I often get a lot of criticism because I differentiate between business and entrepreneurship often. My belief is that great businessmen are not always great entrepreneurs and great entrepreneurs are not always good in business. Some agree and some don’t, but I wanted to take a moment to help you understand why business people make awful entrepreneurs.
Business is equal to making money, while entrepreneurship is innovating to create value.
While an entrepreneur can often monetize an innovative idea, they typically build the idea first without the money as the main decision-driving factor. Businessmen, on the other hand, are driven by their businesses making money, and therefore don’t care about the value created as long as its profitable.
There is a clash when defining value and the proposition of bringing value to others between a businessman and an entrepreneur. While the value of the goods provided may be equal or similar, who it benefits first typically isn’t. Entrepreneurs are notorious for creating value for others while businessman are great at creating value for themselves first.
Then there is the clash that businessmen typically are in business to trade their time and effort for money, and their goal is to increase their earnings for every hour of their life they trade for money. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are great at looking at automation systems and the ability to create a self-sustaining residual model right from the start. While businessmen also want to create businesses that are on auto-pilot, it typically comes from simplifying complex systems created right at the beginning stages. It is very rare that the automated channel structure exists from day 1.
With all that said, it does not mean that the two cannot co-exist on someone and that great entrepreneurs can’t become great businessman and vice versa. This argument is simply to show you that the two are not automatically associated with one another and that being one doesn’t automatically make you great at being the other.
While society and the media do a great job at blending the two, the reality is that many great entrepreneurs knew very little of business when they got started. I, myself, was a businessman first, an entrepreneur second, but that trend has now changed. I have learned to become an entrepreneur first while applying many of the concepts learned through the years I have been in business.
