Lessons from PNG’s entrepreneurs: Enchancing our approach to business support

 by Isaac Jeffries, Senior Consultant & Accelerator Lead

In Part One of this series we outlined the context of our economic development work with entrepreneurs in PNG, and in Part Two we reflected on seven key insights we’ve gleaned over seven years of this work. Now, drawn from working intimately with entrepreneurs, founders and business owners, here’s what we’ve learned from working within PNG’s unique entrepreneurial landscape that informs the work ahead, and our practice as a whole.

The whole ecosystem matters

Entrepreneurs and founders primarily work in a community, not just a marketplace

While a lot of economic principles transcend culture and geography, one that doesn’t hold up in PNG is ‘It’s not personal, it’s business.’ This callous separation of personal identity from commercial brand doesn’t work in places like PNG: The community is too small, word spreads too fast, and reputation is extraordinarily important. This presents opportunity, and it also presents new risks.

There are valid business risks inherent in communities: the risk of upsetting people, the risk of being seen as overpriced, the risk of a business failure correlating to personal failure. Many founders we’ve worked with have stories of seeing people transgress or overstep, and so became determined not to do the same.

Identifying and exploring these risks is essential to avoid the risks turning into roadblocks. Roadblocks tend to come from big sweeping statements that all of us make: ‘I’ll never be able to…’ or, ‘One bad review will sink the business’ or, ‘Everyone expects me to…’. We’ve found a good way of weaving through the roadblocks is to ask founders questions at the micro level: How would you handle an upset customer? How would you handle criticism? PNG’s founders show remarkable creativity and resilience, and when presented with each individual challenge, handle them with sophistication and grace.

These entrepreneurs know what to do – they’ve been operating within this ecosystem forever, like all business owners – sometimes what’s required is breaking down the roadblocks into a collection of smaller hurdles.

The ecosystem values humility and rewards resilience

“If she can do it, I can do it”

One of the best parts of facilitating business support programs is the inspiration of watching people grow in real time. We get to see their ideas spring to life, sometimes watch their prototypes fall over, see how quickly they dust themselves off, and marvel at their rapidly growing revenue and team.

The phrase ‘If she can do it, I can do it’ is so valuable because it holds two crucial truths at the same time: ‘She is remarkable’ and ‘she’s not that different to me’. For business cultures that value humility, this is a wonderful perspective to be able to take. There’s no sense of competition or ranking – just an invitation to make progress alongside peers.

The flipside of ‘If she can do it, I can do it’ is ‘Would I tell her she can’t do that?’ It’s a great test to see if a limiting belief is fair or unfair. If a rule in business doesn’t apply to anyone except you, there’s a good chance that it’s an unhelpful blocker that isn’t grounded in truth. Another test of an unhelpful blocker is the question: ‘Is this belief serving me well?’ For most of the founders in our PNG programs, this question is usually met with a big laugh. They know the answer straight away.

PNG’s entrepreneurs face challenges common to all entrepreneurs

Most unpleasantness can be minimised by accepting and planning for it

As entrepreneurs and business owners, when we think about risks and risk mitigation, our brains tend to focus on the extremes: natural disasters or industry-wide shake-ups. But what really annoys startup founders is the smaller, unpleasant-but-not-catastrophic issues, like copycats or social media criticism. It reminds me of a Bertold Brecht quote: “The sharks I dodged, the tigers I slew, what ate me up was the bedbugs.”

So, when we get questions like, ‘How do I stop copycats?’, the likely answer is you can’t. And that’s ok, because a better question is, ‘Given that this will attract copycats if successful, what can I put in place as a copycat policy?’.

The truth is, we can’t control what other people do unless they massively overstep, and a lot of founders in PNG deal with issues that are both infuriating and yet technically legal. It also presents an interesting opportunity for local founders – to ask how other entrepreneurs have handled these challenges, and then copy their policies! In a lot of cases this costs nothing, and challenges like these become significantly less distressing for founders when they’ve anticipated and planned for them in advance.

We need to meet entrepreneurs where they are

We build on past efforts, but we’re not beholden to them

Business owners are often encouraged to develop a vision for the future – then design a path to reach that vision through their business. That means forming a clear, compelling version of ‘the truth’ in their mind. ‘The truth’ often starts with the words ‘Customers will…’ or ‘We can charge up to…’ or ‘People will choose us because…’ or ‘We are allowed to [x] but not [y]’.

When a business owner signs up for coaching or guidance, they tend to be very set on their version of ‘the truth’ and won’t look at alternative truths until their preferred version of reality has been disproven. They can be reluctant to start from the start, wanting to capitalise on the progress and thinking they’ve already brought with them. And fair enough – starting from the foundations can sound tedious if you think you’re close to a breakthrough and have an urgent deadline.

