There are several different entrepreneurial traits that most people don’t know about. Many of these traits can help to tell you what types of entrepreneurs you’ll interact with best.
More importantly, it will tell you what type of entrepreneur you are personally. By knowing this, you’ll know how to best maneuver your business to suit your goals!
Naturally, many entrepreneurs won’t fit solely into one category. Rather, most will be in two or three. If you’re an entrepreneur (or friends with lots of entrepreneurs) which types of entrepreneurs are you/they?
11. Innovative Entrepreneur
In recent years, through social media and things like YouTube, innovative entrepreneurs have become the focus of the media. This is because they often tend to have large followings that the media can exploit.
Innovative entrepreneurs are the ones who get up at half four in the morning and don’t go to sleep until half one the following morning. They tend to work throughout this time, and if they do take a break, it’s only brief.
Their whole MO is creating a much better product than what the competition can offer, at a vastly reduced price. They aren’t as interested in raising capital, as they are using their work ethic.
Perhaps most, if not all, of the most famous entrepreneurs in history have been innovators. Steve Jobs, Mark Cuban and Bill Gates are all innovative entrepreneurs. Their business quite literally becomes their life!
Most innovative entrepreneurs are driven solely by their dream. They believe that if they can add those extra hours in, and work as hard as possible, they will succeed. It’s not about money, it’s about work ethic.
However, due to this work ethic, they often tend to burn themselves out quite quickly. As an employee, you also get burned out by them, as they expect you to have the same work ethic as they do.
10. Social Entrepreneur
For many entrepreneurs, they start their business so that they can make more money than they did working their job. However, social entrepreneurs the types of entrepreneurs who couldn’t care less about profit.
It may sound cliché, but social entrepreneurs base their whole business around helping others, even at the expense of their profit margin. And they do this in several different ways…
For some, they employ certain people that most other people won’t, be it the homeless, ex-cons etc. For others, they run their business like any other, but donate the profits to some form of charity.
Thee are a few, such as kidpreneur Mikaila Ulmer, who’s business is only profitable because it relies on being a social enterprise. For reference, her business requires beehives, which are paid for with the company’s profits.
Unlike most other entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs are beloved by basically everyone, whilst most other types of entrepreneurs are only liked by a certain aspect of society.
Plus, they run their business in order to help the community, making it a nicer place to live year-on-year.
However, many of them do take their job as a social entrepreneur a little too seriously, making poor business choices as a result.
9. Reclusive Entrepreneur
For many entrepreneurs, one of their main goals is to drive as much media attention their way as possible. Not only does this lead to higher brand recognition, but also higher sales as well.
However, there is a subsect of entrepreneurs and business owners as a whole who despise the thought of this, to varying degrees. These are known (or rather, aren’t known) as reclusive entrepreneurs.
For some, it is full reclusiveness- both themselves and their business. For others, it is that they only want media attention to one aspect, be it only themselves or their business, usually the latter.
Perhaps the most famous reclusive entrepreneurs are Howard Hughes, Alexander Pask and Logan Guleff. The reasoning for their reclusiveness is generally dependent on the individual, with them all having their own reasons.
For the vast majority of these entrepreneurs, they have the ability to do almost anything they want. If they want to go to Disneyland with their family, they can, if they want to donate to a political campaign without scrutiny, they can.
However, the vast majority of reclusive entrepreneurs are complete ghosts. This does have its ups, but for the most part, leads to lower sales- after all, people often want to know who is behind the business they’re dealing with!
8. Small Business Entrepreneur
To most other types of entrepreneurs, the concept of a small business entrepreneur is rather, stupid in their eyes. This is mostly for what they stand for…
As their name would suggest, small business entrepreneurs are satisfied with running a small business in their local area. They have no ambition to turn their business multinational or even expand out of their town/city.
If they do think about expansion, it isn’t very far. If they live in a big city, they may consider adding more offices/outlets/whatever around the city. If they don’t, they may expand to a nearby one.
Beyond that however, they are highly unlikely to even consider expanding further. This is done mostly for restraint, as they don’t want to over expand their business and lose sales because of it.
Depending on their chosen industry, many have a large market share in their local area, to a point where they are perhaps a monopoly. Through this, they are able to set prices at whatever they want, and bring in millions.
However, many of these businesses would be even more profitable if they were nationwide or even international businesses. So many of these entrepreneurs shoot themselves in the foot in that regard.
7. Large Business Entrepreneur
As their name would suggest, large business entrepreneurs are the complete opposite of a small business entrepreneurs. This is in almost every aspect of their business, not just how they conduct themselves.
For the most part, they act as though their business is a part of the Fortune 500 list. This is even if their business is only a single grocery store in a small Texan town nobody’s heard of!
Generally, their businesses only have a finite amount of time where they’ll be profitable. Take this blog for instance, chances are that by the time you’re 100 years old, blogs will be a thing that only the elderly read.
From the large business entrepreneurs I have met in my time as an entrepreneur, many of them have one aim: sell their business to a megacorporation, rather than try to compete with them.
Generally, these types of entrepreneurs are very driven to expand their business. They also tend to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the industry and their largest competitors.
However, many of them do find themselves getting rather upset. This is because not every major company will buy them out. This creates an issue as their whole business is often built around this.
But many of these businesses have gone on to become industry leaders.
6. Scalable Entrepreneur
Of all the different types of entrepreneurs, scalable entrepreneurs generally get the most media attention. This is because they are often the most available for interviews and the like, and use the media to promote their business.
Generally, scalable entrepreneurs believe that their business will change the world for the better. They aren’t as profit-conscious as other entrepreneurs, but are more so than other entrepreneurs.
