If the same business idea were given to a Spanish entrepreneur and an American entrepreneur, the American would probably turn it into a multimillion-dollar corporation, while the Spanish entrepreneur would end up giving the business the James Cameron treatment (sinking it, Titanic-style).
We don’t mean to criticise Spanish entrepreneurs in the slightest, since they haven’t received the same business culture that American entrepreneurs get from their school days. So I’m sure any Spanish entrepreneur will recognise themselves in some of the common mistakes we’ll go through below.
When I talk about a Spanish entrepreneur, I mean the Hispanic world as a whole: Spain, Colombia, Chile and all of South America.
The most common mistakes Hispanic entrepreneurs make include the following:
- Looking for money for the business without having drawn up a business plan or planned the strategy to follow in the medium and long term. Anyone can start a business, with or without business knowledge. The hard part is making it grow.
- Starting big: most Hispanic entrepreneurs set up a well-equipped office before the business even gets going. They hire staff before they’ve made their first sales. They’ve never stopped to think that the biggest companies in the world started in a garage, not in an office or a factory.
- Hiring mistakes: the Spanish entrepreneur tends to hire friends and family, confusing friendship with professionalism. That’s why Spanish companies with great potential never stop being family businesses.
- Accounting: he doesn’t think he needs advice from a professional accountant. He keeps his accounts himself, or hands them to a bookkeeper who charges half what a professional would, and if that bookkeeper is a relative or a friend, so much the better, because he thinks that way he won’t be cheated.
- Lack of ambition: as Michael Douglas said in Wall Street, ambition, for lack of a better word, is good. The Spanish entrepreneur thinks he’s ambitious because he creates 10 to 60 jobs. But he tends to think that expanding his business would bring him losses rather than profits.
- Too much ego: by this point, he doesn’t need advice. Why would he listen to what an employee might contribute when that person is his subordinate? He has built up his company, more or less, on his own. So why listen to someone who, as he sees it, hasn’t achieved anything?
- His circle: he tends to surround himself with people less intelligent than he is, perhaps to feel superior or to control them more easily. The idea of having someone smarter in his professional circle scares him. He doesn’t think that person could bring him new ideas and successes; he only thinks he might be cheated.
- Finances: the Hispanic entrepreneur hasn’t had a financial education. He has heard about reinvesting capital, but he thinks reinvesting means getting a new car or renovating his house, all at the expense of the business’s profits.
- And finally, the Hispanic entrepreneur tends to treat his business as his workplace rather than as a business. He has grown up believing he must work harder than his employees to set an example, and so he becomes a slave to his own business.
I know this may sound like very harsh criticism of the Hispanic entrepreneur, but if you’re going to take it as criticism, take it as constructive criticism. And if you’re a Hispanic entrepreneur, you’ll surely recognise yourself in more than one of the mistakes we’ve described, although you probably don’t think of them as mistakes, since it’s the only way we’ve been taught.
To better understand how our entrepreneurial mindset differs from that of Americans, we’ve prepared the following article, where I’m sure you’ll find the reason for the difference: Differences between a Spanish and an American entrepreneur
Further reading
Featured image: Oysterboy9, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
