65 – Entrepreneur and Risk

Today I want to discuss the idea of being an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial and entrepreneur risk. Part of the reason for this is as we’re talking throughout all of these episodes, we’re hinting or talking about the idea of having additional income, extra income, starting your own business, etc., and there are several different avenues for that, and I want to get clear on some of them and some of the methodologies of getting there, and what you really need to have inside of you.

But first, what I’ll consider the three general categories of an entrepreneur. This is: You’re not working for a company, but you are doing something else. Now, some people (and this is a different classification by different people), some or many people would classify entrepreneur as somebody who starts their own business, but I don’t mean working independently, getting contracts or getting customers, but rather having employees, building a company which has complete financial responsibility, all the risk, and all the management and responsibility it entailed. That’s the real, true broadest definition of “entrepreneur”.

Now, there’s two other things you could do, one of which is you could work completely independently, and be making things based on contracts. This could be something where somebody is working for another company, and they do it part time; they do it on evenings and weekends. Maybe they’re an electrician and they take side jobs, an electrician at a major company. Or they’re a painter, and then they take side jobs as well. Or they’re a systems person, and they help other people advertise on the internet or whatever, or by word of mouth, and they loan themselves out on nights and weekends to solve people’s problems. Or to build things that other people can use.

The last is probably… Well, I’ll call it the newest because it’s risen into a new stage that didn’t exist before, and that’s really because of the internet, and that is this sort of quasi-company that you build that’s a virtual company, whereby you don’t really have employees, but you have lots of people that you’re relying on working with virtually. Now, they don’t have to be virtual; it could be down the street, some of them, but the idea is that you’re not really having that complete financial responsibility with them. That is, you don’t have to file all the papers and all the other things for employees, etc., but also, if something happens, you don’t need them anymore, there’s not the process of laying them off. Also, you go and you find somebody and they don’t work out, then you move on to the next person until you find that very special person, that is your special virtual assistant, or your special web development person that’s building your website and giving you ongoing support, or that social media person that you’re trying out different people and you find the right one that you just mesh. It may not be the best one; it may be the one that is best for you. So you’re building a company that’s a virtual company. This is much lower risk, and there’s an essential part to see the different here between that and what I referred to initially as an entrepreneur.

So, depending on your age, you may want to go into some entrepreneurial activity, but it’s got to be something that’s inside of you. Now, what do I mean by that? It was interesting, you may not even know it yourself, but when I was younger, of course, I always thought that the idea was you were supposed to go work for a company, but I had done a lot of entrepreneurial activities when I was younger. So here it was that when I graduated and went to General Motors Research Labs, then General Motors, and Chase,