Kevin Langley pauses when asked if entrepreneurship would solve the world’s financial crisis.
Then he looks up and says with certainty, “Yes. Yes, it will.”
Langley’s confidence in the power of entrepreneurship helped him create several successful companies. It’s also helped position him to be an international advocate for small business and innovation.
Langley, a 45-year-old Baton Rouge native and LSU graduate, was part of a small delegation from the United States that attended the G20 Youth Entrepreneurship Summit, which was held in Toronto on June 26-27.
The conference, which brought together entrepreneurs, academicians, government officials and leading youth entrepreneurship organizations from around the world, produced a list of recommendations that were presented to the G20 members, who are the financial leaders of 20 powerful economies such as the U.S., Canada, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
Langley, CEO and co-owner of Ellis Construction, which was once recognized as one of the nation’s fastest-growing companies, was chosen for the summit because of his continued work in the Entrepreneurs’ Association, a nonprofit group representing small-business owners in 42 countries. He is chair-elect of the group, which represents more than 8,000 business owners employing 1.5 million people and producing $152 billion in annual revenue.
At the conference, Langley and other members formed the G20 Young Entrepreneurship Alliance, a movement to keep the conversation of promoting global youth entrepreneurship alive by collaborating globally.
Only recently has entrepreneurship been receiving the economic credit it deserves, Langley says. One example was last year’s G8 summit, which typically is reserved for talk of nuclear proliferation and international environmental agreements.
“We were able to get three-fourths of a page of a 38-page document to address entrepreneurship and innovation for solving a lot of the world’s problems and creating economic opportunity,” he says.
Three-fourths of one page might not sound like much space unless you consider the context. That solutions to the world’s problems were condensed into 38 pages is a giant leap forward for entrepreneurship. That momentum continued at the G20 conference.
“Youth entrepreneurship is a vital issue that needs to be discussed by the leaders of the G20 nations,” says Vivian Prokop, CEO of the Canadian Youth Business Foundation, adding that the summit brought the importance of youth entrepreneurship to the attention of the G20 leaders and, in turn, to the rest of the world.
Langley and the other members of the international group submitted a communiqué to global leaders that focused on five areas of improvement:
• Access to funding. Startup businesses often are considered by lenders to be too risky or too small, despite the low investment they might require. The communiqué suggests that governments provide alternative institutions for seed money.
• Coordinated support from government, private-sector initiatives and educational opportunities.
• Entrepreneurship culture. Langley says many students don’t consider entrepreneurship to be a career path.
• Education and training. Governments should encourage entrepreneurship in high schools, colleges and universities.
• Decreased regulations and increased tax breaks.
The recommendations don’t sound much different from what small-business owners in the U.S. discuss every day. But, Langley says, many countries lag behind the U.S. in providing support.
“Small businesses have created all of our economic opportunity,” he says. “In the U.S., all net job growth over the last 20 years came from small business. And while most people think innovation comes from universities and major corporations, the reality is that it’s the small entrepreneurial firms that are thinking on their feet, identifying opportunities and filling the needs in communities.”
Langley acknowledges that nothing tangible might come from the international collaborations. The importance of the effort, he says, is creating the dialogue.
“There are 1.3 billion people coming into the job market in the next seven years,” he says, “but the global capacity to create jobs right now is at a quarter of a billion. That means we have a 1 billion-person job difference we need to address.”
So what’s next on Langley’s capitalist crusade?
He will continue to move the conversation forward at the next G20 summit, scheduled for November in Seoul, and at the 2011 Youth Entrepreneur Summit in France.
Despite playing a major role in advising world leaders about what could one day become business policy, Langley brushes aside the claim that he wields any power.
“Not powerful,” he says. “Just passionate.”
