KEY POINTS:
Ken Morse has declared war on the "three Bs" philosophy of New Zealand business owners.
Achieving "the bach, the boat and the BMW" and then retiring will
not build this country's per capita income, the American expert in
start-up companies says.
Morse is head of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, based in Boston, Massachusetts, and is in the country to hold a two-day workshop for fledgling Kiwi businesses.
"As a nation New Zealand needs people to be more ambitious than just building a lifestyle company with 12-15 people," he said. "As a nation we need tech companies to go global."
Around 50 people are due to attend the workshop, entitled Global Sales Strategies for Ambitious Kiwi Entrepreneurs, which begins at PricewaterhouseCoopers' Auckland offices today.
Entrepreneurs were a "sub-culture", Morse said, and he and the Entrepreneurship New Zealand Network, which organised the seminar, were working to build that subculture.
Entrepreneurs strove to achieve way beyond the three Bs, he said.
"They're very different from what might be called mainstream New
Zealand culture.
"They work harder. This workshop is going on at a time when lots of people are still out at the beach."
This was a great time to start a company, Morse said. The economic slowdown meant there was an availability of good people and cheap office space.
"This is really gonna be bad. There's gonna be some folks who are going to find out that the old-fashioned work ethic [will] be the only way they survive.
"We've seen this before - some of the best MIT companies came out of the post-2000 bubble."
At the workshop he would teach start-up companies that they had a great advantage over their more lumbering competitors in winning
the hearts and minds of demanding customers, he said.
He also urged New Zealand entrepreneurs to form a team of people when launching a business idea.
"The success of start-ups is almost always a function of the size of teams. Lone wolves build perpetually small companies."
