Entrepreneurship Definition

Entrepreneurship Definition - What is Entrepreneurship

Have you ever wondered how to be an effective contributor to your society, community, or economy?

If yes, then you have a big potential to become a successful entrepreneur.

Since entrepreneurship is one of the 4 economy pillars: Labor, Land, Capital and Entrepreneurship, that makes you a potential real contributor there.

How much is your dream big? You can aim as higher as you can in order to be effective by providing products or services of value.

Start immediately by practicing entrepreneurship and making it as your discipline. It can be practiced and it can be learned. It's all about your willingness, your motivation and challenge.

Fine, but where is the definition of entrepreneurship?

Often, entrepreneurship was coined with any new venture created by its owners. But, to be precise, that is not a real entrepreneurship.

Let's dig more by giving some practical examples: If you open a laundry business in your neighborhood, and provide the same services available in the market, that is not entrepreneurship although there is a new venture created and new jobs as well.

In English: a copy paste business is not entrepreneurship.

When you create such business, you need to be a little creative when addressing the business proposition. Paste it not as is, find a new market, provide a new service that makes you unique among competitors, create a new job type; that is entrepreneurship.

In order to conclude: To be an entrepreneur, you can imitate an existing business but you have to innovate when launching it. If you want to create a new business, you need also to innovate because new businesses create new jobs and job types, addresses new markets, have something unique, and challenge others to create a new competition. As an entrepreneur, you are moving the wheels of your economy towards a new era, so make sure you are on the right track and direction.

Three Pre-Qualifications of Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneur Pre-Qualifications

If you want to test your readiness to become an entrepreneur, here are the things that you need to have in your mind and heart:

You need to have a dream, like the American dream

It's absolutely correct to aim high, but the steps to achieve your dream need to be planned and studied carefully. A dream does not need to keep up with you while sleeping; it's just a series of ideas that alter your thinking whenever you are awake, hibernating or sleeping mode, and keep coming in a persistent way.

Those ideas can be short, mid, and long term ideas but your gut will always tell you to seek them sooner or later. Some people achieve their dreams quickly, others spend years trying, and a lot of others don't even take a risk to start achieving anything.

You need to know your WHY

Sometimes this step is incorporated in the previous one, and other times, the dream might be available but it is not clear for you yet. You need to know WHY you will be seeking your dreams in order to understand your vision, mission, and strategy. You need to have a clear view of your vision, and it should not be "money".

You are preparing yourself to launch a venture that will produce amazing products or services, which will help your community to prosper, so the money will be definitely a result of your achievements rather than a target or goal.

To understand more about knowing your WHY, I recommend you to read the following two books for Simon Sinek: Start with WHY and Find your WHY.

Knowing your WHY will brighten your vision, will also set a noble target to pursue, as well as help to define the HOW and WHAT to do to achieve your targets.

You need to be a risk-taker

All the decisions that you are going to take in your entrepreneurial life need to fail the risk safety test. Put it simply like this, if you are concerned about safety nets and setting safety thresholds or other similar stuffs, then most probably you will not be able to succeed with major decision milestones.

It's very simple to know if you are a risk taker or a risk averse person. Dive into your history, and try to remember joyful adventures with your family or friends. Were you the guy that starts always by testing new adventures or were you the guy who sits and watches others doing it?

Risk taking is a skill, it can be practiced and developed throughout your career so you don't need to worry if it's not built-in among your existing skills.

Four Pillars of Entrepreneurship

Now that we know what should be implanted in your mind and heart, let's move to the most important pillars of entrepreneurship of the 2020 era.

Someone might ask: What is the difference between qualifications and pillars?

The dream is yours: No one else has the same dreams as yours, so it's a unique qualification for you, rather in size, shape, ways of execution, ... It is proprietary to you.
Knowing your WHY: No one else is better than you to know your WHY. It is all based on your own past and present. Also, you cannot hire people to know your WHY but you can hire people to understand and execute your WHY by taking care of the HOW and WHAT.
Risk taking: it is your final decision as an entrepreneur to sign the final order, either for your own plans or your team's plans. As a entrepreneurship leader, you have to be accountable to the consequences of your decisions and the risks in those decisions, which might not be seen for somebody else.

