The United States is blessed with a wealth of entrepreneurs such as the Aguerres who want to start a small business. According to research by the Small Business Administration, two-thirds of college students intend to be entrepreneurs at some point in their careers, aspiring to become the next Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com.
The desire to be one’s own boss cuts across all age, gender, and ethnic lines. Results of a recent U.S. Census Bureau survey of business owners show that minority groups and women are becoming business owners at a much higher rate than the national average.
Why has entrepreneurship remained such a strong part of the foundation of the U.S. business system for so many years? Because today’s global economy rewards innovative, flexible companies that can respond quickly to changes in the business environment. Such companies are started by entrepreneurs, people with vision, drive, and creativity, who are willing to take the risk of starting and managing a business to make a profit.
A Snapshot of Small Businesses in America:1Source: “Firm Size Data: 2014,” https://www.sba.gov, accessed February 1, 2018.
— 80% (approximately 23.8 million) of the nearly 29.7 million businesses have no employees (businesses run by individuals or small groups of partners, such as married couples).
— 89% (approximately 5.2 million) of the nearly 5.8 million businesses with employees have fewer than 20 employees.
— 99.6% (approximately 5.7 million) of all businesses have 0–99 employees
— 98% have 0–20 workers.
— Approximately 5.8 million businesses have fewer than 500 employees.
— Only about 19,000 businesses in the United States have more than 500 employees.
— Companies with fewer than 50 employees pay more than 20% of America’s payroll.
— Companies with fewer than 500 employees pay more than 41% of America’s payroll.
— 32.5 million people (1 employee in 4) work for businesses with fewer than 50 employees.
— These businesses also pay tens of millions of owners, not included in employment statistics.
Entrepreneur or Small-Business Owner?
The term entrepreneur is often used in a broad sense to include most small-business owners. The two groups share some of the same characteristics, and we’ll see that some of the reasons for becoming an entrepreneur or a small-business owner are very similar. But there is a difference between entrepreneurship and small-business management. Entrepreneurship involves taking a risk, either to create a new business or to greatly change the scope and direction of an existing one. Entrepreneurs typically are innovators who start companies to pursue their ideas for a new product or service. They are visionaries who spot trends.
Although entrepreneurs may be small-business owners, not all small-business owners are entrepreneurs. Small-business owners are managers or people with technical expertise who started a business or bought an existing business and made a conscious decision to stay small. For example, the proprietor of your local independent bookstore is a small-business owner. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, also sells books. But Bezos is an entrepreneur: He developed a new model—web-based book retailing—that revolutionized the bookselling world and then moved on to change retailing in general. Entrepreneurs are less likely to accept the status quo, and they generally take a longer-term view than the small-business owner.
Types of Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs fall into several categories: classic entrepreneurs, multipreneurs, and intrapreneurs.
Classic Entrepreneurs
Classic entrepreneurs are risk-takers who start their own companies based on innovative ideas. Some classic entrepreneurs are micropreneurs who start small and plan to stay small. They often start businesses just for personal satisfaction and the lifestyle. Miho Inagi is a good example of a micropreneur. On a visit to New York with college friends in 1998, Inagi fell in love with the city’s bagels. “I just didn’t think anything like a bagel could taste so good,” she said. Her passion for bagels led the young office assistant to quit her job and pursue her dream of one day opening her own bagel shop in Tokyo. Although her parents tried to talk her out of it, and bagels were virtually unknown in Japan, nothing deterred her. Other trips to New York followed, including an unpaid six-month apprenticeship at Ess-a-Bagel, where Inagi took orders, cleared trays, and swept floors. On weekends, owner Florence Wilpon let her make dough.
In August 2004, using $20,000 of her own savings and a $30,000 loan from her parents, Inagi finally opened tiny Maruichi Bagel. The timing was fortuitous, as Japan was about to experience a bagel boom. After a slow start, a favorable review on a local bagel website brought customers flocking for what are considered the best bagels in Tokyo. Inagi earns only about $2,300 a month after expenses, the same amount she was making as a company employee. “Before I opened this store I had no goals,” she says, “but now I feel so satisfied.”2Andrew Morse, “An Entrepreneur Finds Tokyo Shares Her Passion for Bagels,” The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2005, p. B1.
