Unit 1; Ch. 1, Importance of Entrepreneurship

     For our very first reading, the topic is the importance of entrepreneurship and goes into the basics of what entrepreneurship is. The chapter starts off with the question of, what is an entrepreneur? To answer this, an entrepreneur starts and runs a business, while an employee works for the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur makes all of the final decisions, however, there's a lot of risk involved, as it's a no risk, no reward situation. It's a difficult process when starting out as you have to experiment with your customers and your idea could be a massive hit or be a major loss of investment. I found it quite surprising that 64% of new jobs are created by small businesses in the US, as I expected a figure more similar to 40%. The SBA or Small Business Administration defines and supports a small business if they have less than 100 employees or less than 50 if they built their business from the ground up. Out of 800,000 businesses in 2011, 50,000 survived the year. Many entrepreneurs fail as they're goals are unobtainable for the time being or they simply don't know where they want their business to go. In the reading, we learn about Vincent who started a business repairing iPhones. He identified a problem with how expensive they are to fix, and offered services to fix them cheaper and faster than Apple! Some of the benefits of being an entrepreneur are creating your own set of rules, enjoying the work you do everyday, helping you community, and the amount of wealth you can obtain if successful. While the benefits may seem great, they don't come without risk as previously mentioned. Especially in your business startup, there's a chance you can flop, losing all your invested time and money. Speaking of time, it can take many grueling hours in the beginning. The last two main problems can be unexpected obstacles that are demoralizing, making it difficult to continue, and financial insecurity until your business starts rolling. A serial entrepreneur is someone that utilizes skills and strategies learned from a previous business they created or helped found, and apply them to their new businesses. Today, we see many entrepreneurs advertise using the internet through websites and ads.  This was a very informative article and the main message to me was that while there are many upsides to becoming an entrepreneur, getting there is the most difficult part as you need determination among other things.