some are vehicles for self-employment, others lifestyle businesses and many long-established organisations.
But the evidence suggests that there are more entrepreneurs in Britain than ever before and that more and more people want to join in, especially among a younger generation keen to take its destiny in its own hands.
There are already groups helping business creators, such as Duncan Cheatle’s Prelude or Julie Meyer’s Entrepreneur Country. The Entrepreneurs’ Network, a new think tank, has just been launched.
But there remains room for an activist, campaigning organisation to go and bat for wealth creators. One such outfit – the Association of Self-Employed People – came close in the 1970s but there is nothing like it today.
Others have proposed an entrepreneurs’ union in the past, including Doug Richard of Dragons’ Den fame and most recently Rohan Silva, a former Downing Street adviser; ironically, we now just need a social entrepreneur to take matters in their own hands, and set something up. It is an idea whose time has most definitely come.