Marketing Essay

Entrepreneurs are in fact born and made (Burns, 2011). People are born with certain personal traits whereby shaped by history, experience of life, and the environment where people grow up in (called as antecedents). Furthermore, there are also some situational factors that influence the decision to start up a business. Figure 3 showed factors influencing Sandiaga to start up Saratoga Capital.

2.1 Personal Character Traits

There is theory linking the character traits of an individual to the success of a business; summarized by Burns (2011) -shown in figure 4. When Sandiaga studied abroad, he decided to live independently in another country; gaining new experiences and building self-confident. There he pushed himself to reach high achievements, and hence graduated with an excellent result for both bachelor and master degree. The need for achievements can also be seen from other situations: success in gaining the position of executive vice president in NTI Resources Limited, Canada; contribution in Indonesian non-profit organizations and organizations (i.e. KADIN and HIPMI) in order to achieve “Indonesia in Equality”; and different views on money as a badge of achievement (Sandiaga even did not really care whether to get paid of his job or not).

Furthermore, as an employee in an investment management sector, Sandiaga was formed to have such mentalities: forecasting future trend and price; innovative thinking by linking innovation to the market place (Burns, 2011); and long-term planning (visionary). Armed by these mentalities, Sandiaga took a risk to build Saratoga Capital during the economic recession; facing the biggest uncertainties of having no regular salary. However, he and his family have to survive. Entrepreneurs share the characteristics of owner-managers (Burns, 2011); however as an “accidental” entrepreneur, Sandiaga does not possess internal locus of control. Sandiaga believes that a strong faith of God (Alghozali, 2011) will open a way...