The Technician, the Entrepreneur, and the Manager

In order to start and grow a business, a venture?s founder is required to wear three separate hats including that of technician, entrepreneur, and manager. In any business, the technician does the work and produces the results, the entrepreneur sets the vision and grows the business, and the manager creates the processes and systems that bring the vision to life.

Most people that start a business are technicians by trade. They know a skill or craft and seek to build a business around it. But here?s the fatal fallacy: a technician assumes because they know the trade or craft that they know how to run a business that does the technical work. In order to grow a business therefore, the technician must also become an entrepreneur and a manager.

Entrepreneurship is the mastery of economic creativity. It is a dynamic process of vision, change, and creation. It requires an application of energy and passion towards the creation and implementation of new ideas and creative solutions.

Essential ingredients include the willingness to take calculated risks in terms of time, equity, or career; the ability to formulate an effective venture team; the creative skill to marshal needed resources; and the fundamental skill of building a solid business plan; and finally, the vision to recognize opportunity where others see chaos, contradiction, and confusion. Entrepreneurship is not magic, it?s not mysterious, and it has nothing to do with genes. It?s a discipline. And, like any discipline, it can be learned and improved upon.

In order to be effective in growing a business enterprise, there must be a balance between the technician, the entrepreneur, and the manager with different roles taking the lead at different times. But many technicians have not had any immediate experience with the roles of entrepreneurship or management. As technicians, they have worked in their business, but not on it.

This is the need that the 16 modules created by Enrique R. Suarez satisfy.

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