Entrepreneurship is the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which is often initially a small business. The people who create these businesses are called entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship has been described as the "capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit". While definitions of entrepreneurship typically focus on the launching and running of businesses, due to the high risks involved in launching a start-up, a significant proportion of start-up businesses have to close due to "lack of funding, bad business decisions, an economic crisis, lack of market demand—or a combination of all of these.
A broader definition of the term is sometimes used, especially in the field of economics. In this usage, an Entrepreneur is an entity which has the ability to find and act upon opportunities to translate inventions or technology into new products: "The entrepreneur is able to recognize the commercial potential of the invention and organize the capital, talent, and other resources that turn an invention into a commercially viable innovation." In this sense, the term "Entrepreneurship" also captures innovative activities on the part of established firms, in addition to similar activities on the part of new businesses.
Many people own small businesses known as local businesses.
Local businesses are businesses found in a particular village, town or city.
Such businesses also include local people trying to promote what they have found out like grow better garden vegetables, make children love school, better treat their wives or husband.
Even your local women and men meetings can also be seen as local business.
Such businesses are bound to suffer from very poor customer attendance.
Most of them close down due to boring customer appearance or lack of funs.
Some have gone back to the old method of distributing fliers.
This is a very ineffective method since it has to be drop in the mail box of each house.
The problem here is how many houses can you drop these fliers and how consistent can you be.
The internet is the most effective way to promote a small business online.
On todays post users are going to be learning the following.
How to use twitter to promote a small business online for free
How to use facebook to promote a small business online for free
How to use blogger to promote a small business online for free
How to use pinterest to promote a small business online for free
This is what you are going to find out.
Cities, villages, towns receive allot of visitors from other villages, cities and towns.
Some of them are tourist, friends, relatives, business people or just enjoying a country.
Non of these people go about checking mail boxes.
What they do is go on the internet.
How to use facebook to promote a small business online for free
If you are on facebook, then you already know what is going on there.
People are busy chating with friends, keeping updates on their favorite stars, games, movies...
What you are also going to find out or know facebook offers its users the opportunity to create a page or group which is completely manage by them.
Create a page or group about your local business say pizza shops in badvilbel, american meeting houses in frankfurt, african diches in badvilbel.
The best way to promote a page or group on facebook for free is by inviting your friends and requesting they also invite their friends.
What you want to do is update this group or page as frequently as possible.
If someone get in a place where your local business is found.
Say they are checking out men's meeting or women's meeting in badvilbel on facebook and your group or page happen to show up they will definitely call, email and possibly visit your local business.
Make sure to have an email box you always check and answer questions, working phone number, address to your local business.
How to use twitter to promote your local business online for free
Twitter is known as a mini blogger platform where users are allowed to post shot messages.
With twitter you need followers and people also have to follow you back.
Don't just go about following anyone that won't make any sense.
Say you have found out how to make children love school.
Use twitter search and search for organisations, individuals offering better parental advice.
Then go to their followers and follow the people there.
After you have had a good follow up, start tweeting short messages about your local business or your findings.
Twitter will give you the opportunity to include emails and even landing pages on each tweet you make.
On your BIO you can also include the address of your local business.
How to use pinterest to promote a small business online for free
Pinterest is known to be the social media with the highest referal rate.
This is what you do on pinterest.
follow people
get followers
post pictures known as pins
Follow targeted people.
Don't be promoting better garden flower ideas and busy following people promoting nude pictures.
With each pin you have the ability to include a description where you can include an email, phone number, village, city or town address.
What you need is repins and followers.
Make rich pins about your local business attractive to the eye.
Women stuffs like fashion, food, wedding do pretty well on pinterest.
How to use blogger to promote a small business online fro free
Blogger is like a website owned by google.
With blogger you live under the themes and design of google.
You have the ability to manipulate with the css and html codes to saute your style and taste.
Very dangerous though since any mistake will lead to broken links, very slow loading.
