Categories: Articles

What Is An Entrepreneur?

It’s a term that so many people are struggling with in this day and age.

This week is small business week. With that comes all sorts of staggering information about how important small business is to our economy:

More than 99% of Ontario’s businesses are small and medium-sized (under 500 employees).
More than 97% of Ontario’s employer businesses were small-sized with fewer than 100 employees.
More than 2.8 million Ontarians worked for small and medium enterprises.
Large enterprises employed almost 2.7 million individuals.

We tend to look at the massive brands and organizations as some kind of lighthouse of power when, in reality, we would not have much of an economy were it not for the small business owners. The challenge is that we live in a day and age when a business (like Instagram) can have under ten employees, minimal (if any) revenue, and then be sold for one billion dollars (in this case, it was to Facebook). So, is Instagram a small business? Or do we need to take the concept of a startup and separate it from the flock, because the spirit of a startup is so foundationally different from an individual who is more than happy to make enough less money (with as little stress as possible) and wants to run a business that would never be worth a billion dollars.

So, if you’re limiting your income and growth potential on purpose, can you still be considered an entrepreneur?

I have set a very clear definition of what an entrepreneur is: an entrepreneur is someone who has a vision for the industry that they serve that has yet to exist, and is willing to take the risk to prove their vision by executing and running a business around it. Some would argue that this definition is too shallow. Some would argue that many small business owners should not even be considered entrepreneurs. So might even argue that children of entrepreneurs taking over a family business would be considered entrepreneurs too (I’m iffy on this one). This week, I was invited to take part in a live television panel on TVO‘s The Agenda with Steve Paikin. The title of the show was called, Small Business In A Big Box World. The segment lasts about thirty minutes, and I’m hopeful that I did us all proud. There was some heavy back and forth challenges and debates.

So, would you consider certain small business owners entrepreneurs? I would. Here’s why…

Also, in cased you missed it, here’s my CTRL ALT Delete solo session on The Agenda with Steve Paikin from a few months back…

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.