I might be an entrepreneur after all

It seems that for as long as I have been making my own way in the world, there has always been a line of people ready to tell me what it is to be an entrepreneur. In essence, what it is to be me. As it has been so regularly explained to me, the qualities I need include the ability to risk it all, take a leap of faith, and generally be prepared to go all in and let it ride. But this isn't me - yet I always wanted to hold this title. Am I in the wrong line of work? It sure doesn't feel like it. I have a general inability to work for others when the end goal isn't shown to me, and I thrive on the constant thrill of being where I want, when I want, doing what I want. I know what I want to be and how I will get there. The problem I have is many others think I don't.

I remember quite fondly the first time I sat in the office of a family friend who, over 10 years, had built himself a strong food product. Before starting his business, this family man had had his fair share of losses and business failures. Being my early 20s I was still rather green in the business sense, but I had my values and my beliefs which are still basically the same, if not a little more refined, today. We sat in his small conference room, perched high above the rumbling of fork lifts and conveyor belts. "James," he said from across the table "can you see yourself losing every dollar you have and being able to get up and do it again?" I looked around the room at the business this man had created, at the shelves of his products and the faded poster touting their superior qualities. "Yes" I said. I was lying. The idea of going 'all in' on a business never felt right to me. Chalk it up to my less than privileged upbringing or lack of conventional business education but the idea, not only that I would have to risk it all to succeed but that the hand of fate would decide my business success, seemed not only wrong but just plain stupid.

My online wise-man, Wikipedia, states: "Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service, by carving out a niche in the market that may not exist currently. Entrepreneurs tend to identify a market opportunity and exploit it by organising their resources effectively to accomplish an outcome that changes existing interactions within a given sector." No mention of risk taking anywhere and seems to sum up the definition beautifully. Okay it may have been proceeded by: "An entrepreneur is a person who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome." But who decided it was inherent to take large financial risks in order to be an entrepreneur? The phrase that seems to escape most people in this line of work is "organising their resources effectively to accomplish an outcome". I don't think risking it all on one venture is organising ones resources effectively at all. But was I the only one? The accumulative knowledge of Wikipedia seemed to think so. I may have carried on feeling like a stranger in a foreign land had it not been for a paper on the topic discovered by my better half.

In the recent book From Predators to Icons, the French scholars Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot set out to uncover what successful entrepreneurs have in common. Instead of coming up with findings that reinforce the common perception of what it is to be an entrepreneur they discovered something rather different.

This from a New Yorker book review which runs rings around anything I could write: "By examining case histories of several businessmen who built their own empires — ranging from Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, to Bernard Arnault, of the luxury-goods conglomerate L.V.M.H. — and charting what they consider the typical course of a successful entrepreneur’s career, the truly successful businessman, in Villette and Vuillermot’s telling, is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting. Would we so revere risk-taking if we realised that the people who are supposedly taking bold risks in the cause of entrepreneurship are actually doing no such thing?

"In contrast to the familiar image of the entrepreneur as a visionary with a plan, Villette and Vuillermot instead discover a far less dramatic process of improvised adaptations gradually assembled into a coherent course of conduct. And rather than being risk-takers, those who are most successful in business are risk-minimisers. Huge gains, these case studies reveal, are most reliably obtained in circumstances where the entrepreneur has established careful provisions for risk reduction."

And in the perfect grammatical balance of the New Yorker, there you have it. It turns out that for all the common misconceptions and just plane blind assumptions about the subject, I am equipped to be an entrepreneur after all.

James Crow is the Auckland-based entrepreneur behind Pot of Gold skin balm and After Ink tattoo aftercare. He blogs about life as a startup entrepreneur each week for Unlimited