1.

0 Introduction

Every year, many millions of dollars are spent on starting new enterprises. An entrepreneur is a
person who accountable for risk and outcomes, with appropriately managing the life cycle of the
firm and to overcome the factors affecting the growth of a firm.

The critical factors leads to succeed in business will be how a business owner managing
entrepreneurial growth. Sunpizz Sdn. Bhd. has been chosen as an entrepreneurial firm for
interview project, which will be discuss in the later section.

2.0 Company Background

Sunpizz Sdn Bhd was owns by Mr. Andy Yek Hock Siang, who was graduated under Bachelor
Science (BSc) in Quantity Surveying at University of Port Mouth, London. Currently, Sunpizz
Sdn Bhd located at Lot 1398, Centre Point Commercial Center, Miri. Sunpizz Sdn Bhd
transforms themselves from traditional hand drawing designers and carpenters in making the
furniture into new innovation of cutting edge 3D technology, where the design are done via
computerized 3D sketch up and the furniture is selected from design catalogues and can be
custom-fit to size, color which best suits your preferences.

In 3 years time, Sunpizz Sdn Bhd are now boost themselves with increasing franchises in
Malaysia, which are now able to see their ventures in Kuching, Sibu, Bintulu, Miri, Brunei, Kota
Kinabalu and Kuala Lumpur.

3.0 Managing Entrepreneurial Firm’s Growth

Accessing the entrepreneurial firm’s growth will be the crucial pathway which leads the success
of business enterprises. A successful entrepreneurship has to discover the golden globe of
opportunities. Nevertheless, it is a great challenge as continuous changing economic scale and
the perceptions of the societies nowadays.

Thus, the survival and growth of a business needs the entrepreneurs to equip themselves with
strategic, tactical skills and abilities in innovation, finance and business acumen in an effort.
These knowledge and abilities would be essential in part of the business’s formulation.
4.0 The Life Cycle of a Venture

The graph below represents the different stages of a venture life cycle. It involve the
development of a new venture, activities during start-up, growth of a venture, stabilization of
business and decision for innovation or decline of the venture.

Figure 1.1 Venture’s Life Cycle

4.1 Venture Growth

In Figure 1.1, it represents the traditional venture’s life cycle of a business. Sunpizz Sdn Bhd are
now under venture growth. The growth stage would require some minor changes in the
entrepreneurial strategy. The external environment would affect the business strategy such as the
potential competitors, emerging competitors and other market forces. The growth of the ventures
would typically meet the administration tasks of the firms. For instances, the entrepreneur would
relinquish the enterprise or move to other firms which resulting in the failure of the business.
Stage of growth often signals the beginning of a metarmorphosis from a personal operated
venture transform into group-structured operation. Hence, entrepreneur need to analyze their
managerial styles, to realign behaviors and time management, which will be useful for
entrepreneurs whose enterprise are in the growth stages.

5.0 Key Factors during the Growth Stage

When entering the venture growth, there are mainly four key factors an entrepreneur needs to
consider. Firstly, control of the entrepreneur firm would be discussed, followed by the sense of
responsibility on entrepreneur. Next, tolerance of failure would examine how a firm manages
degree of failure. The last is the changes an entrepreneur need to retain from time to time. Each
of these factors would affects the firm growing towards either succeed or failure.

5.1 Control

During the growth stages of the entrepreneur firm, the growth would creates problems in
command and control. The entrepreneur will need to consider the current control system and
resources allocation system which sets the control of a venture. It ensures that the firm was
moving towards direction of control and participation. Eventually entrepreneur holds great
importance in controlling the wide operations of the firm.

5.2 Responsibility

When a company grows, the perception of dissimilarity between the authority and responsibility
becomes more obvious. The entrepreneur has to create a sense of responsibility to be more
flexible, innovative, and supportive. It is essential for all the employees to take parts in all the
innovative activities and shared responsibility. This could encourage the employees handle the
job with responsibilities and minds the consequences after it.

5.3 Tolerance of Failure

At the growth stage, maintaining tolerance of failure is extremely important. There are certain
degrees of failure as opposed to punishment of failure when an entrepreneur firms continually
innovate and grow, which are moral failure, personal failure, and uncontrollable failure. Moral
failure known as failure of internal trust which serious on mutual expectation and trust.
Secondly, personal failure known as the lack of expertise or application and the failure would be
shared by the firms or particular individual. Thirdly, uncontrollable failure is caused by macro-
environment such as resource limitation, strategic plan and market trends. Overall, top
management need to analyze thoroughly to prevent these occurrences.

