What is an Entrepreneur?

Different Types Of Entrepreneur

The job of an entrepreneur is to make money. It is that pure and simple. However, as you may be noticing in the midst of the stretched financial times under which we are living, it is not actually simple to make money in this day and age unless you are acutely aware of where an opportunity exists, how to create an opportunity, or possessed of a quick brain. Money does not grow on trees, as the saying goes, and there is just no way that you can guarantee the success of a money-making plan. If there was a foolproof way to lay down a small amount of cash and walk away with a larger amount, we’d all be doing it.

Prior knowledge of a market definitely helps. It allows a potential entrepreneur to recognize where there is a gap in a market. Without this ability, there is often a danger of trying to make money in a saturated market, where there is a queue of people pushing and shoving to make their mark. Being the best in that particular market may deliver the results you were looking for, but then again it may not. And being in the middle of the pack will lead to, at best, disappointing results.

Some entrepreneurs style themselves as being in the “ideas market”. In other words, they have creativity that allows them to formulate solutions to existing or potential problems, or ideas for a product that will become highly-prized as a consumer item. This seems to be an innate skill. There is no apparent way of teaching creativity – it is instinctive and natural. You can be taught to recognize opportunity, but creating an opportunity is something that is the preserve of a lucky few, percentage-wise.

Both of the above are kinds of entrepreneur, albeit different types. The first type is an opportunist. In the current market, only a very skilled opportunist can be confident of riding out the storm, as a contraction in a market dictates that the level of opportunity will be reduced, competition between candidateswill be greater, and the people who are quicker to spot the opportunities will be the ones who hit the jackpot. Competing with such individuals is a thankless task for anyone. But they are good at what they do and should be congratulated.

The second kind is an innovator. The opportunities for an innovator to strike it rich are likely to depend on what area of innovation they specialize in. Although there is no recession-proof market (while supply-and-demand markets fare worse than necessities, there is some sign that people will still seek to make savings on the latter), someone who dreams up a solution to a need will be on safer ground than someone who conceptualizes and produces an item that is coveted a great deal, but judged to be beyond the spending power of too many people. So in the present day, it may well be that the best thing to be is a problem-solver.:

First Published: Apr 18, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

Keeping Business in the family

Running A Business With Family Members

The word “entrepreneur” conjures up in many people’s minds an image of an individual who makes money for themselves with little concern for anyone, nor anything beyond their own bottom line. This is as unfair as saying that the only reason anyone takes on a job is doing so for selfish reasons. The truth is that entrepreneurship is a way of making a living just as surely as digging a ditch or manning the phones in an office. And entrepreneurship is not all about looking out for Number One, either. With a bit of co-ordination and collaboration, close family ties can make for a strong business profile.

Just think of all the people who have gone into business as a partner in a company and have come unstuck later on when their business partner turned out either to be unscrupulous or incompetent. In such cases, unless you have everything in writing and a great deal of resourcefulness, you can lose everything. By going into business as a family, or part of a family, you can avoid this step naturally. Thinking about it logically, how hard do you think it would be to hide an unscrupulous nature from someone who you see all the time?

No-one knows you better than someone with whom you have grown up – and vice versa. You know their strengths, weaknesses and their instincts and they know yours. When dividing up duties in an organization, it can often be confusing and challenging to assign the correct duty to the correct person. The solution? Well, by knowing each other so well you can instinctively spot who will do which task best – removing the early teething troubles that come from figuring all of that out. And if there is a task that no-one is especially suited for, the close collaboration that has characterized your life as a family makes it easier to deal with it as a team.

All of this ties in fairly neatly with another major benefit to working together as a family – the profit margin. Self interest is a perfectly healthy motivating factor in trying to do the best that you can in business. It is all the more likely that you will keep your eye on the ball if that self interest is tied in with wanting to do the best for your family. Although nothing is a guaranteed success without planning, motivation and a great deal of good luck, the conditions that make success more likely are ones that are nurtured as a rule within families.

There is a line of thought that says you should not go into business with a family member because when things go wrong you will have all the more reason to be unhappy, and there can be an increase in tension. It is true that without sound business sense on the part of everyone, a business could well go downhill very quickly. For this reason, family businesses will not always work and it is not a perfect fit for everyone. Nothing is guaranteed. But by approaching the tasks and the tests that business will throw your way as a team, you give yourself a better chance of achieving them. Something which family ties will help enormously with.

First Published: Apr 24, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

How to Make Money Online

Make Money Online

The Internet in its way has had as profound an effect on the world as any invention before it. As profound as television, electricity, the telephone and all the other world-changing developments without which it is hard to imagine life. The Internet is definitely right up there among all of the others, because not only are you sitting reading this on a computer, where it is available specifically due to the Internet, but also the information that makes the writing possible was researched using the World Wide Web. The speed of transmission of information these days is something that the average human could not have conceived of back in the 1980s. Now, it is taken for granted.

Using the Internet to make money is still a relatively new thing, certainly in comparison with how businesses have operated without it. It is now possible to make money, spend it and save it without ever leaving your home. Recognizing an opportunity to make money, then realizing it by putting your idea into cyberspace and watching the cash roll in is something that more and more people are finding to be a surprisingly manageable solutionto money worries, and a worthwhile income stream for people who are already doing OK. Like many ways of making money, people look at the Internet and the business opportunities it offers and think “There has to be more to it than that.” They scorn that it might just be a matter of getting an idea and putting it into practise. But they are not quite right to do so.