What we’ve learned from our work with PNG’s entrepreneurs is to meet people where they are, hear their full story, and give our honest assessment at the end.
We won’t pre-judge the situation, and in return, they aren’t allowed to fall in love with their current set of plans. In most cases, the work they’ve already put in is helpful, and their version of ‘the truth’ has a lot of validity. But it only takes one new insight to re-shape their business model:

• Several other competitors exist who they hadn’t seen before
• There is another type of major customer they could pursue
• There are other exciting menu items they could test and prototype
• Their pricing strategy is far too low
• Limiting beliefs are hampering their vision for what this could become
• This is currently on track to being a job that depends on the founder, not a business they could eventually step back from

Yes, it’s unpleasant to repeat steps, but entrepreneurs are much more agreeable when they’ve had their work considered and can see a payoff on the horizon. We’re not back-tracking, we’re helping them design a new and better business.

We need to embrace tension in business development

Accelerators are hard because they ask entrepreneurs to suspend judgement, and avoid jumping into expensive action

One of the most unpleasant words in a business development program is ‘tension’. Tensions aren’t resolved quickly, and they’re not comfortable to sit with. You’ll have the tension between where you are, versus where you’d like to be. You’ll have the tension between being affordable, versus being exclusive, or the tension between growing too slowly, versus taking on too much risk.

Founders and entrepreneurs hate tension, they’d rather take a bold action to remove it altogether. It might be through a big press release, a large commitment, ordering an economical-but-costly amount of stock, hiring five new team members at once, scrapping all their progress to focus on a new idea, or giving up altogether.

The trouble is, bold actions are unhelpful to the business design process, which generally does better through small bets, quiet experiments, pivots, and sitting in uncertainty. During our accelerators and programs in PNG, we’ve asked local founders to sit with us in this tension – to name it, feel it, but not rush to get rid of it.

Accountability is incredibly powerful

Inquiry-based approaches empower founders

Good questions can be adapted to your context, so that you can find your own answers

One of our fundamental beliefs is that entrepreneurs don’t need to be told what to do, they don’t need answers. Instead, they benefit from good questions and a range of options.

Good questions can be adapted to suit the PNG context, and founders recognise the right question for their specific situation. Entrepreneurs are pattern spotters, and if a founder can see that something has worked in a few different settings, they’re able to adapt it to their own scenario. A range of options is helpful, because it gives founders lots of choices to explore, knowing that the right option will stand out to them.

This works because it lets the person with the most information (the founder) make and own the decision, but it also brings out new options that the founder had never thought of or had previously dismissed. So, for a topic like sales growth, we’d explore ten big questions with a cohort and invite them to choose 1-2 that are especially poignant, and it’s usually a different question for each founder in the room.

Empathetic coaching enhances support

Coaching with empathy and ‘Feel, felt, found’

Some of the best peer advice comes in the form of ‘Feel, felt, found’, e.g. “I know how you feel. I felt the same way too. What I found was…”. This is an excellent approach in a local context too, and our local business coaches are tremendously qualified to offer empathy and stories in extremely similar circumstances. There’s a point where Steve Jobs’ advice doesn’t translate to being a woman in business in East New Britain, PNG, no matter how wise his quotes may sound.

What’s great for our business coaches is that it forces us to offer advice that we’ve embraced too. If we haven’t experienced it, we won’t speak on it with authority, or we’ll at least flag where our perspectives come from and where they might have limitations.

Long term programs foster sustainable growth

Because growth often comes from lots of incremental steps out of your comfort zone

It would be lovely if we could grow from within our comfort zones, or if we could make one big decision that suddenly changed everything. Annoyingly, growth usually stems from a series of small trips outside of your comfort zone. That means being comfortable with being uncomfortable and developing a habit of stepping into uncertainty.

This is why we tend to run programs over several months – usually 4 to 8 months – because it gives us all enough time to take calculated risks. It’s enough time to change our own mindsets, to let our ideas breathe and evolve, while also keeping the right amount of urgency. Each phase of work feels like a sprint, and a 3-day intensive is genuinely exhausting, but the process as a whole is like jogging a marathon with friends.

Personal Connection is Key

Resources don’t change businesses – conversations do

Books, articles and videos are not magical, and merely possessing a good resource doesn’t magically transform your business. Even reading/watching/listening good content isn’t totally effective – it’s easy for the message to pass you by, or the most relevant points to slip through unnoticed.

Instead, the greatest transformations tend to come through conversations. These make an idea or message feel immediate, relevant and tailored to your situation. A dialogue helps us to thoroughly unpack, question and debate a situation, and helps illuminate what’s in our blind spots. Entrepreneurs have likely experienced this over and over again – conversations with trusted advisors that change your mind and change your habits. The catch is, conversations take up time, they take a lot of trust, and they’re often a bit unpredictable.

In a full-day workshop, 90% of the value can come from a single 10-minute conversation, with the right person at the right time. It’s really hard to have these golden moments in isolation or at the push of a button – they happen organically when you have kind, knowledgeable people who want each other to succeed.

Our work in PNG so far hasn’t felt like creating, but rather like unlocking. We’ve simply worked with the right partners to identify talented people with great ideas, who each needed a nudge or some structure, and who came together to create a strong community of practice.

Over the last seven or eight years, we’ve learned much from PNG’s entrepreneurs, who are combining new thinking with long-held values, and are making remarkable progress on their own terms. We’re incredibly excited to see what the next decade will bring for economic equality in PNG, and for every entrepreneur we’ve had the pleasure to work with since 2017.