In contrast, growth-oriented entrepreneurs want their business to grow into a major corporation. Most high-tech companies are formed by growth-oriented entrepreneurs. Jeff Bezos recognized that with Internet technology he could compete with large chains of traditional book retailers. Bezos’s goal was to build his company into a high-growth enterprise—and he chose a name that reflected his strategy: Amazon.com. Once his company succeeded in the book sector, Bezos applied his online retailing model to other product lines, from toys and house and garden items to tools, apparel, music, and services. In partnership with other retailers, Bezos is well on his way to making Amazon’s vision “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”—a reality.3Barbara Farfan, “Amazon.com’s Mission Statement”, The Balance. April 15, 2018, https://www.thebalance.com/amazon-mission-statement-4068548.
Multipreneurs
Then there are multipreneurs, entrepreneurs who start a series of companies. They thrive on the challenge of building a business and watching it grow. In fact, over half of the chief executives at Inc. 500 companies say they would start another company if they sold their current one. Brothers Jeff and Rich Sloan are a good example of multipreneurs, having turned numerous improbable ideas into successful companies. Over the past 20-plus years, they have renovated houses, owned a horse breeding and marketing business, invented a device to prevent car batteries from dying, and so on. Their latest venture, a multimedia company called StartupNation, helps individuals realize their entrepreneurial dreams. And the brothers know what company they want to start next: yours.4“About StartupNation,” https://startupnation.com, accessed February 1, 2018; Jim Morrison, “Entrepreneurs,” American Way Magazine, October 15, 2005, p. 94.
(Credit: Steve Jurvetson/ Flickr/ Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0))
Intrapreneurs
Some entrepreneurs don’t own their own companies but apply their creativity, vision, and risk-taking within a large corporation. Called intrapreneurs, these employees enjoy the freedom to nurture their ideas and develop new products, while their employers provide regular salaries and financial backing. Intrapreneurs have a high degree of autonomy to run their own minicompanies within the larger enterprise. They share many of the same personality traits as classic entrepreneurs, but they take less personal risk. According to Gifford Pinchot, who coined the term intrapreneur in his book of the same name, large companies provide seed funds that finance in-house entrepreneurial efforts. These include Intel, IBM, Texas Instruments (a pioneering intrapreneurial company), Salesforce.com, and Xerox.
Why Become an Entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs are found in all industries and have different motives for starting companies. The most common reason cited by CEOs of the Inc. 500, the magazine’s annual list of fastest-growing private companies, is the challenge of building a business, followed by the desire to control their own destiny. Other reasons include financial independence and the frustration of working for someone else. Two important motives mentioned in other surveys are a feeling of personal satisfaction with their work, and creating the lifestyle that they want. Do entrepreneurs feel that going into business for themselves was worth it? The answer is a resounding yes. Most say they would do it again.
Are You Ready to Be an Entrepreneur?
Here are some questions would-be entrepreneurs should ask themselves:5Sources: Jess Ekstrom, “5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Start a Business,” Entrepreneur, accessed February 1, 2018; “Resources,” http://www.marketsmarter.com, accessed February 1, 2018; Monique Reece, Real-Time Marketing for Business Growth: How to Use Social Media, Measure Marketing, and Create a Culture of Execution (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press/Pearson, 2010); Mike Collins, “Before You Start–Innovator’s Inventory,” The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2005, p. R4.
- What is new and novel about your idea? Are you solving a problem or unmet need?
- Are there similar products/services out there? If so, what makes yours better?
- Who is your target market? How many people would use your product or service?
- Have you talked with potential customers to get their feedback?
- Would they buy your product/service?
- What about production costs? How much do you think the market will pay?
- How defensible is the concept? Is there good intellectual property?
- Is this innovation strategic to my business?
- Is the innovation easy to communicate?
- How might this product evolve over time? Would it be possible to expand it into a product line? Can it be updated/enhanced in future versions?
- Where would someone buy this product/service?
- How will the product/service be marketed? What are the costs to sell and market it?
- What are the challenges involved in developing this product/service?
Text adapted from Introduction to Business, OpenStax under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-business/pages/1-introduction
