What Haiti Taught Me About Entrepreneurship

I've spent years doing volunteer economic development work with agricultural entrepreneurs and students in Haiti, and I went into it assuming I'd be the one teaching. Mostly, I ended up learning.

The lessons didn't look anything like what gets taught in a business school case study, and they've stuck with me longer than most of what I picked up running companies in the United States.

Entrepreneurship without a safety net

In the U.S., when a founder's plan doesn't work, there's usually a next move. A bridge loan, a pivot, a round from friends and family, a job offer from someone who respects the attempt even if it failed.

In Haiti, a lot of the entrepreneurs I've worked with don't have that cushion. A failed harvest or a broken piece of equipment isn't a setback you recover from next quarter. It's the whole plan for the year.

Watching people build real businesses under those conditions reframes what risk means. Most of what American founders call risk is a mild inconvenience by comparison.

Resourcefulness beats access to capital

Capital solves a lot of problems, and I'd never argue otherwise. But spend time with entrepreneurs who don't have access to it and you start to see how much capital quietly substitutes for creativity back home.

When you can't write a check to fix a logistics problem, you figure out a workaround. When you can't hire your way out of a skills gap, you train someone yourself or trade services with a neighbor who has what you lack.

I've watched agricultural entrepreneurs in Haiti solve supply chain problems with nothing but relationships and persistence that would take a funded startup a six-figure consulting engagement to untangle. It's made me a lot more skeptical of my own instinct to throw money at a problem before I've tried to think my way through it.

Patience is a strategy

Growing seasons don't care about your timeline, and neither does the pace of rural infrastructure.

The entrepreneurs I've worked with in Haiti have a relationship with patience that looks nothing like the patience you hear about in American business culture, where it usually means waiting a few extra weeks for a product launch. Theirs is closer to a discipline built over years, planning around cycles they can't control and adjusting without the frustration that would derail a lot of founders I know.

I used to think patience was mostly about temperament. Now, I think it's closer to a skill you build by operating somewhere that refuses to move on your schedule.

Mentorship runs in both directions

I went into this work thinking of myself as the mentor, which is a comfortable role for anyone who's built and sold companies. It took a while to admit that the teaching was happening in both directions.

I'd sit with a student working through a business plan for a small agricultural venture, offer some framework I'd picked up in a boardroom, and watch them politely take what was useful and discard what wasn't suited to their actual constraints.

That's a humbling process.

A lot of what passes for business wisdom in the U.S. assumes a baseline of infrastructure, credit access and legal protection that simply isn't available everywhere, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of arrogance.

The students and entrepreneurs I've worked with taught me to separate the universal parts of good business thinking from the parts that only work because of where I happened to build my career. That distinction has made me a better advisor everywhere I apply it, from rural cooperatives to the boardrooms I started in.

The real lesson is about what entrepreneurship requires

Strip away the funding environment, the infrastructure and the support network, and what's left is the part of entrepreneurship that matters. It's the willingness to keep going when the obvious path is closed, paired with a discipline to build something real out of very little because very little is all you have.

Those are the same traits that separate good founders from mediocre ones everywhere, including in boardrooms in New York and Dallas where the stakes look completely different on paper.

Bringing it home

I don't romanticize the hardship. The entrepreneurs I work with in Haiti deserve far greater access to capital and infrastructure, and I'd never suggest that scarcity builds better character as some kind of trade worth making.

What I take from the work is narrower than that. It's a sharper read on which parts of entrepreneurship are circumstance and which parts are character.

The circumstances vary a great deal depending on where you're born. The character part, the willingness to build something out of very little and keep building when it doesn't work the first time, is the same whether you're starting a farm cooperative in rural Haiti or a company in a market with every resource available to you.

That's the piece I try to carry back into whatever I’m building next.