Sure, if you are looking for a “get rich quick” scheme, you will generally find that your options are at best limited. If there was a way of everybody making money just by doing nothing, then the global financial crisis would be easily solved. Things do not work that way, and you need to have something to offer if you are looking to get anywhere. It may not be easy, and it certainly will not just happen. But one thing that is for certain is that the Internet has opened the way for many people to make a tidy sum of money without having to spend a lot or travel very far. It hasn’t made making money easy, but it has presented people with opportunities. These opportunities have made a lot of people rich, and anyone with an idea, the work ethic to make it happen and a cool head can do very well for themselves.

If you have a PayPal account, a website and an idea, you can make money online. The PayPal account is available to everyone, the website is too. Even if you don’t have the ability to create websites yourself, blogging platforms make it possible for you to simply take care of the text and the images, and leave the technical stuff to someone else. The idea? Well, that has to come from you. But many of the people who are billionaires today had an idea that may not have been anything more complicated or revolutionary than an idea you have had. What has made them rich and successful is their desire to make that idea a reality. That is something that is not beyond any of us.
First Published: April 18, 2009 entrepreneurjourney.com

Knowledge Is Power; And Also Money

Knowledge Is Power

Turn Knowledge Into Money Making eBook

There are many of us who have a range of talents that render our friends almost speechless with envy. However, try and find, when we try to convert those talents into money that they seem to be in very limited demand. Looking for a job when you have a talent for music should be straightforward – your skills are very clear, and the vacancies should be obvious. It is similar for any talent that can fall under the bracket of “academic” – they can be very desirable talents particularly for those who do not have them. Nevertheless, for those who do they often seem to be frustrating and unproductive, sitting there making no money whatsoever, unless you can win a competition based on your talent.

Many are now coming to the conclusion that if those talents are not going to just go out there and make money by themselves, they will need to be twisted into some shape that makes them lucrative. No one is going to pay you money just for knowing how to do something – unfortunately. However, what you can do is to turn your talent, knowledge or intelligence into book form and sell that book. Once upon a time, in order to write and sell a book, you needed to write to publishing companies with your plan, get it accepted, and then submit your book at various stages for feedback and editing. If it did not conform to what the publishers wanted, then it would not get published. So you could be as intelligent and knowledgeable as you liked, but getting published was next to impossible for many.

With the advent of the e-book, this is no longer such a concern. People with knowledge to distribute can now write a book in Microsoft Word (or any other desktop publishing program) and distribute it themselves. If you are good with web design, or know someone who is, then you can design a website to go along with your book, providing you with a product and the means of advertising it all in one fell swoop. Writing an e-book and publishing it can also be a way in to the still thriving paper-based literary world.

So if you have a certain, specific talent which your friends are always commenting on and expressing envy over, then why not think about writing an e-book. You can send it to your friends without asking them to pay for it – they can even act as a focus group by telling you what they like and what they do not. Setting up an account with PayPal enables people to pay for the book, whereupon you can send the book to them, and hey presto. You are making your talent into money – finally. Instead of getting frustrated with a dormant talent, you will be getting rich from it.
First Published: Mar 13, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

Entrepreneurship Today - Too Risky, or Just The Right Time?

Small Business Ideas

As the economic news seems to get worse by the day, it seems that a different company is going bust every time you switch on the news. People are finding work harder to come by, and those who do have jobs are often finding themselves with fewer hours, or missing out on pay rises due to their employer finding it impossible to find the money that is required to keep a business thriving and its employees earning what they thought they would. For employees, there are more and more situations developing where they find themselves coming to work and wondering what bad news will filter through in the morning meeting. And as employees, they are also finding that there is not a whole lot they can do about this, that they just have to accept the latest piece of negative news.

In this climate it seems that it would be a brave individual who decides to up and start their own business. Watching companies go to the wall is going to be enough to turn off a number of potential entrepreneurs, who look at the situation as it is and doubt that they could make their own company work where the established names are failing. If the big companies with decades of experience are unable to keep their heads above water, then what chance does a greenhorn with a dream have? It is perfectly understandable that a number of potentially excellent businessmen and women are keeping their ideas to themselves right now.

It is absolutely the case that fewer businesses start up during a recession. For one thing, there is often a lot of capital required to set up a new business, especially where new premises are involved. For most people, this necessitates borrowing, and we are living in times where borrowing money is getting harder and harder, with banks not wanting to take any kind of risk in the light of a climate that has driven some to their worst operating losses ever. But on the other side of this, if you have made savings of any kind you may well have what the banks are looking for – a deposit. By raising this kind of operating capital, or giving the banks an assurance that you are likely to be careful with your money, you increase your chances of getting a business off to its best start.

Alternatively, the Internet has made it possible to start up a business without having any premises. All you need is your home computer, an idea, and the materials to put it into practice. Even the materials do not need to be expensive, depending on the nature of your business. From a very low start-up cost you could find yourself earning money pretty quickly. Obviously it is no time to be setting up a company selling executive holidays – the take up would be rather low – but if you have an idea to supply a need that has not been diminished by the credit crunch, now could just be the best time to go for it. A narrowed field, and a market that is not far from bottoming out – what are you waiting for?
First Published: May 7, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com