Melinda Emerson

Entrepreneurship is defined as the activity of setting up a business or businesses taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.  An entrepreneur is an individual who creates a new business, bearing most of the risks and enjoying most of the rewards. The process of setting up a business is known as entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur is commonly seen as an innovator, a source of new ideas, goods, services, and business/or procedures. There are 4 types of entrepreneurship:

1. Small Business Entrepreneurship Today, the overwhelming number of entrepreneurs and startups in the United States are still small businesses. There are 5.7 million small businesses in the U.S. They make up 99.7% of all companies and employ 50% of all non-governmental workers.

2. Scalable Startup Entrepreneurship Unlike small businesses, scalable startups are what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their venture investors do. These entrepreneurs start a company knowing from day one that their vision could change the world. They attract investment from equally crazy financial investors – venture capitalists. T+hey hire the best and the brightest. Their job is to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.  When they find it, their focus on scale requires even more venture capital to fuel rapid expansion.

3. Large Company Entrepreneurship Large companies have finite life cycles. Most grow through sustaining innovation, offering new products that are variants around their core products. Changes in customer tastes, new technologies, legislation, new competitors, etc. can create pressure for more disruptive innovation – requiring large companies to create entirely new products sold into new customers in new markets.

4. Social Entrepreneurship Social entrepreneurs are innovators who focus on creating products and services that solve social needs and problems. But unlike scalable startups their goal is to make the world a better place, not to take market share or to create to wealth for the founders. They may be nonprofit, for-profit, or hybrid.

Joining us for our discussion on Business Knowledge  is Melinda Emerson  who is on the phone from her Philadelphia office . Melinda F. Emerson, better known as the  Smallbizlady, is one of america’s leading small business experts. She is an author, speaker and small business coach whose areas of expertise include small business start-up, business development and social media marketing. As CEO OF Quintessence Group, Melinda develops audio, video and written content to fulfill her mission to end small business failure.  She is the author of Become Your Own Boss In 12 Months:A Month By Month Guide To Business That Works, Revised & Expanded Version.  Welcome Back To Mastering Your Money, Melinda Emerson.