It is advisable to use the one given to you by google.
You can do every thing on blogger.
It is free, no annual domain fees.
post videos, pictures, write articles with lengths of your choice.
Create short videos, write articles take photos of your local business and post on blogger.
Here come the hard part.
The biggest topic online known as internet traffic.
Companies, individuals spend huge sums of money promoting their business with google adwords, facebook ads, twitter ads.
Being found by search engines in a process known as seo (search engine optimzation) is also a very difficult and frustrating process since large industries have eaten all the front page of google.
With blogger you get a link.
You can send this link to your facebook friends, email it to your twitter and pinterest followers which is the most effective way.
Or do it the hard way learn about seo.
Where you will have to learn how to create backlinks, do keyword research.
I have a couple of posts that will help you go through that.
Facebook Mentorship For Business
Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, or "the owner or manager of a business enterprise who, by risk and initiative, attempts to make profits". Entrepreneurs act as managers and oversee the launch and growth of an enterprise. Entrepreneurship is the process by which either an individual or a team identifies a business opportunity and acquires and deploys the necessary resources required for its exploitation. Early-19th-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say provided a broad definition of entrepreneurship, saying that it "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield". Entrepreneurs create something new, something different—they change or transmute values. Regardless of the firm size, big or small, they can partake in entrepreneurship opportunities. The opportunity to become an entrepreneur requires four criteria. First, there must be opportunities or situations to recombine resources to generate profit. Second, entrepreneurship requires differences between people, such as preferential access to certain individuals or the ability to recognize information about opportunities. Third, taking on risk is a necessary. Fourth, the entrepreneurial process requires the organization of people and resources.
The entrepreneur is a factor in and the study of entrepreneurship reaches back to the work of Richard Cantillon and Adam Smith in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. However, entrepreneurship was largely ignored theoretically until the late 19th and early 20th centuries and empirically until a profound resurgence in business and economics since the late 1970s. In the 20th century, the understanding of entrepreneurship owes much to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s and other Austrian economists such as Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. According to Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation. Entrepreneurship employs what Schumpeter called "the gale of creative destruction" to replace in whole or in part inferior innovations across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products including new business models. In this way, creative destruction is largely responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth. The supposition that entrepreneurship leads to economic growth is an interpretation of the residual in endogenous growth theory and as such is hotly debated in academic economics. An alternative description posited by Israel Kirzner suggests that the majority of innovations may be much more incremental improvements such as the replacement of paper with plastic in the making of drinking straws.
The exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities may include:
- Developing a business plan
- Hiring the human resources
- Acquiring financial and material resources
- Providing leadership
- Being responsible for both the venture's success or failure
- Risk aversion
Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) saw the role of the entrepreneur in the economy as "creative destruction" – launching innovations that simultaneously destroy old industries while ushering in new industries and approaches. For Schumpeter, the changes and "dynamic disequilibrium brought on by the innovating entrepreneur [were] the norm of a healthy economy". While entrepreneurship is often associated with new, small, for-profit start-ups, entrepreneurial behavior can be seen in small-, medium- and large-sized firms, new and established firms and in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, including voluntary-sector groups, charitable organizations and government.
Entrepreneurship may operate within an entrepreneurship ecosystem which often includes:
- Government programs and services that promote entrepreneurship and support entrepreneurs and start-ups
- Non-governmental organizations such as small-business associations and organizations that offer advice and mentoring to entrepreneurs (e.g. through entrepreneurship centers or websites)
- Small-business advocacy organizations that lobby governments for increased support for entrepreneurship programs and more small business-friendly laws and regulations
- Entrepreneurship resources and facilities (e.g. business incubators and seed accelerators)
- Entrepreneurship education and training programs offered by schools, colleges and universities
- Financing (e.g. bank loans, venture capital financing, angel investing and government and private foundation grants)
In the 2000s, usage of the term "entrepreneurship" expanded to include how and why some individuals (or teams) identify opportunities, evaluate them as viable, and then decide to exploit them. The term has also been used to discuss how people might use these opportunities to develop new products or services, launch new firms or industries, and create wealth. The entrepreneurial process is uncertain because opportunities can only be identified after they have been exploited.
