{"id":6218,"date":"2021-12-16T06:32:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-16T04:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/escp.eu\/thechoice\/?p=6218"},"modified":"2023-02-17T16:51:58","modified_gmt":"2023-02-17T14:51:58","slug":"so-you-want-to-be-an-entrepreneur-heres-how-to-get-started-when-starting-your-own-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/escp.eu\/thechoice\/choose-to-lead\/so-you-want-to-be-an-entrepreneur-heres-how-to-get-started-when-starting-your-own-business\/","title":{"rendered":"So you want to be an entrepreneur? Here\u2019s how to get started when starting your own business"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Many of us have thought about starting our own business – but where to begin? It might sound surprising, but not all entrepreneurship journeys have to start with a business background – or even a well-defined \u201cbig idea.\u201d Entrepreneurship expert and ESCP professor Ren\u00e9 Mauer<\/a> and Niuversity<\/a> founder Fadi Alshalabi<\/a> put some of the myths to rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Prof.<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Ren\u00e9 Mauer<\/span>
ESCP Business School Prof.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Fadi Alshalabi<\/span>
Niuversity founder and CEO<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hello Fadi! Your entrepreneurship journey is extremely interesting. After many years in academia, you founded Niuversity in 2017. To get started, can you tell us a little bit about your background and the story behind the creation of Niuversity?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fadi:<\/strong> Before I launched Niuversity, I was a member of the academic staff at the University of Damascus in Syria – so a very academic background. At the time we had over 200,000 students enrolled: sometimes, I\u2019d teach classes in front of four or five hundred students at a time. I was always conscious of the fact that each student had his or her own learning style but that they all had to adapt to my teaching style. Even at that time, I had a dream of creating an educational system that catered to everyone<\/mark>, which ended up giving rise to Niuversity, a skill-oriented Arabic-language learning platform based in Berlin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you feel that you had a certain predisposition to entrepreneurship?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fadi:<\/strong> The idea to become an entrepreneur was always there, but it was only after the crisis erupted in Syria that I began to seriously think about how to develop it. I was doing research in Germany at the time, which welcomed a big wave of Syrian refugees in 2015. One day I was distributing food with some colleagues, and I encountered five of my own students. As you can imagine, it was a very difficult moment for all of us. I delved a little deeper and I found that the language barrier was a huge hindrance for my students – brilliant young people who were extremely educated, but who lacked a concrete skill that would allow them to transpose their knowledge. I immediately knew that an Arab-language school would be able to act as the bridge they needed.<\/strong> With that said, I certainly had no formal entrepreneurship experience, so I joined an incubator and then enrolled in U-School, an entrepreneurial acceleration programme at ESCP, to get to grips with what I needed to do to make it happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, long-term success needs two things: concretization of a generic idea, and constant transformation of the initial idea.<\/p>Ren\u00e9 Mauer<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9, you mentored Fadi during his time in the incubator and then also during U-School. In the light of his comments, do you feel that anyone has the potential to become an entrepreneur, or are they born, not made?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9:<\/strong> Entrepreneurs are made, of course \u2013  what else would an entrepreneurship professor say?<\/mark> But joking aside, maybe there are some people who bring with them a certain set of characteristics, paired with a particularly useful set of skills, which allow them to succeed more easily with all sorts of projects.
But entrepreneurship can happen when an individual likes a (business) idea enough to start acting upon it. That person can be anyone. And that idea doesn\u2019t have to be big; it just has to ignite the individual enough to push him or her into action. What keeps many people from becoming entrepreneurs is that they\u2019re waiting for \u2018the big idea\u2019.<\/strong> But very often, an idea only becomes big in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s certainly a very interesting remark. Fadi, could you tell us a little more about how your initial idea began to take on an entrepreneurial shape – \u2018getting bigger,\u2019 in a sense?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fadi: <\/strong>The crucial decision was taking Niuversity online. Having a purely digital offer obviously has several advantages: it\u2019s accessible to everyone in Germany, and it\u2019s specifically adapted for an Arab-language public that isn\u2019t necessarily used to digital tools. However, the context that we were facing with our offering was that international completion rate for voluntary online learning is 8%.<\/strong> For Arab-speaking people, it\u2019s only 2%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To counter this, together with my team, we decided to teach in real time rather than via pre-recorded classes, using behavioural economics and behavioural psychology to make the experience as interactive as possible. These were not skills I had initially, so this was a part of the transformation of my idea into a viable entrepreneurial endeavour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another factor was adapting the experience to cultural norms. At Niuversity, we have now created something that is extremely seamless for our users – you receive an email, you click on it and bang, you\u2019re in the class. This we have learned through difficulties getting students into the classes. We kept analysing, adopting and changing until we reached today\u2019s results. Learning about the importance of these practical elements and requirements to make everything user-friendly was definitely part of the journey. Today, we have a completion rate of 94%<\/strong>, as well as an exam pass rate of 87%. This is a huge achievement, and it just goes to show the possibilities of what can happen when an idea is backed up by practical choices.
