If you read through enough websites, blogs, business journals, newsletters, etc., you will find that one of the fastest growing business sectors is that of the entrepreneur. I would agree with that to a certain extent.

More specifically, I would say that one of the fastest growing sectors is the technician with an entrepreneurial spirit. By definition, an entrepreneur is one who “organizes and manages an enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.”

By contrast, the Technipreneur is someone that is an expert at their trade or with their product or service, that has a desire – that entrepreneurial spirit – to go out on their own and start a business rather than lend their technical expertise to someone else’s business.

Another way to look at the difference is the Technipreneur wears many, if not all of the hats in the company including, management, production, implementation, sales, marketing and administration. Conversely, the entrepreneur organizes others to wear each one of those hats.

There is a fundamental difference in paradigms between the entrepreneur and the Technipreneur, with each having their own unique benefits and challenges. The entrepreneur sets out with the mindset to organize people and develop a business system around a product or service that is needed by society. She doesn’t necessarily have an in-depth working knowledge of the product or service they provide. But she doesn’t need to as she will find people that do have the knowledge and assemble them into the business team.

On the other hand, the Technipreneur is typically an expert at the product or service they provide. He may have gone to school to learn it and spent many years perfecting the knowledge of the product or crafting the skills of the service. Then, one day he gets an itch to venture off on his own with the entrepreneurial spirit to start a business and provide the product or service on his own terms.

Examples of Technipreneurs range from mechanics and contractors to lawyers, accountants and financial advisors and many of them will tell you that starting out isn’t done with a simple “if you build it, they will come” model. This is where the successful Technipreneur becomes resourceful. He seeks out others that help him where he may lack expertise such as business plan development, marketing and sales. With training and experience, the Technipreneur becomes a jack of all trades and actually a master of SOME!

In this information age in which we live, it is becoming more and more viable for the small business owner/technician to flourish with all of the resources available to them. Typically smaller in size, they can be more flexible than the larger companies as well as more responsive. As such they can compete on a field where they can position themselves as the trusted advisor in their industry.

That will do it for this week’s overview of the Technipreneur. We will look closer at the dynamics of the Technipreneur off and on over the next several weeks and how you can apply the concept and ideas into your own activities. Until then…

Now, Go Get ‘Em!!