For a lot of people, when they start their business, they don’t see themselves as an entrepreneur or as an innovator, and I think this is an important factor. They see themselves, in a lot of cases, as the technician or the practitioner. And that’s what eMyth talks about 70% of all businesses have been started by a technician who, if they are successful at being a technician, they become an entrepreneur. And so they don’t go into it with an entrepreneurial mindset.
Let me talk about the difference between an entrepreneur mindset and a practice owner/business owner mindset. An innovator mindset says, I’m going to build something that’s unique or that’s different. And I’m going to go out and create a marketplace for it, and it’s going to become greatly successful. That’s how an innovator thinks about their business.
A practice owner says, or a technician-owned business says, “I’m going to go out and I’m going to be good at what I do. And I’m going to be so good at it, everyone’s going to want to see me, everyone’s going to want to be around me, and I’m just going to have a great life with a great reputation of being excellent at what I do.”
An entrepreneur mindset steps back and says, where do I want to be in 5 years? 10 years? What do I want it to look like? What do I want my life and what do I want my engagement in that situation to be? And how do I want to go create it in order to create that impact that I want to create? It’s a much different perspective.
“So I think it’s important to understand that you need to pay attention to whatever your perspective is and how you’re thinking about whatever it is you’re going to do.”
And so the person that creates a widget, a Steve Jobs, and goes out and creates the largest business in the world, that’s an innovator who became a highly successful entrepreneur.
A business owner who goes out and creates a business that has 30, 40, 50 locations and hundreds of people working inside of it, they started as a practice owner and they became an entrepreneur because they were intentional about creating a business that reached far beyond what they could do alone.
But for that same particular business, if somebody goes and starts it as a practitioner and they don’t grow beyond themselves, they’re not really an entrepreneur, even though they started their own business. Because an entrepreneur has a bigger perspective of a much grander scope in what they want to attain or accomplish.
The important question isn’t if you’re a business owner or an entrepreneur. The key is which do you WANT to be? And how are you positioning yourself to get there?
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