Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Finland: Challenges of Small-Scale Restaurant Startup

The term of entrepreneurship has been recognised and increasing awareness in Finland among policy makers and media since the recession in the early 1990’s. Finland is one of the most innovation and technology-driven economies in the world, with highly viable competitive markets and ranked 17 as ease of doing business globally. Finland continues to be a more viable, competitive and business-friendly economy with the well-operational support system for entrepreneurship. The country needs immigrants to address the predicted skills shortage, improve the dependency ratio and radically change the economic structure and the labour market. Entrepreneurship is also becoming an increasingly important employment path for the immigrant population. Immigrants are already establishing more companies than the rest of the population, especially in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. Through immigrant entrepreneurship the market gains international resources, new ideas, approaches and more business, and that boosts the economy of the whole country. Entrepreneurship is also an excellent way of gaining access to the Finnish society. The purpose of the study was to explore the initial challenges of immigrant entrepreneurs with establishing small-scale restaurant businesses in Finland and study how to overcome those challenges. The theoretical framework was created around the elements that were relevant to the topic. It gave a good base for the creation of the interview questions. The empirical research was implemented by using the qualitative approach. Five immigrant entrepreneurs from Jyväskylä, Finland were interviewed, and they were selected based on their small-scale restaurant business establishment experience and successful business operations during the past few years. According to the results, the main challenges with establishing a small-scale restaurant business by an immigrant entrepreneur was acquiring training, adequate information and skills, initial capital /finance, lack of language skills, reliable, qualified and affordable workforce, governmental bureaucracy and financial reporting. Those challenges can be overcome with previous work experience, undertaking franchise business operations and social help from friends and families in financial affairs as well as learning the host-country language in school or university. Working overtime in the restaurant could be reduced by hiring employees, and it is very important to have bookkeeper and accountant services related to financial reporting and governmental bureaucracy. The author’s recommendation for further research is studying business failures of immigrant entrepreneurs in Finland and expanding the study to different locations in Finland with larger population samples