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Technical and cultural difficulties aside – Ren\u00e9, what would you say is something that many of us find more difficult than expected when it comes to entrepreneurship?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9: <\/strong>As we can see from the examples, the devil is in the details. The challenge itself – innovating the education space for Arab-speaking people – is in itself quite a common concept. The major difficulty, when it comes to entrepreneurship, is to accept the uncertainty of how exactly that should be done, and the failure that is connected to experimenting with different ways of doing it.<\/strong> In the end, long-term success needs two things: concretization of a generic idea, and constant transformation of the initial idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personally, I don\u2019t believe in \u2018the big idea\u2019 that overcomes everything else. Of course, there may be cases in which people have a genius \u2018aha\u2019 moment and come around the corner with this new-to-the-world innovation – but these are very rare cases. Usually, ideas themselves need a lot of work in the entrepreneurial process.<\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fadi:<\/strong> I agree \u2013 and let me stress that in my case I felt it to be even more challenging. Prior to Niuversity, I was an \u2018employee\u2019 all my life, which carries itself a degree of certainty. When I thought about making the shift to business, I said \u201cI can do it! I\u2019m a PhD holder, I lead a team of people, I\u2019m capable in my field – this should be easy.\u201d What a mistake – I realised very quickly that all my knowledge and experience was no longer appropriate for this change in career.<\/mark> In my previous field, I managed a large team but I wasn\u2019t paying their salaries. The day I hired my first employee at Niuversity, I got quite the shock – I really began to understand what entrepreneurship and building a company looked like. It was a different kind of responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9<\/strong>: I fully understand. The task of creating a new company in order to gather and organize resources is an additional challenge.<\/strong> Still, let me stress that my impression was that Fadi does have some natural entrepreneurial talent for partnering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you have a specific example of that natural talent?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9<\/strong>: Well, when I met Fadi in the incubator programme, he did a great job of applying a particular tool about five minutes after he had learnt about it.<\/strong> I had just introduced effectuation and the \u201ceffectual ask\u201d to the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Effectuation is a model that describes how expert entrepreneurs think, decide and act, and has evolved into a very useful method to shape ideas that face high uncertainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if your entrepreneurial journey begins in an industry that you know very well, it\u2019s so important to be ready to start over mentally.<\/p>Fadi Alshalabi<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Fadi particularly liked the \u2018effectual ask,\u2019 a way of asking for support that 1) assumes that the other side wants to commit something, but 2) leaves the scope of that commitment entirely open to the other person. That way, people can still say no. However, we know from research that entrepreneurs are surprised how often that commitment is more than nothing, sometimes even more than was ever thought possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After learning about the effectual ask, Fadi approached me and said: \u201cSo, Ren\u00e9, what would it take for you to include me into one of your ESCP programmes?\u201d He had been reading the start of the sentence from my own example on the flipchart, and had only added the focus of his interest into it. I was very surprised and impressed, and Fadi ended up joining our U-School programme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fadi, what else would you say has helped you in your entrepreneurship adventure?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fadi:<\/strong> It probably sounds unsurprising given my background in teaching, but community feedback and peers have been really important to my success.<\/mark> Firstly, on a practical level – I have a German business partner without whom many doors would have remained closed to me, particularly when it came to the German bureaucracy – but I strongly believe in the power of working together, of sharing a common belief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More generally, I cannot stress enough the importance of \u2018unlearning\u2019.<\/mark> Even if your entrepreneurial journey begins in an industry that you know very well, it\u2019s so important to be ready to start over mentally. I had to accept that I was wrong about some things, ignorant about others, and had I not been able to do so I would have never gotten Niuversity off the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, what practical advice would you give any entrepreneur who is struggling to find their \u2018big idea\u2019 in concrete terms?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fadi: <\/strong>I would always say to anyone starting out in entrepreneurship: One thing at a time<\/em>. Prioritise the things that are within your control and ask questions as you go. Moving from Point A to Point B is more effective than setting yourself a huge map that will only lead to frustration and disappointment!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9: <\/strong>I\u2019d offer three short, sweet pieces of advice:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  • Get clear on why you want to start acting upon an idea.<\/strong><\/li>
  • Spend time exploring what you can already do and shape <\/strong>based on your own means.<\/li>
  • And finally, make sure you\u2019re true to yourself <\/strong>about your own commitment when it comes to getting started!<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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