65 Entrepreneur and Risk
b'Today I want to discuss the idea of being an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial and entrepreneur risk. Part of the reason for this is as we\\u2019re talking throughout all of these episodes, we\\u2019re hinting or talking about the idea of having additional income, extra income, starting your own business, etc., and there are several different avenues for that, and I want to get clear on some of them and some of the methodologies of getting there, and what you really need to have inside of you.\\n\\n\\n\\nBut first, what I\\u2019ll consider the three general categories of an entrepreneur. This is: You\\u2019re not working for a company, but you are doing something else. Now, some people (and this is a different classification by different people), some or many people would classify entrepreneur as somebody who starts their own business, but I don\\u2019t mean working independently, getting contracts or getting customers, but rather having employees, building a company which has complete financial responsibility, all the risk, and all the management and responsibility it entailed. That\\u2019s the real, true broadest definition of \\u201centrepreneur\\u201d.\\n\\nNow, there\\u2019s two other things you could do, one of which is you could work completely independently, and be making things based on contracts. This could be something where somebody is working for another company, and they do it part time; they do it on evenings and weekends. Maybe they\\u2019re an electrician and they take side jobs, an electrician at a major company. Or they\\u2019re a painter, and then they take side jobs as well. Or they\\u2019re a systems person, and they help other people advertise on the internet or whatever, or by word of mouth, and they loan themselves out on nights and weekends to solve people\\u2019s problems. Or to build things that other people can use.\\n\\nThe last is probably\\u2026 Well, I\\u2019ll call it the newest because it\\u2019s risen into a new stage that didn\\u2019t exist before, and that\\u2019s really because of the internet, and that is this sort of quasi-company that you build that\\u2019s a virtual company, whereby you don\\u2019t really have employees, but you have lots of people that you\\u2019re relying on working with virtually. Now, they don\\u2019t have to be virtual; it could be down the street, some of them, but the idea is that you\\u2019re not really having that complete financial responsibility with them. That is, you don\\u2019t have to file all the papers and all the other things for employees, etc., but also, if something happens, you don\\u2019t need them anymore, there\\u2019s not the process of laying them off. Also, you go and you find somebody and they don\\u2019t work out, then you move on to the next person until you find that very special person, that is your special virtual assistant, or your special web development person that\\u2019s building your website and giving you ongoing support, or that social media person that you\\u2019re trying out different people and you find the right one that you just mesh. It may not be the best one; it may be the one that is best for you. So you\\u2019re building a company that\\u2019s a virtual company. This is much lower risk, and there\\u2019s an essential part to see the different here between that and what I referred to initially as an entrepreneur.\\n\\nSo, depending on your age, you may want to go into some entrepreneurial activity, but it\\u2019s got to be something that\\u2019s inside of you. Now, what do I mean by that? It was interesting, you may not even know it yourself, but when I was younger, of course, I always thought that the idea was you were supposed to go work for a company, but I had done a lot of entrepreneurial activities when I was younger. So here it was that when I graduated and went to General Motors Research Labs, then General Motors, and Chase, and I got the opportunity, I built my own company. I built a consulting company, it became very large, extremely well-respected, covered around the world.\\n\\nAs I transitioned out of that, I got another opportunity, and that opportunity was having a training center offered to me by Microsoft,'