The Role of the Entrepreneur
Business: Edexcel GCSE, topic 1.1.5
Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is a person who sets up a business and takes on the risk of enterprising activity. They have to be able to:
Identify business opportunities
- Enterprise involves identifying business opportunities, and then creating a business (or expanding an existing business) to fill a gap in a market.
- There is always a risk of failure, but there is often a large reward for success.
Take risks
- An entrepreneur is someone who takes on the risk of enterprising activity.
The Role of the Entrepreneur
The role of the entrepreneur is to organise resources, make business decisions and take the risks involved with enterprise activity. This means they must have certain qualities:
Hardworking
- An entrepreneur must motivate themselves every day to work without someone telling them that they have to.
- At the beginning, this can often mean working alone and without being paid.
Organised
- An entrepreneur must organise or do everything needed to run a business.
- This includes accounting, marketing, sales and business strategy.
- To be successful, an entrepreneur must stay on top of these tasks every day, whilst also planning for the future.
Innovative
- Spotting gaps in the market and providing solutions to complex problems requires entrepreneurs to think outside of the box and be innovative.
Willingness to take risks
- When setting up a business there is always a risk of failure.
- However, if an entrepreneur never takes these risks when investing money and giving up their current job, then their idea (or business) cannot succeed.
- A business faces a constantly changing environment and even if an entrepreneur is very organised and plans well for the future, they never know what will happen.
Test yourself on The Role of the Entrepreneur
What is an entrepreneur?
A entrepreneur has to be able to...
Which of the following is NOT a good quality for an entrepreneur?