Enterprise in Action: A Guide To Entrepreneurship

Chapter 9

Opening the Box

Every industry has its own dynamics. For businesses operating in any given industry there will be a set of options and constraints. Things you have to do, challenges and problems peculiar to the industry, together with choices and alternatives.

Among owner-managers these industry-specific dynamics are usually learned by experience, typically by prior experience. This, of course, is a reason for our having made the case for experience capital in Chapter 5. At this point in the book it might be fun to take an example, some industry with which the general public is already beguilingly familiar, and see what is to be found when the box is opened.

Everything in the garden

Looking back over 200 years or more there are a variety of developments that have led people to like their gardens. Most obviously industrialisation and its corollary urbanisation took people out of the countryside and introduced them to high-density urban living. The yearning for a garden becomes compensatory: and if not a garden, a patch; if not a patch, a window box; if not a window box, a pot plant.

Then suburbanisation, especially when it is the product of private building development, is by definition expansion outwards, enabling more space for housing units and thus the majority end up with a garden. In the UK this private house building crossed with suburbanisation took off in the 1930s and has never really stopped. The spread of affluence that marked most of the 20th century brought ...