By Paz H. Diaz, Ph.D.
Before starting a business, you need to identify what type of entrepreneur you want to be. Many types of entrepreneurs are needed to help the country grow and flourish.
The following are some examples of the types of entrepreneurs you can choose to become:
1. Selfemployed-: These individuals perform all the work and keep all the profit. This includes everything from family-run stores, agents, repair shops, accountants to physicians and lawyers. It can be a full-time job because no one else is involved. Included in this category are those who go into business in order to survive, e.g. cigarette vendor, house-to-house peddlers, sari-sari store owners.
2. Opportunistic entrepreneurs: These entrepreneurs start a business and expand as fast as possible in order to be able to hire other employees. Usually, these additional employees have the necessary expertise that the owner does not have.
3. Innovators: Those with particular inventive abilities who design a better product and then crate companies to develop, produce and market the item. High-technology companies of this type are a new trend.
4. Acquirers: These entrepreneurs take over a business started by somebody else and use their own ideas to make it successful. This often happens when there is a financialproblem in the current operation. Fresh management ideas or new capital may save the business.
5. Buy-sell artists: These entrepreneurs buy a company to improve it so that they can sell it again for a profit.
6. Speculators: These are entrepreneurs who purchase a commodity and resell it for a profit. Real estate, art pieces, antiques, and crops are typical speculator items.
7. Franchisee: A franchisee is an individual who starts a business for which a widely-known product image has already been established by another entrepreneur known as the franchisor. The franchisee owns the business and assumes its operating responsibilities, subject to specifications set out by the franchisor.
8. E-preneurs: These entrepreneurs need not set up brick-and-mortar stores because their main business is selling online. Because of this, they have low overhead costs and thus are often able to sell items at prices lower than traditional retailers do.
(First published in Windows to Entrepreneurship: a teaching guide by the SERDEF)
Photo: from technorati.com