Beg and borrow
Finding finance will be a continuous challenge, warns John Teeling.
Issues for minority entrepreneurs
MENTORS
Dr Thomas Cooney
Dr Thomas M. Cooney is academic director of the Institute for Minority Entrepreneurship (DIT), and a research fellow at the Dublin Institute of Technology. He is president of the European Council for Small Business (2009-2011), a member of two European Commission Expert Groups, visiting professor at the University of Turku (Finland), a board member of IRCSET (Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology), a board member of INTRE (Ireland's Network of Teachers and Researchers in Entrepreneurship), and a board member of ICSB (International Council for Small Business). He has researched, presented, and published widely on the topic of entrepreneurship, including the books New Venture Creation in Ireland (with Shane Hill), European Cases in Entrepreneurship (with Rickie Moore) and Irish Cases in Entrepreneurship. Further information is available from his website www.thomascooney.com.
Issues for minority entrepreneurs
25.02.2010
People who fall into the minority entrepreneurship category – people with disabilities, from ethnic communities and the over 50s – face additional and distinctive challenges that mainstream entrepreneurs don’t face, says Dr Thomas Cooney, director of the Institute of Minority Entrepreneurship at Dublin Institute of Technology.
“Enterprise agencies and related training organisations don’t appreciate the need for tailored approaches so people in these groups need to recognise their additional distinctive challenges. Then the question becomes how do they deal with them,” he says.
Patience is paramount
“For example, one of the biggest challenges the immigrant community faces is gaining trust in terms of customers and suppliers. Unfortunately there is no easy solution to this other than time and building relationships. The immigrant community has got to appreciate when going into business that when making initial contact with people they need to be more patient than they would be at home.
“They need to account for that delay in their business plan in getting in customers and building credit terms with suppliers. In building up relationships, the issue is around trust, not about them as individual – it’s a cultural issue. Immigrant entrepreneurs tend to take the problem personally when it’s not meant that way.”
Challenges
A survey Cooney’s institute did last year showed that building trust was one of the key challenges facing emigrant entrepreneurs. Gaining access to finance was their number one challenge. “They identified lack of access to finance from government agencies, but the vast majority of these enterprises are small locally traded-services that don’t qualify for such supports,” he notes.
Contributed by
Dr Thomas Cooney
Dublin institute of Technology
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