“Quit you 9-5 and work for yourself! Create your own life! How can you work for someone else for all of your life?”
These are statements that consistently come up in our society today. The word entrepreneur has become diluted in a way. For example, someone could possibly get a couple thousand views on TikTok and begin to label themselves a Digital Entrepreneur. In no way is that a bad thing, but for many it distorts the image of what an entrepreneur is. It leads many to question, “What really is an entrepreneur?”
The purpose of this blog post will not be to focus on answering that question. I will aim to take a deeper dive and provide more context for what “Entrepreneurship” is/means. We’ll look at the trends of entrepreneurship in the United States, look at what characterizes an entrepreneur, and their place in our society to name a few things.
Now that I’ve covered my bases, let’s take a swim.
Definition
The Investopedia definition of an entrepreneur is as follows, “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.” Of course, there is no one definition to what an entrepreneur really is. Some may characterize them as thought leaders, visionaries, or even symbols of hope and wisdom. Meanwhile, some may characterize them as greedy, power-hungry pigs. It really just depends. Personally, I feel as if a nice general consensus description of an entrepreneur would be someone who can be identified as a go-getter, an opportunity seeker. Many times you see the phrase “entrepreneurial spirit” come up in our society. Here, it is pretty clear to identify what they mean when they say the phrase. They are usually referring to something along the lines of ambition and tenacity. On the same accord, the word entrepreneur comes up a lot today as well. It seems as if the meaning behind it in a lot of contexts’ has switched from a title to more of a lifestyle.
Ocean Waves and Business Trends
I mentioned above that many people bring up the term entrepreneur and an immediate vision of a certain lifestyle is created their mind. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people were able to change these thoughts into their actual reality. There has been a very peculiar boom of entrepreneurs and business incorporations like never seen before. It is even crazier to think that this sudden boom happened in the middle of not only a pandemic, but an economic recession as well. Nearly 5.5 million business were formed in 2021. This is one million more than the number of business formed in 2020, and 54% more than 2019.
Who is starting these business?
I think it is not only important to look at the number of businesses incorporated in this time period, but it is even more important to look at who is starting these companies. In 2021 49% of entrepreneurs were women, a substantial increase of 28% from 2019. 29% of these business were founded by people of color, with 7% belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community. This shows that there really is a greater variety of breadth as well as depth in the entrepreneurial game right now, something that is amazing to see. Although, it is still important to mention that many members of the these communities that I have mentioned are critically underfunded when it comes to their companies.
Why are they starting these companies?
So we’ve gone through some identifiers as to what the demographics of these new age entrepreneurs look like. Now, let’s look as to why they are starting these companies. What are the hidden implication/reasons for starting these companies besides the pandemic. To be succinct, flexibility. The pandemic did not inherently open the gateway towards entrepreneurship, you don’t just wake up one day and open a key to becoming one. What the pandemic did was allow the mind more time to think, reflect, and strategically prioritize. With the stressors of constant work being put on pause for just a moment, I believe many people began to realize how much they loved being in control of their own time. For many parents, entrepreneurship meant having a schedule where they can provide for their family and have the ability to carve out more time for them as well. One more factor that has played a substantial role in this boom. Many people chose this path because it allowed them to be more in control of their finances. An interesting thing to note is that most individuals actually stayed within the same industry when they started their respective businesses, 71% in 2022 to be exact. I say this is an interesting thing because most of the time that someone thinks about venturing out and starting their own business, you would think that they are leaving their current situation to pursue a long-held passion of theirs. That high number of business owners staying within the same industry presents a unique insight.
People are making choices to design a business around their life.
What role does entrepreneurship play in our society?
I believe that the recent boom in entrepreneurship is actually a pretty good thing. Think about it from this perspective, entrepreneurship is a form of wealth creation. Not to get too deep into demographics again, but the typical white family has eight times the wealth of a typical black family and five times that of a hispanic family. Entrepreneurship has long been a foreign concept to many black American families. With the aid of many inclusive entrepreneurship incubators, seed facilities, and countless other efforts, the game has been able to lower the barrier of entry a bit. Entrepreneurship is a mechanism of introducing many new products into society. It also opens up job opportunities for many people. However, take that with a grain of salt as most businesses started in 2021 were single person LLC’s. Needless to say, the value of entrepreneurship in society is extremely high. Looking at many Fortune 500 companies now, they have adopted grand scheme incubator systems to spur the feeling of creativity and innovation. They do this not only because they recognize the importance of entrepreneurship, but they also know that if they do not stay agile and constantly improving, their companies will not last in our current climate. Although I have covered many different facets of entrepreneurship in this article, a few principles do remain. An entrepreneur is someone willing to take on considerable risk in return for something of great value to them. Whether what’s valuable is money, power, influence, or freedom is really up to the respective individual. Point being, entrepreneurship looks a bit less scary than it once might have in the past. There are more tools than ever before to create a business.