Finding Your Entrepreneurial Path

Before you get consumed with the technical aspects of launching a venture, it is important to start with the most important foundation: finding your personal path to entrepreneurship.

Your Personal Path through Self-Reflection

Your decision to launch a venture should not be taken lightly. Entrepreneurship requires a lot of energy, decision-making skills, tenacity, resourcefulness, and flexibility. As you consider entrepreneurship as a career, you should complete some self-reflection to figure out how, why, and when entrepreneurship may be the right professional path for you. For example, if your personality is introverted—that is, you often find it most energizing to be alone—you might consider a venture that capitalizes on that scenario. It might be helpful to study or meet other entrepreneurs with a venture you find interesting.

Your Personal Path through Research and Experiments

A key step to finding your personal pathway to entrepreneurship is to conduct research and try out roles related to your desired venture. Researching the potential industry or entrepreneurial options available to you will provide some level of comfort and validate your decisions about what you might do next. One concrete way to do this is to “shadow” a professional in your desired field. This means arranging to be an observer during a standard workday to see firsthand what is involved in running that type of business. You may also be able to secure some experience by serving as an apprentice, intern, or lab assistant, or as an independent contractor or freelancer, an individual who contracts to offer professional services or tasks for a negotiated fee. Informational interviews—whether informal chats with new or established business owners at a trade show or networking event, or a formal question session—can also provide insight.

Your Personal Path through a Soft Launch

One sure pathway to entrepreneurship is to jump in with both feet and experience the process by launching a venture. Although this may seem like a big leap or you may feel you are not ready, remember that entrepreneurship is an experiential discipline that can be understood fully only through hands-on experiences. Launching a venture for a limited time frame or audience to gain experience, insights, and feedback about the target market or consumer—a process known as a soft launch (or soft open)—will provide valuable feedback on how to meet the consumer’s needs or improve on your product to ensure success. You might explore a soft launch by creating a sketch or sample of what you plan to offer and asking friends and potential customers what they think, or by creating a website or app prototype to share with a limited number of people to see if it works as planned (sometimes called a beta test) and get feedback.

Frameworks to Inform Your Entrepreneurial Path

In designing a venture that is sustainable or capable of being self-funded, it is helpful to use specific tools to manage information. One such tool is a framework—a structure or outlined process that can be used to accomplish entrepreneurial goals through problem solving, idea generation and validation, and brainstorming.

• Design Thinking Process supports a systematic, logical approach for addressing and solving problems with multiple solutions. Design thinking was first applied in relation to STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Due to the success of this process, design thinking has become popular in many other areas.
• Four Lenses Strategic Framework is used for the development of social enterprises; assesses four strategic areas (stakeholder engagement, resource mobilization, knowledge development, and culture management) to address a social problem and provide sustainable social impact.

Applying the Framework through an Action Plan

At some point during your venture development process, it becomes critical to capture your thoughts and intentions in a meaningful and productive way. Creating a customized action plan—an organized, step-by-step outline or guide that pulls together the ideas, thoughts, and key steps necessary to help set the stage for entrepreneurial success—at an early stage will make the entrepreneurial process much smoother and potentially more successful in the long run. Applying an appropriate framework will provide you with a visible, tangible, strong foundation for your future venture. In completing the framework, you should identify gaps as well as ideas for further development, then add both to your action plan. Just as you can choose from several types of frameworks, you can apply any of a variety of action plans.

Unlike with the business plan, the purpose of an action plan is to pull together the ideas, thoughts, and actions necessary to help you set the stage for entrepreneurial success. Consider what kind of action plan you need to prepare a holiday meal. We have a vision of the end result—friends and family gathered together to share a delicious, festive meal. We will need to select the right location for the holiday meal, identify the guests to invite, and create a financial budget for the related costs of the holiday meal. Then we would need to create our action plan—similar to a business plan—to identify what actions are necessary to support the event. In our action plan, we would include inviting guests to the event, drawing up a menu and a grocery list, designing a timeline to ensure that all the dishes of the holiday meal are completed in the correct sequence: We want all the food to be ready at the right time. Our action plan would also include the clean-up process and any after-dinner activities that we want at our event. As you can see, both the business plan and the action plan are necessary for success.

Once you select a framework and an action plan, you have the basic tools and information you need to outline the path of your venture. The framework offers a big picture of what you want to create and the resources required for that goal, whereas the action plan provides you with concrete actions for starting along your entrepreneurial path and, later, for supporting the business plan.

Types of Entrepreneurs

For some people, the entrepreneurial pathway is clear cut and logical. For example, a career in a biomedical lab may involve research and clinical trials that lead to patent applications for a product to sell in the marketplace, leading to a new venture. Others experience the entrepreneurial pathway through nontraditional methods, as when an unexpected opportunity arises. As the global marketplace continues to evolve, new entrepreneurial opportunities will open for individuals who are open to opportunities that build on creativity and innovation.

Traditional entrepreneurs were perceived as individuals who did not fit in a typical organizational structure or as people who had the brains, creativity, imagination, and money to launch out on their own. However, this perception is changing with increasing support to reduce barriers to enable access to entrepreneurship for all demographic groups.

Today, opportunities have expanded for businesses and organizations that respond to current challenges, which may include trying to improve a negative situation or finding a need in a positive situation, with an increasing awareness of the benefits provided through entrepreneurial activities. As more global, cultural, and economic issues and opportunities arise, more individuals will explore entrepreneurship as a response to these challenges. For example, noting the challenges that women and minorities face in starting a new venture, Alan Donegan and his team train people on how to turn their entrepreneurial visions into a reality through his PopUp Business School. The point is that opportunities should be available to everyone.

As the traditional view of entrepreneurship evolves, different types of entrepreneurship are emerging and are worth noting as you contemplate your entrepreneurial journey. The types presented here are among the most common today, each with its own unique opportunities and challenges.

• College Entrepreneur: As the cost of higher education continues to rise, more college students are seeking ways to reduce reliance on tuition loans by launching a venture. The college entrepreneur might launch an enterprise while attending or after graduating from college.
• Corporate Intrapreneur: If you work for a progressive company that seeks innovative solutions for growth and opportunities, you can become an intrapreneur by organizing the necessary resources to pursue a venture of organizational interest.
• Internet Entrepreneur: As access to technology and its related platforms increases, so do opportunities for Internet-based businesses. Internet entrepreneurs utilize social media platforms, smartphones and tablets, applications (apps), and any other form of accessible technology as their product or venture. The critical structure for these ventures is the inclusion of an e-commerce or online payment processing capability.
• Part-time Entrepreneur: In response to economic downturns, underemployment, and unemployment, more individuals are supplementing income through part-time activities, casually referred to as “side hustles.”
• Social Entrepreneur: Some entrepreneurs are driven to offer innovative solutions to existing and emerging social problems, such as poverty, hunger, human trafficking, and environmental degradation. Most social enterprises are structured as nonprofit entities. However, increased interest in for-profit entities that marry business and social goals has given rise to a subcategory that has emerged known as a B-corp, or benefits corporation. The B-corp designation is a voluntary certification that is managed by the nonprofit group B Lab to ensure that corporations adhere to specific guidelines, rules, and accountability.