People often ask the question:

What is the difference between a businessperson and an entrepreneur?

Some would say the businessperson is the blue suited MBA with a briefcase, process workflows, five-year strategic plans and a corporate AMEX card.

The entrepreneur is the disheveled garage dweller testing concept after concept in a bubble of failed experiments and idea frustrations.

Others would say difference only depends on where you are in the process.  If you are bringing a product or service to market, you will transform from one image to the other…from entrepreneur to businessperson.

The entrepreneur is often considered the idea person. You are an entrepreneur if you create a product or service idea that you want to place in the marketplace. When entrepreneurs get started, they have to think of the business aspects of their idea. After all, it’s not possible to put the product or service into the market unless you think about the specific business activities you need to do.

A businessperson is often seen as the manager with the numbers, holding meetings about strategy, and dealing with taxes and lawyers. The business is the entity built after the entrepreneur’s idea is commercialized.

When you start a business, the entrepreneur often has to do everything. There is no divide between the two titles – businessperson or entrepreneur – when you get started, especially if you are bootstrapping which is the practice of paying all your own bills without external financing.

Over time, perhaps as you professionalize your business, or you open multiple businesses, you transform into the more familiar business image that Wall Street loves.

If you start a business, based on your idea, you are both an entrepreneur and a businessperson.

An entrepreneur is often defined as: a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.

A businessperson is defined as: a person who works in business or commerce, especially at an executive level.

If you did not start the business, but you work for it in a management role, you are the businessperson.

You can call yourself an entrepreneur if you take the business idea and turn it into a company that delivers products or services to the marketplace.  You eventually hire businesspeople to run the operations, administration, production, distribution and marketing for you.  As you continue to develop ideas and create new opportunities for your product or service, you remain the entrepreneur.

That’s the achievement you want to be able to be the entrepreneur hiring businesspeople to help you run your business.  At that point you have the life dream you wanted to achieve when you got started.

What do you need to make it happen?

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