Entrepreneurs tend exhibit positive biases towards finding new possibilities and seeing unmet market needs, and a tendency towards risk-taking that makes them more likely to exploit business opportunities.
Types of entrepreneurs
Ethnic
The term "ethnic entrepreneurship" refers to self-employed business owners who belong to racial or ethnic minority groups in the United States and Europe. A long tradition of academic research explores the experiences and strategies of ethnic entrepreneurs as they strive to integrate economically into mainstream U.S. or European society. Classic cases include Jewish merchants and tradespeople in large U.S. cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as Chinese and Japanese small business owners (restaurants, farmers, shop owners) on the West Coast. In the 2010s, ethnic entrepreneurship has been studied in the case of Cuban business owners in Miami, Indian motel owners of the U.S. and Chinese business owners in Chinatowns across the United States. While entrepreneurship offers these groups many opportunities for economic advancement, self-employment and business ownership in the United States remain unevenly distributed along racial/ethnic lines. Despite numerous success stories of Asian entrepreneurs, a recent statistical analysis of U.S. census data shows that whites are more likely than Asians, African-Americans and Latinos to be self-employed in high prestige, lucrative industries.
Institutional
The American-born British economist Edith Penrose has highlighted the collective nature of entrepreneurship. She mentions that in modern organizations, human resources need to be combined in order to better capture and create business opportunities. The sociologist Paul DiMaggio (1988:14) has expanded this view to say that "new institutions arise when organized actors with sufficient resources [institutional entrepreneurs] see in them an opportunity to realize interests that they value highly". The notion has been widely applied.
Cultural
According to Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland, cultural entrepreneurship is "practices of individual and collective agency characterized by mobility between cultural professions and modes of cultural production", which refers to creative industry activities and sectors. Rea and Volland identify three types of cultural entrepreneur: "cultural personalities", defined as "individuals who build their own personal brand of creativity as a cultural authority and leverage it to create and sustain various cultural enterprises"; "tycoons", defined as "entrepreneurs who buil[d] substantial clout in the cultural sphere by forging synergies between their industrial, cultural, political, and philanthropic interests"; and "collective enterprises", organizations which may engage in cultural production for profit or not-for-profit purposes.
Feminist
A feminist entrepreneur is an individual who applies feminist values and approaches through entrepreneurship, with the goal of improving the quality of life and well-being of girls and women. Many are doing so by creating "for women, by women" enterprises. Feminist entrepreneurs are motivated to enter commercial markets by desire to create wealth and social change, based on the ethics of cooperation, equality and mutual respect.
Social entrepreneurship is the use of the by start up companies and other entrepreneurs to develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues. This concept may be applied to a variety of organizations with different sizes, aims, and beliefs. For-profit entrepreneurs typically measure performance using business metrics like profit, revenues and increases in stock prices, but social entrepreneurs are either non-profits or blend for-profit goals with generating a positive "return to society" and therefore must use different metrics. Social entrepreneurship typically attempts to further broad social, cultural, and environmental goals often associated with the voluntary sector in areas such as poverty alleviation, health care and community development. At times, profit-making social enterprises may be established to support the social or cultural goals of the organization but not as an end in itself. For example, an organization that aims to provide housing and employment to the homeless may operate a restaurant, both to raise money and to provide employment for the homeless people.