5.4 Change

An entrepreneur should also retaining innovative and opportunistic posture towards growth
stages as made immediate changes to the firms planning, operations and implementation.
Entrepreneur should holds flexibility in the continues changes of market environment. For
instance, most of the ventures will involve series of marketing stages at the growth stage. The
marketing strategies had developed to serve different market needs. A successful would adopt
appropriate marketing strategies and make immediate changes after deeply discovers the current
market trends. Thus, entrepreneur would introduce unique selling proposition (USP), which the
other competitors unable to provide certain products or services of this uniqueness. Therefore, it
is prominent for entrepreneur to make immediate managerial response to different environmental
situations.

6.0 Unique Managerial Concerns of Growing Ventures

There are some challenges that during the growth of a ventures, typically how the firm
positioning itself in the market and recruitment of the right people. These challenges might
obviously shapes the firms in long term businesses running. The managerial concerns are more
like significant to small business and important to entrepreneurs.

6.1 The Distinctiveness of Size

The size of a firm would decide the size of the market it can serve. This happened as the
geographical areas of the firm, which it only provides products and services to certain region or
state. With the emerging and potential competitors which increasing nowadays, it had become a
threat for a firm to be succeed in their business. The customers would have more mindsets in
considering the different products offering by number of firms in the market, as the customers
would decide the quality of the products and the services provided. Hence, it is a challenge for
the firms to positioning itself to gain more market coverage. As sooner the competitors would
learn through the experiences and switching the buyers’ decision. As part of that, the
entrepreneur need to re-positioning and de-positioning in year by year basis to identify
competing product which suit the customer’s preference and market demands. In addition,
typically smaller firms would encounter higher ordering costs for the inventories as they do not
receive quantity discounts and have to pay higher prices. In the other hand, smaller firms would
have more flexibility as compared to large firm, which the decision makings can be made and
implemented immediately. Besides, the marketing or service could be adjusted immediately as
their competitive advantage. Smaller firms tend to have more constant communication with the
community, as involvement of entrepreneur to adjust the products or service to suit market needs
are visible. Eventually, the entrepreneur would have more personal contact with the customers in
smaller size of firms which builds good relationship with the customers and improve customers’
loyalty.

6.2 The one-person-band syndrome

In today’s world, many entrepreneurs start a business alone or with their family members. When
the entrepreneur encounters certain problems, he/she would need to handle the risk personally.
The one-person-band syndrome occurred when the entrepreneur need to retain all the decision-
making authority. Recruitment of the employees is an example, recruitment of the employees
nowadays are more difficult, as most of the major players in the business world recruiting people
via ‘headhunters’, which they grab the talented people before any get one of them. It is very time
consuming of an entrepreneur to recognize the candidates with appropriate skills and abilities
through interviewing by the entrepreneur himself. Hence, the entrepreneur could delegate the
recruitment tasks to HR department or administration. Moreover, the one-person band would
restrict the growth of the firms, because the entrepreneur would have limited ability and skills.
So it is more beneficial for an entrepreneur to recognize the importance of delegation.

6.3 Time Management

Time management is crucial for an entrepreneur to success. It is challenging for an entrepreneur

to manage time more efficiently and carry out managerial activies. There are four steps which are
assessment, prioritization, creation of procedures and delegation. Assessment is where
entrepreneurs list out the daily operations and tasks and rank them according to the importance.
While prioritization is entrepreneur examined his or her ability to devote necessary time to the
task. Next, creation of procedures would be encompasses the repetitive daily activities and to be
handled by employees. Lastly, delegation is whereby the entrepreneur would delegate different
tasks for the employees to avoid one-person-band syndrome.

6.4 Continuous Learning

An entrepreneur would never stop learning and should be adapted to the constant changing of
market trends and environment. Entrepreneur would need to make immediate changes to their
products and services as to maintain the competitive edge.

7.0 Conclusion

In conclusion, a successful entrepreneur would able to regulate entrepreneurial firm growth and
to avoid the firm towards failure, as he or she should mind the factors that would affecting the
growth of a firm and apply managerial styles from time to time to overcome the factors and
challenges affecting the growth of a firm.

(1620 words)
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