When it comes to entrepreneurship pillars, you can hire people with those pillars/skills to work in your team in order to realize your dream. Unless you decide to work alone, then those pillars become required qualifications that you need to practice.

Four Pillars of Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Business Planning, Emotional Intelligence, Data Analysis

Innovation

Innovation Pillar

As highlighted in the definition above, innovation is always linked to entrepreneurship in most of the specialties, articles and books. If you are a sole entrepreneur, you will require innovation as a preliminary discipline to succeed.

Innovation requires the following four components:

Brainstorming: As an individual, you can have the assistance of friends and family. As a team player, it's best to sit and use the latest available brainstorming techniques. By, this you will guarantee that you have covered all possible features and aspects of your products/services.
Team Spirit: Working in a team requires some skills of conflict management, as conflict is inevitable in a such environments. Team spirit requires also some basic project management skills to be available.
Creativity: When you brainstorm and generate new ideas that have never been implemented, you are said to be creative. When you execute those ideas and implement them, you are said to be innovative. Creativity comes before innovation.
Practical Research: Many studies performed by leading universities and organizations show that research and development for new products require the involvement of the 5 human senses: touch, see, hear, taste and smell. That means you need to workout those sensations when collecting information for your research. You gotta touch base with the real end user of your product/service in order to innovate with your solution.

For more information about innovation, I recommend reading my previous article about "The Art of Innovation" for Tom Kelly.

Business Planning

Business Planning Pillar of Entrepreneurship

To start a new business, to look for funds, to ask for partnerships, to merge with another company, to acquire a new company, you will need a business plan.

These all are situations that entrepreneurs might face in his career.

Business plans, in 2020 and afterwards, consists of four key sections in addition to the executive summary, vision-mission-strategy statements, and sales pitch presentation:

Operations / Technical: This section highlights the way you are going to operate your business. You need to list here the following details: business name and registration type, organization chart, hierarchy, management team, key personnel, products and services process creation, requirements, materials, supply chain and legalities.
Marketing: In order to be unique, you need to add few sections for your business plan here in this section. You can start with the normal market segmentation, targeting, and positioning, marketing mix, SWOT analysis or PESTLE analysis, but to differentiate yourself from others, get deep as much as you can when it comes to consumer behavior analysis, digital strategy for social media analysis and competitive analysis. This is what is going to attract the investors in addition to the financials study.
Finance: I recommend hiring a consultant to do this job for you as it is and will remain the most important factor for investor's decision. This is where you know how much you owe and own from assets and liabilities, you forecast your sales and profits for 10 years in advance. The main components of this section are: Balance Sheet, P/L Statement, Cash Flow Statement, Break-even Analysis, and Ratios Analysis.
Corporate Social Responsibility: Most common used ways for businesses to spread are to participate into their communities by sharing values and commitments with their surroundings. You cannot stay hidden for ever if you want to go viral with your products and services. People will value your outcome by measuring your social involvement. You better think deeply about your responsibilities and put them in your plan.

If you are going to start fresh with your business plan, I have kept a gift template for you to download for free at this link: GIFT BUSINESS PLAN TEMPLATE

Note: You can reorganize this template the way you want instead of sticking to the written.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence Pillar of Entrepreneurship

This pillar started trending only few years back and went viral in all leadership discussions. People started to realize the difference between intelligent quotient (IQ) and emotional Intelligence (EQ) when they started reading more about emotional intelligence.

70% of your people evaluation comes from his EQ and 30% from his IQ.

Emotional Intelligence is well defined and explained by the famous psychologist Daniel Goleman, which his book "Emotional Intelligence" was sold in 5 million copies in 1995. Until today, Daniel Goleman is inspiring leaders around the world with his videos, webinars, books, and articles published from time to time.

Emotional intelligence is to be practiced at home and at work, and if done accurately, I can guarantee you that it can give you the best work/life balance and stability ever.

