Who wants to be an entrepreneur?

We tend to admire entrepreneurs as risk takers, some even looking down a bit on non entrepreneurs for being risk averse. We crave certainty and assurance and see strength in entrepreneurs’ ability to live with uncertainty and doubt.

As more people continue working after marriage, either as dual career couples or as copreneurs, work-life balance become a major issue for employers, employees and the self-employed.

We admire entrepreneurs for their courage in the face of adversity and willingness to keep trying new things while we ordinary mortals just keep inching along, doing the same old things and hoping to make it to retirement in one piece.

So we celebrate entrepreneurs but we know that new entrepreneurial ventures largely fail- about 80% in the first two years - and we know those entrepreneurs cannot all recover and come back for more. Some will have to become non entrepreneurs and some will just give up altogether. There is also a point at which all those admirable qualities that entrepreneurs have turn into liabilities rather than assets, when risk taking simply becomes recklessness.

Talking with franchisors and franchisees when researching for my book, I fell to thinking about where franchising sits on the entrepreneur- non-entrepreneur – high risk - low risk spectrum. Seems to me it's somewhere in the middle. The franchisor certainly has to take an initial risk in developing the franchise formula. On the other hand once the formula is proven the franchisee takes the risk when investing in the franchise. In the end, both the franchisor and the franchisee are able to hedge their bets.

Perhaps neither is a ‘true’ entrepreneur and perhaps that’s a good thing- a case of ‘balanced entrepreneurship’.

(By the way does ANYONE know a word that means the opposite of ‘entrepreneur’?).

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