When you hear the term entrepreneur what do you think of?
Probably someone who owns a business, right?
Maybe it’s an individual who sells a product to customers for a profit.
Although this is technically correct, it is a popular misconception that this is the ONLY type of entrepreneur. According to Ben Casnocha, entrepreneur, investor and bestselling business management author, there are four different types of entrepreneurship: small business entrepreneurship, scalable startup entrepreneurship, large company entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship.
Today, we are looking into social and small business entrepreneurship. The most common entrepreneur would be the individual, small business entrepreneur. According to fitsmallbusiness.com, 83.1% of entrepreneurs founded their own business. An example of a small business entrepreneur would be Janeah Kemp, a 16 year old female who owns her own line of clothing “Murda Mafia”. Most small business entrepreneurs own what is called a for profit organization. A for profit organization is a business that was created with the intent of making a profit.
A social entrepreneur is a person who creates a program or business to help solve problems in society. An example of a social entrepreneur would be Amber Anderson, another 16-year-old female, who has created her own mentoring group for African American middle schoolers called “ANA’s Mentoring Group”. Sometimes, like in Amber’s case, a social entrepreneur starts what is called a non-profit organization. A non-profit organization is an organization formed to educate or help a population and does not earn a profit. This is important to know since there are 1.5 million nonprofit organizations, more than half of which are social entrepreneurship.