Can Paid Staff Be Entrepreneurs?

Students often think of entrepreneurs as people who have set up their own successful business. Perhaps that’s because many of us use well-known entrepreneurs, who happen to run their own business as examples. This may be understandable, since it helps students to relate to what entrepreneurship is about, but is it accurate?

The new specifications are quite clear about the sort of skills and qualities that are usually found in entrepreneurs, and they don’t mention “business owner” as one of them.

This begs the question “can employed staff be entrepreneurs?”.

Adam Leyland, Editor of The Grocer magazine makes his view quite clear - the answer is yes!

His article outlines why he believes that retail managers are entrepreneurs because they are “trusted to act on their own instinct, making quick decisions, managing tricky customers and staff, fighting the system, local councils, trading restrictions, to win through for their customers and communities.”

Those certainly sound like the qualities that the exam boards refer to so perhaps we should reconsider the examples we use when teaching entrepreneurship, and focus more on the skills and qualities instead of the famous names.