Entrepreneurship is defined as the starting of new businesses, usually by an individual who identified a gap in the market and trail blazed their way to success as sole owner and CEO. But you don’t have to share this passion of building your own business to see the value in utilising the same skills for your future career aspirations! We explore the relevancy of entrepreneurial skills for your career in this free one-hour webinar, and hear from a USQ student about how she found success by nurturing these skills and taking a chance.

2. Welcome to Country

4. Student to entrepreneur: Five critical factors to turn your
entrepreneurial dream into success
Retha Wiesner
Professor in Management
Director of the WiRE Program
www.wireprogram.com
Research Program Leader: SME
Performance and
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Institute for Resilient Regions
University of Southern
Queensland

5. Do you?
• Recognise, create and act on
opportunities?
• Identify opportunities for creating or
releasing value?
• Do you form undertakings/
endeavours/ventures/projects that
bring together resources to exploit
those opportunities?
• If yes, then you are entrepreneurial.
• Entrepreneurship is not an
extraordinary phenomenon but lies
dormant in each of us as
entrepreneurial potential to act.
• Venture – endeavour, enterprise,
project, business, undertaking,
initiative, pursuit.

7. Five critical factors of success
Purposeful passion/what
energises you? (why?)
Courage (execution) Luck (attitude and relationships)
Savvy and & capability
(how and what?)

8. Purposeful passion/what energises you?
• The business plan myth
• Finding the why to the what and the how of your venture
• The why = authentic purpose and the soul of a venture
• Manifested as: Purpose and intensity of feeling + endurance
(maternal-like)/attitude towards work + differentiation +
commitment
• Your passion for your idea is contagious
• Passion is what you purposely and ‘insanely’ love doing or
what it is that energises you continuously.
Factor 1

9. Fuelled by purpose and
hunger, founders with
strong purposeful passion
characteristics are
compelled not only to
build a venture but to
share their mission and
vision with the rest of the
world.
Purposeful passion is not ‘lust’

10. When are purposeful passion and
commitment most prominent?

11. Limitations to
• Execution and market acceptance
• Practical, legible plan of action
• Control: what’s more important—the idea or its reach?

12. Let’s explore and share your purposeful passion

13. Poll
What is your purposeful passion? If
you are comfortable sharing, please
let us know via the chat function on
Zoom.

14. Let’s explore your purposeful passion
• What is your name?
• What do you love to do? (write, design, teach, talk, crunch
numbers?)
• Why do you love doing it so much?
• What are you most principally/especially qualified to teach other
people?
• Who do you do it for? (Others)
• What do these people want or need that you give your
skill/passion to them?
• How do they change as a result of what you give them?

15. Business savvy and capability (how and what?)
Factor 2

16. Business savvy and capability (how and what?)
Academic/Book savvy Practical savvy People savvy Creative savvy
Book + practical + people + creative savvy = insight, sensibility,
expertise and responsiveness = Business savvy

17. (a) Academic savvy - analytical prowess and intellectual discipline
informs strategies and skills (execution & action)

18. (b) Street savvy
• Street savvy individuals bring a hard-
headed practicality and momentum
that cuts through stasis.
• They read situations and contexts
rather than statistics.
• They rely on observation,
experience, and common sense to
come up with what seems to be an
obvious solution that their academic
savvy colleagues may never have
considered.

19. c) People savvy
• A people savvy business-builder
engages a pattern recognition that
decodes and intuits how people will
react.
• They factor their perceptions of the
opinions of others into your decision
making.
• Your comprehension of others’
intentions and actions helps you to
create and maintain strong
relationships and, by anticipating
the next moves of your business
rivals, maintain your competitive
edge in the marketplace.

20. Master three types of critical conversations
People savvy business-
builders are great at three
types of critical
conversations:
1) one-on-one meetings
2) small-group discussions
3) town-hall-style
convenings.

21. Practice social inclusion (empowering others/participation)

22. Prioritise, focus and cultivate your network of relationships

23. d) Creative savvy
• Visionaries, idea generators,
or innovators – grab on to
them.
• Ideas + push boundaries +
ability to express your
creativity into reality.
• Those with high creative
savviness are phenomenal at
sensing and interpreting
patterns.

24. Formula for savvy entrepreneurial students
• Pattern recognition and trend
spotting = Academic savvy + Practical
savvy + People savvy + Creative savvy.
• The ability to organise, simplify, and
prioritise is perhaps the most
important quality in Savvy-oriented
entrepreneurial students.
• It’s about grasping macro and micro
trends earlier and faster by connecting
different observations and different
types of savviness.
• Watch out for spending too much time
on focusing on financial
performance targets rather than on
the inputs that drive those numbers.
• Find out what caused the results. Find
out the why?

25. Factor 3: Courage
The courage to make things happen with the
will to act – specifically at critical moments of
initiation, endurance and evolution
• Courage to initiate - It takes courage to begin
something, both at the earliest stages of business
formation and at the later, slower-growth stages—
when the need for change is evident, but too few
people can make that change happen.
• The courage to endure: The optimal mind-set?
Failure is not an option, but a reality.
• The courage to evolve - those with the courage
to evolve are able to change the direction of a
venture in the face of new competitors or new
consumer attitudes, or they are able to recognise
the need to change themselves out of leadership
for the greater good of the business.

26. Why courage?
• People prefer the status
quo.
• A courageous individual
isn’t someone who
doesn’t feel fear; they
are someone who acts
despite their fear.
• The bottom line: Ideas
mean nothing without
practical action.

27. Factor 4: Chance/luck
• The occurrence of events in
the absence of any obvious
intention or cause.
https://en.oxforddictionaries
.com
• Luck is an undeniably
necessary component of
business success.

28. Developing a chance/luck attitude
• A chance/luck attitude = humility + intellectual curiosity
+ optimism.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: more luck tends to come to those
people who believe in possibility and see the good in
something before they see the bad.
• Chance/luck attitude + luck network = possibility to
influence certain types of chance.
• Chance/luck network: A subset of one’s network that brings
unforeseen positivity (those who want to share your path).

29. Factor 5
BUT…

33. Poll…
How comfortable are you with
failure?

34. Limit the number of hats
you wear
• You can’t do everything by yourself
and be successful.
• Call out for help
• Determine what you do best

35. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box.
What’s the story behind your work?

36. Have a lot of passion for what you are doing.

37. It takes time, never give up.