Nascent
A nascent entrepreneur is someone in the process of establishing a business venture. In this observation, the nascent entrepreneur can be seen as pursuing an opportunity, i.e. a possibility to introduce new services or products, serve new markets, or develop more efficient production methods in a profitable manner. But before such a venture is actually established, the opportunity is just a venture idea. In other words, the pursued opportunity is perceptual in nature, propped by the nascent entrepreneur's personal beliefs about the feasibility of the venturing outcomes the nascent entrepreneur seeks to achieve. Its prescience and value cannot be confirmed ex ante but only gradually, in the context of the actions that the nascent entrepreneur undertakes towards establishing the venture, Ultimately, these actions can lead to a path that the nascent entrepreneur deems no longer attractive or feasible, or result in the emergence of a (viable) business. In this sense, over time, the nascent venture can move towards being discontinued or towards emerging successfully as an operating entity.
The distinction between the novice, serial and portfolio entrepreneurs is an example of behavior-based categorization. Other examples are the (related) studies by, on start-up event sequences. Nascent entrepreneurship that emphasizes the series of activities involved in new venture emergence, rather than the solitary act of exploiting an opportunity. Such research will help separate entrepreneurial action into its basic sub-activities and elucidate the inter- relationships between activities, between an activity (or sequence of activities) and an individual's motivation to form an opportunity belief, and between an activity (or sequence of activities) and the knowledge needed to form an opportunity belief. With this research, scholars will be able to begin constructing a theory of the micro-foundations of entrepreneurial action.
Scholars interested in nascent entrepreneurship tend to focus less on the single act of opportunity exploitation and more on the series of actions in new venture emergence, Indeed, nascent entrepreneurs undertake numerous entrepreneurial activities, including actions that make their businesses more concrete to themselves and others. For instance, nascent entrepreneurs often look for and purchase facilities and equipment; seek and obtain financial backing, form legal entities, organize teams; and dedicate all their time and energy to their business.
Project-based
Project entrepreneurs are individuals who are engaged in the repeated assembly or creation of temporary organizations. These are organizations that have limited lifespans which are devoted to producing a singular objective or goal and get disbanded rapidly when the project ends. Industries, where project-based enterprises are widespread, include: sound recording, film production, software development, television production, new media and construction. What makes project-entrepreneurs distinctive from a theoretical standpoint is that they have to "rewire" these temporary ventures and modify them to suit the needs of new project opportunities that emerge. A project entrepreneur who used a certain approach and team for one project may have to modify the business model or team for a subsequent project.
Project entrepreneurs are exposed repeatedly to problems and tasks typical of the entrepreneurial process. Indeed, project-entrepreneurs face two critical challenges that invariably characterize the creation of a new venture: locating the right opportunity to launch the project venture and assembling the most appropriate team to exploit that opportunity. Resolving the first challenge requires project-entrepreneurs to access an extensive range of information needed to seize new investment opportunities. Resolving the second challenge requires assembling a collaborative team that has to fit well with the particular challenges of the project and has to function almost immediately to reduce the risk that performance might be adversely affected. Another type of project entrepreneurship involves entrepreneurs working with business students to get analytical work done on their ideas.
Millennial
The term "millennial entrepreneur" refers to a business owner who is affiliated with the generation that was brought up using digital technology and mass media—the products of Baby Boomers, those people born during the 1980s and early 1990s. Also known as Generation Y, these business owners are well equipped with knowledge of new technology and new business models and have a strong grasp of its business applications. There have been many breakthrough businesses that have come from millennial entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook. Despite the expectation of millennial success, there have been recent studies that have proven this to not be the case. The comparison between millennials who are self-employed and those who are not self-employed shows that the latter is higher. The reason for this is because they have grown up in a different generation and attitude than their elders. Some of the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are the economy, debt from schooling and the challenges of regulatory compliance.
Entrepreneurship training and education
Michelacci and Schivardi are a pair of researchers who believe that identifying and comparing the relationships between an entrepreneur's earnings and education level would determine the rate and level of success. Their study focused on two education levels, college degree and post-graduate degree. While Michelacci and Schivardi do not specifically determine characteristics or traits for successful entrepreneurs, they do believe that there is a direct relationship between education and success, noting that having a college knowledge does contribute to advancement in the workforce.
