Entrepreneur or home business owner?

Sometimes an idea will knock around inside my head for a while until I realise it would make a good subject for a blog post. Today it’s been drawn out by a conversation with my marketing consultant, Claire Habel. We were talking about being an entrepreneur and my immediate reaction was that I’m not!

My definition of an entrepreneur is someone who has doing deals and making money in their blood, who was the kind of kid who was selling sweets to the other kids in primary school. I was perfectly happy with my pocket money. Making any more never occurred to me and anyway it would have meant putting down the books I permanently had my nose in.

My profile in the Wealth Dynamics system, an ‘entrepreneur profiling test’, is Mechanic, someone who excels in putting systems and processes into place and making sure they work efficiently. After initially sulking for turning out to be the most boring out of the eight profiles (knowing that Mark Zuckerberg is a Mechanic makes it no more attractive), the penny dropped that this was why I ran a very profitable cleaning business for 12 years and sold it as a going concern.

I introduced systems for everything, from recruiting staff to checking the loo cleaner and changing dirty dusters, and it allowed me to make exceptional profits. But I think that makes me a good business owner, not an entrepreneur. The definition in my Penguin English Dictionary is ‘somebody who organises, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise’.

Very definitely yes to the first two, but I’m far too cautious for the third. What do you think? Are you an entrepreneur? Do you even like the word or do you think programmes like Dragons Den have given it a bad name?