For the most part, they aren’t really concerned with holding 100% of their company. They’ll often sell part of their company off to venture capitalists and others to fund their business’s expansion.
People such as Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams and Kevin Systrom are all examples of modern-day scalable entrepreneurs. And from this, they’ve become billionaires, with Mark Zuckerberg being one of the richest people!
Generally, these entrepreneurs run startups. As such, they are very time conscious and are very competitive. If you can’t keep up with them, you’ll lose your job and they’ll find someone who can keep up with them.
If you can keep up with them, you’ll generally be rewarded for this through shares in the company. If the company does well, you’ll never have to work again in your entire life!
5. Imitating Entrepreneur
Imitator entrepreneurs have somewhat of a bad rep in the entrepreneurial community. This for the fact that most other types of entrepreneurs see them as incredibly lazy, for not trying to innovate and be different.
As their name would suggest, imitating entrepreneurs have a particular entrepreneur that they admire. They have read every book about them, read every article published on them, and I mean everything.
This isn’t to find out what makes them so successful, but rather the opposite: it is to simply learn everything about them. From here, they copy them, almost 100%, in the hopes of accessing their success.
Naturally, most of these entrepreneurs tend to have lighter workloads, because they don’t have to focus on so many other aspects of their business that most other entrepreneurs would have to.
With this lighter workload, imitating entrepreneurs are often at the back end of their industry, as they’re always playing catch-up with the big players. They also tend to skip on R&D in favor of imitating their favorite more.
Generally speaking, most of these entrepreneurs begin as imitating entrepreneurs before changing to another type of entrepreneur. This is especially the case with those who want to scale up their business.
4. Hustler Entrepreneur
When it comes to the best types of entrepreneurs, hustlers often take the cake in my book. In many ways they and innovators have a lot in common, indeed, many hustlers are innovators and vice versa. But not always.
As with innovators, hustlers get up at the crack of dawn to begin their workday, and only go to sleep if their work is done. Their work ethic is what drives them, with money being a secondary motivator.
However, hustlers also differ from innovators in many ways. Innovators generally work on only one product, and if it’s more, they’re closely related. Hustlers generally have multiple streams of income, and multiple businesses.
Generally, they are seen to “waste” a lot of their time by non-entrepreneurs. This is because they are willing to cold call hundreds of potential investors/customers, even if their acceptance rate is less than 0.01%.
Hustlers seem to have a knack for building businesses quickly. They spend all of their time trying to build the perfect business so that they don’t have to later on in life: although they generally continue this until they die!
Similarly to innovators, working for hustlers can be very difficult. After all, they’re putting in all this effort to make their dream a reality, and as their employee, you should too!
3. Research-Oriented Entrepreneur
Of all the different types of entrepreneurs, you’ll either find research-oriented entrepreneurs extremely easy to work with, or extremely difficult to work with. This is mostly to do with how meticulous they are.
Before starting up their business, they’ll spend hours pouring over financial statements, competitor research and just about anything they can get their hands on. This is all in the hopes of being as prepared as possible.
You’d think that this would be for a few weeks, or maybe a month or two. In reality, it’s usually well over a year. There have been several instances of people spending over a decade planning their business before doing it!
When they finally do set up their business, this research-oriented approach doesn’t fade away. Instead, it just aims itself at the business itself, usually a division of the company that isn’t doing particularly well.
As an employee, research-oriented entrepreneurs are among the best entrepreneurs to work for. This is because they are very knowledgeable about the industry as a whole, as well as their business and are very hands-on.
With that being said, they are often slow to act. If there is a downturn in the industry itself, it often takes them several extra weeks after their competitors to act, as they require facts to prove this, not just speculation.
2. “Get it Done” Entrepreneur
The opposite of a research-oriented entrepreneur is a so-called “Get it done” entrepreneur. Instead of spending hours researching their industry, they do cursory research and then just establish their business.
Personally, I would consider myself as a “Get it done” entrepreneur. When I established my first business at 14, I spent hours researching it, which almost put me off it entirely. Today, I just do it.
When I came up for the idea of this blog, I first thought about it on a Monday. By Friday that same week, Finance Friday, as we know and love it, had been born. And this is what most “Get it done” entrepreneurs do!
Many of these entrepreneurs are similarly very hands-on. However, they understand that the more they wait around, the less inclined they’ll be to establish their companies.
They also tend to understand that mistakes are a part of the learning process. As such, they often work harder than other entrepreneurs in the short term, to both fix this issue, and prevent it from happening ever again.
Often, many of these entrepreneurs jump in without looking. With this, they often make stupid, and occasionally costly mistakes. This is something that other types of entrepreneurs tend to know about, and therefore avoid.
1. Wealth Entrepreneur
Anyone who knows more than three entrepreneurs, knows at least one wealth entrepreneurs. How easily you can get on with them ranges wildly from person to person- some are very arrogant, whilst others are more humble.
Generally, these entrepreneurs are seasoned professionals who’ve been doing it for a while. Originally, they started off as one of the other types of entrepreneurs, before selling their business to a larger corporation.
This sale gave them a huge pot of cash that they use to expand their net worth. Generally, they spend their time researching an industry that they are familiar with (usually one that’s related, but not competing with, their old business).
From here, they invest in the business, or buy it outright. From here, they sink a lot of their wealth into the business, using it to buy out competitors and generally to increase the business’s value. With that, they sell it and go at it once again.
A lot of them have almost become professional company flippers, and have millions of dollars at their disposal. This means that they can easily outspend the competition, even if the competition has a better product/service.
However, many of them are very over confident when doing this. For many of them, they do it for the increased net worth and payday at the end, which may not come if the business goes through a rough patch.
Which types of entrepreneurs do you know? Which are you? Tell me in the comments!