Michelacci and Schivardi state there has been a rise in the number of self-employed people with a baccalaureate degree. However, their findings also show that those who are self-employed and possess a graduate degree has remained consistent throughout time at about 33 percent. They briefly mention those famous entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg who were college dropouts, but they call these cases all but exceptional as it is a pattern that many entrepreneurs view formal education as costly, mainly because of the time that needs to be spent on it. Michelacci and Schivardi believe that in order for an individual to reach the full success they need to have education beyond high school. Their research shows that the higher the education level the greater the success. The reason is that college gives people additional skills that can be used within their business and to operate on a higher level than someone who only "runs" it.
Resources and financing
Entrepreneurial resources
An entrepreneurial resource is any company-owned asset that has economic value creating capabilities. Economic value creating both tangible and intangible sources are considered as entrepreneurial resources. Their economic value is generating activities or services through mobilization by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial resources can be divided into two fundamental categories: tangible and intangible resources.
Tangible resources are material sources such as equipment, building, furniture, land, vehicle, machinery, stock, cash, bond and inventory that has a physical form and can be quantified. On the contrary, intangible resources are nonphysical or more challenging to identify and evaluate, and they possess more value creating capacity such as human resources including skills and experience in a particular field, organizational structure of the company, brand name, reputation, entrepreneurial networks that contribute to promotion and financial support, know-how, intellectual property including both copyrights, trademarks and patents.
Bootstrapping
At least early on, entrepreneurs often "bootstrap-finance" their start-up rather than seeking external investors from the start. One of the reasons that some entrepreneurs prefer to "bootstrap" is that obtaining equity financing requires the entrepreneur to provide ownership shares to the investors. If the start-up becomes successful later on, these early equity financing deals could provide a windfall for the investors and a huge loss for the entrepreneur. If investors have a significant stake in the company, they may as well be able to exert influence on company strategy, chief executive officer (CEO) choice and other important decisions. This is often problematic since the investor and the founder might have different incentives regarding the long-term goal of the company. An investor will generally aim for a profitable exit and therefore promotes a high-valuation sale of the company or IPO in order to sell their shares. Whereas the entrepreneur might have philanthropic intentions as their main driving force. Soft values like this might not go well with the short-term pressure on yearly and quarterly profits that publicly traded companies often experience from their owners.
One consensus definition of bootstrapping sees it as "a collection of methods used to minimize the amount of outside debt and equity financing needed from banks and investors". The majority of businesses require less than $10,000 to launch, which means that personal savings are most often used to start. In addition, bootstrapping entrepreneurs often incur personal credit-card debt, but they also can utilize a wide variety of methods. While bootstrapping involves increased personal financial risk for entrepreneurs, the absence of any other stakeholder gives the entrepreneur more freedom to develop the company.
Bootstrapping methods include:
- Owner financing, including savings, personal loans and credit card debt
- Working capital management that minimizes accounts receivable
- Joint utilization, such as reducing overhead by coworking or using independent contractors
- Increasing accounts payable by delaying payment, or leasing rather than buying equipment
- Lean manufacturing strategies such as minimizing inventory and lean startup to reduce product development costs
- Subsidy finance
The neighborhood you are living in is getting as many visitors as you can think of.
The problem here is most of these people have just a few days for you.
How do you keep getting such people?
When they get to a city and are looking for cultural groups, favorite spots, food.
They turn to the internet.
When we talk about the internet we are talking about google, facebook and twitter.
Get your local business out there and watch the magic happen.
Don't go about trying to make money when people have not even trusted you.
Most of them will run as fast as they came.
With blogger you are going to see allot of opportunities to make money online like google adsense, amazon, ignore that rather focus on getting internet traffic.
When you get loyal readership you can even start an online store.
In all it takes some time and patience.
