“The Entrepreneurs’ Network” aka TEN is the venture arm of Olive Media, focusing on being a media partner for entrepreneurs providing education, resources, advertising and much more on TV and radio.

TEN guides the viewers to new products and services and their success stories behind them on every platform and screen.

Olive Media believes that “content” is the fuel for high-performing communities. TEN was built to deliver promotional messaging that connects brands with their consumers. “Connections” is how we guide the content into markets. It is about having a closed-loop distribution strategy, ensuring there are no dead ends or wastage.

The Vision

Economic development requires sustainable and shared increases in per capital income accompanied by changes in the structural composition of an economy towards higher value added goods and more efficient production methods.

Entrepreneurs can contribute to economic development by facilitating the reallocation of resources from less to more productive uses, by performing ‘cost-discovery’, ‘gap-filling’, and ‘input-completing’ functions in the economy and by supporting structural change.

The time for action is now. We need resources that spur growth but at the same time create opportunities for all, ensuring that the benefits of economic activity are broadly shared so that living standards improve for all segments of the population, including the young, the women, the old, the poor and the migrants.

TEN is all about supporting entrepreneurship since it can play as a conduit for inclusiveness. It paints a picture of the scale and scope of self-employment and entrepreneurship activities. Also examines barriers and provides guidance for everyone on how these barriers can be overcome, focusing on business creation by the unemployed, the design of business development services and making economic systems friendly to entrepreneurship and self-employment.

The good news is a number of NGOs, public and other foundations do exist to support entrepreneurs in different aspects such as financing, mentoring, and etc. except none of them provide a sufficient knowledge to back-up entrepreneurs in order to be well prepared primarily to discipline their business dreams, plan, launch and strategically manage their businesses. TEN was created to fill this “quality“ gap.

A recent report issued by the OECD shows, for example,that young people are twice as likely as adults to report a lack of entrepreneurship skills (18% vs. 8%) as a barrier to business creation, and women are more likely than men to report that it would be difficult to reconcile business ownership with family commitments (8% vs. 4%). TEN is create to overcome such barriers to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to pursue entrepreneurship and self-employment, regardless of their personal characteristics and background.

TEN’s inclusive entrepreneurship policy aims to address the entrepreneurship “quality gap” by significantly lower levels of turnover, income from self-employment and survival rates for businesses owned by women, youth and immigrants. It is important to steer business starters towards activities that offer good prospects for income generation and survival and to help them develop good quality business management and business models.

We’ll put your dream into business!

TEN helps its audiences when it really matters – from buying their next car to changing their careers. It takes true expertise to earn that kind of trust, which is why we only brand entrepreneurs.

TEN looks at the interrelationships between brands, customers, content and markets to find opportunities or leverage points that can take the performance of the entire economies & businesses to a higher level.

We do this by taking a step back and seeing the bigger picture, designing the content with the targeted audience to serve. We’re proudly partner of many entrepreneurs’ success journeys.

The world’s best entrepreneurs rely on us

Many entrepreneurs turn to TEN to help their businesses grow. They know that we are experts in speaking to audiences at the right time, on the right platform. And we do it in a way that creates a powerful, lasting relationship that delivers real results.

We are hard-wired to produce brilliant content for our audience and clients. And if you are a prospective client, you will find commercial teams here that consider it a matter of honor to ensure that you get not just great results, but ideas that can influence how you do business.

Why TEN?

“Active incubators” can be critical in connecting entrepreneurs to appropriate assistance. TEN is one of these incubators, an active media one and is becoming one of the critical ingredients of new strategies fostering and supporting entrepreneurship.

For economies, the population of unemployed people represent a stock of unutilized economic resources that could be used to increase output and potentially economic growth. For individuals, the consequences can be devastating. Time spent in unemployment decreases current and lifetime earnings, and increases the chances of poverty and social exclusion.

People starting businesses from unemployment face the same principal barriers to business start-up as other entrepreneurs – lack of finances, lack of human capital and lack of sufficient entrepreneurship skills. However, the scale of the obstacle is often greater for those in unemployment because they have lower levels of savings, human capital and entrepreneurship skills and are trusted less by banks and other lending institutions.

Another important disincentive for people starting businesses from unemployment is the opportunity cost of business creation. In other words, business start-up may decrease their income despite their increased efforts to enter and stay in the labor market. This is particularly true for those with significant labor market experience and where unemployment benefits are generous.

Lack of entrepreneurship skills

Entrepreneurs need a wide range of skills to be successful in starting and operating abusiness venture. These skills include general workplace skills that are used in any work environment, as well as technical skills (e.g. communication, problem solving, environmental monitoring), business management skills(e.g. goal setting, decision making, finance, negotiation, customer relations) and personal entrepreneurial skills (e.g. risk management, change management, strategic thinking,leadership).

These skills also include, for example, business planning, self-motivation, assessing andmanaging risk, strategic thinking, making the best of personal networks, and motivatingothers. Please refer to the table below for a more complete listing of entrepreneurship skills.

Relative to people in employment, the unemployed are in a deficit of both updatedgeneral skills and specific skills that are relevant for entrepreneurship. This makes the successful establishment of a business more difficult for theunemployed. The longer a spell in unemployment, the more rapid the unemployed willlose human capital by not being active on the labor market.

Policy recommendations

• Offer support to upgrade the quality of businesses started including by encouraging business projects in markets where there is excess or growing demand and by developing business management expertise.
• Support motivated and capable people to start up from unemployment by offering startup and entrepreneurship skills development, and building connections between unemployed entrepreneurs and mainstream support providers such as chambers of commerce and micro finance institutions.
• Offer integrated content of business development that combine counselling, coaching, mentoring and financial guidance, cover the pre start-up, start-up and post start-up.
• Build up a body of accredited, trained and experienced business development advisors, coaches and mentors from within the targeted client populations.
• Involve local partners in business start-up schemes for the unemployed to i) increase awareness of these supports by involving unemployment offices, chambers of commerceand other civil society actors (e.g. the business community, microfinance institutions),and ii) take advantage of their knowledge and networks.