Following a very successful MarketingTalks seminar we looked back and review what it was all about. The post comes a little late as we were waiting to add videos.

Rebecca Kihlman a lecturer in Metropolia gave her students the task of reviewing the seminar and we decided to use their reviews for this follow up post.

Taneli Tikka has been working as an entrepreneur already 11 years – since he was 21! He has been involved in software and social web enterprises such as IRC-Galleria, Muxlim, Stardolls, Dopplr, Applifier and in a lot of other projects. Additionally, a very interesting fact was that he has not studied entrepreneurship or management of small companies as a specific programme in any higher educational schools. However, he graduated from Helsinki School of Economics as the 1^st of his class in the Executive MBA programme. He has failed with many undertakings during his journey, but as he referred to Michael Jordan – the failures lead to success as it also works in extreme sports.

The aim of his presentation was to point out the core qualities and challenges of being a good entrepreneur, especially in Finland. He also mentioned some basic mistakes that beginner entrepreneurs tend to do, such as overestimated formality. According to Taneli Tikka, fancy clothes do not make you more successful. Additionally, he emphasized how crucial uniqueness and differentiation are in business, because as he highlighted every product has a competitor. Taneli also referred to the ability to adopt quick decisions as an essence in enterprises. Although there is a lot of paper work to do before hand, some investors tend to not even bother to read the business plan. According to Taneli’s approach, investors are interested in You and the business You have. He gave a good example of how investors often observe the entrepreneur him/herself and give him/her only 60 seconds to describe the company and the idea, because they seek creativity and the “flame”.  According to the investor, understanding quality is more important than quantity. He also emphasized the  clarity of the purpose of the enterprise. Taneli Tikka analysed the current opportunities in Finland to be an entrepreneur. He claimed that entrepreneurship in that particular country is difficult due to its government’s creation of poor possibilities. The entrepreneur mentioned high tax rates imposed on enterprises and the negative consequences of bankruptcy that reflect on the entrepreneur’s reputation.

Irina Attias’s Account

The second speaker of the MarketingTalks seminar was Ramine Darabiha. Like the previous speaker, Taneli Tikka, Ramine was very passionate about his topic: being an entrepreneur. I will mention a few points that made an impression on me and the first one is ambition. He emphasized a lot that an entrepreneur has to believe in him/herself. You cannot afford to be afraid to act because then you waste your opportunities so at least you need to try. He also posed the questions: Can your goal in life be to obey rules that are set by other people? Does that really give you satisfaction? So based on those questions he asked us to be brave and have our own goals.

Next he talked about stamina. How do you react when you fail? Is your team strong enough that you support each other even in the face of problems? Still even if there is a risk to fail, we shouldn’t be afraid of unknown tomorrow. When you have your vision you just need to follow it. One topic in his presentation was particularly popular to the audience who were mainly business students: the talk about business plans and especially the tone that he used while speaking about them. He thinks that a business plan is a good tool for the entrepreneur himself to evaluate all the things that you need to take into consideration. He continued that in reality it is quite rare that anyone else reads them. He also mentioned some critical questions about business plans e.g. How to predict the future? There are many unpredictable things happening every day in the world so I think the criticism was justified.