I will dedicate a complete section soon for emotional intelligence. If you are interested, you can subscribe to my blog to receive the latest achievements about emotional intelligence by clicking on the form below.

The most important components of emotional intelligence are as follows:

Self-awareness: Knowing yourself. What are your key brain parts responsible for acting and reacting? Which part is responsible for what? How do you take decisions? How do you interact with your emotions? Do you really know yourself?
Self-management: How do you manage your emotions? How many times you took the bad decision while angry? How do you control your reactions? How can you interfere in the process of gratitude, happiness, joy, anger, anxiety, depression, grief, and all other emotions? Do you really have a control on yourself?
Social awareness: If you know yourself and how to control your emotions, then do you know the others? Do you practice empathy towards others? Do you put yourself in their shoes in every situation before judging them?
Relationship Management: Knowing the others and how they feel and act is the door to controlling their reactions. Do you plan to win all your discussions? Persuasion, sales, convincing, conflict management will be your peace of cake if you master relationship management. If you are a good communicator and presenter, then you have most probably achieved half of your target in relationship management.

Data Analysis

Data Analysis Pillar of Entrepreneurship

Here is the part that is mostly consulted for, or outsourced. Not every entrepreneur have the time to follow up with technology disruption but there must be someone to handle this disruption correctly.

IT people are becoming more and more important especially with the digital transformation revolution. Everything is becoming digital. Multiple platforms have been created online to manage customer data and make it easy to take decisions based on automatically generated reports with artificial intelligence.

Basic Information Technology: Do you know how to use a computer/laptop? Do you feel comfortable using Spreadsheets, Slides and text editing software? Most probably, technology will take a major part of your knowledge if you become an entrepreneur, so make sure that you have those basic skills as you will need them always.
Analytics Platforms: Today, customer and competitor analysis is taking a tremendous part of all business plans and from agile business development. You might need to adjust your marketing strategy as a whole, or in pieces based on consumer behavior by changing either prices, discounts, offers, advertisement campaigns, ... All this is provided for free or in a paid subscription in three major platforms: Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. These companies are competing in billions of dollars to expand their exposure and provide additional services to their clients in order to win the market.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): This is what is disrupting technologies. AI algorithms are able to automate huge number of tasks that we never dreamed a machine could ever do. As an entrepreneur, you need to be updated with such technology and read about its future as it might severely affect your tech business later on.
Reporting: Reports, Dashboards and Infographics are all what you are going to see very often if you become an entrepreneur having a delegated team. They will work the hard things, generate a beautifully designed report showing Key Performance Indicators, based on which you can take accurate decisions.

Conclusion

Entrepreneurship is like an astonishing artistic drawing. The artist takes a long time to complete it by adding, modifying, and erasing from it on several sessions. He wakes up at midnight to modify a tiny line or color for the sake of making it more perfect.

You are that artist; whenever you learn a new skill, practice it and fail, you approach to success and perfection. At the end, perfection is something relative and people might not see it perfect like you do. But, as much as you learn, as much as you approach from realizing your dream.

Entrepreneurship is an ART

If you reached this point and you are still reading here, I bet you have now some gut feelings that entrepreneurship is not an easy discipline, or maybe, it is not a good idea to start practicing for some reasons. I can assure you that it is completely the opposite.

Entrepreneurship is built-in in everyone's heart and mind. We just need to nurture it the right way and it will definitely flourish and generate the best outcome you have dreamed of.

Most of the above mentioned skills will be earned during your life and career with time, and also, a lot of them can be outsourced. The availability of resources is unlimited, you can just spare few hours to plan correctly your resources as this will be YOUR dream to be realized. No one will realize it for you.

However, there are a lot of entrepreneurs who are not aware of most or some of the above subjects and they are successful at what they do. How is that?

Simply because they rely on others to complete their tasks or they win a lot of money in a way that make them blind of what they are losing by the unawareness of the above subjects and their benefits to their business.

Holding all those skills together is going to be the #1 key differentiation among your competitors. You need to be yourself, and believe in your team members, delegate them and earn their respect and loyalty, in order to enjoy the fruits of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship Definition - What is Entrepreneurship?