Entrepreneurial Leadership Is Everywhere
This Is How It All Began — My Story as an Entrepreneurial Leader
When I was ten, my father rewarded me with two pullets for my excellent performance at school. Brimming with excitement from the reward, I began rearing chickens at home. My idea was to raise the two chickens until they grew and reproduced more. I took ownership of the chickens and always checked and fed them before going and after coming from school. Eventually, the chickens grew, started reproducing, and increased to ten. I would then crack jokes at the home fireside on how I would become rich from my fast-growing chickens. In managing my chickens, I sold a portion of eggs from my stack of eggs to buy myself school materials and let the other batch of eggs hatch into new chicks. Rearing chickens enabled me to afford school and lifted the burden of paying school fees off my parents’ shoulders. The impact of raising chickens was phenomenal; it was making me financially independent.
Four years later, I wanted to do poultry farming as a business. My vision was to grow a formal business that supplied eggs and chickens to the local market and generate much profit for me. However, the more I tried executing my plan of exploding into a medium-size chicken-rearing business, the more unsuccessful my idea proved to be because the breeds I raised had low production to meet the market demand. The chickens took a long time to grow and delayed providing eggs, making my goal of becoming a supplier of eggs and chicks unattainable. I suddenly realized a need for more productive breeds of chicken in order to increase the production of my poultry business and meet market demand. Therefore, I started looking for exotic breeds of chicken that grew faster and laid more eggs per day. Searching for exotic breeds almost went hopeless as none in my community raised different breeds from mine. Fortunately, the turnaround in my business came when I heard, on local radio, of an exotic breed of chicken called Plymouth Rock Chickens that had been introduced in the neighboring district. As the news of these exotic breeds was new to my ears, no community member had heard of this more productive breed before.
The next day, I sold half of my old breed chickens and walked all day to buy exotic breeds from the other district. Fortunately, the transaction went well, and I returned to my community with five Plymouth Rock Chickens. The result was impressive after laboriously feeding the exotic and cross-breeding with local chickens: chicks from the blend of two breeds grew faster and laid more eggs. Consequently, the production of my business boomed, and I was able to satisfy market demand and generate profit. When my neighbors noticed the success of my breeding strategy, they were inspired and adopted my way. My approach has become famous in my community. People currently use it for breeding their local and less productive chicken breeds to exotics, as precisely as I did, and improve their poultry-farming ventures’ production.
To me, innovation here means innovation everywhere. My story of improving my poultry farming does not merely represent a good business strategy I implemented; it also typifies how innovation should positively affect others. The introduction of Plymouth Rock Chickens in my business increased production, profit, and split innovation all over the community. As people adopted my strategy, the output of their poultry substantially increased by multiple folds. My innovation sparked economic growth and made my community better off. My experience as a young entrepreneur taught me that including the community at the core of the business is key to creating sustainable and inclusive businesses.
My life goal and dedication are to use my entrepreneurial capabilities to originate positive innovation in my community — — the only proper way to serve my community. I have made it a responsibility to solve the world’s alarming problems, because I believe that is the only way I feel comforted and empowered.
