When we think of entrepreneurs, most of us imagine dynamic, successful, over-achievers lik

e Bill Gates of Microsoft, Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines, Inc. or Jim Boyle of Columbia Sportswear, to name a few contemporary heroes. The truth is that we often fail to recognize entrepreneurs all around us: the corner grocery store owner, the family physician who opens a medical practice in our neighborhood, or the young person who delivers the morning paper. Each is creating business opportunities through entrepreneurship, although the process of entrepreneurship would be markedly different from each other.

According to Jeffery Timmons, author of "New Venture Creation" (1990), there are three crucial components for a successful new venture: the opportunity, the entrepreneur, and the resources needed to start the company and make it grow. The opportunity is the idea for a new business. The entrepreneur is the person who develops the idea for a business into a business. Resources include money, people and skill. In this unit, we focus on entrepreneurs, one of the critical ingredients for success of a new business: Who are they？ What makes them tick？

One factor which distinguishes Bill Gates from the morning paper deliverer is the level of business success each desires to achieve. Determining what success means to you is a crucial element in the early stages of new venture planning. How you measure success in life shapes your views of business opportunities and small business. We begin this unit with a look at success: what it means and how it is measured.

Defining Success through Personal Evaluation

“Most people spend less time planning their new business than they do their family vacation” (Canadian Small Business,1997). Yet, selecting the right business idea and planning for its success are crucial steps in new venture planning. You will learn more about opportunity identification, or how to find and evaluate business ideas. For now, let's focus on success.

Success is how you define it. What success means to you will not likely be what success means to someone else. Success is very personal and subjective. We usually measure success in one of three ways:

Success can be measured in dollars, usually earnings.

Success can be measured by the value of our possessions, including our home.

Success can be measured through our personal values.

Whether you define success by money, possessions, personal values or a combination of the three is up to you. How we define success significantly influences our selection of a business to start. Our view of success becomes our framework for evaluating business opportunities. If we think a business opportunity has the potential to raise us to our desired level of success, we give it further consideration. If not, we usually discard the idea. For example, if the paper deliverer defined success as earning $75.00 of spending money per month and he or she was earning $200.00 per month, then they would consider their venture highly successful.

Visioning and Goal Setting for Business Success

Planning for business success begins with an understanding of ourselves, who we are and where we want to go in our professional lives. Enrolling in college is one step toward fulfilling our vision of the future. Two processes which are helpful to would-be entrepreneurs are visioning and goal-setting.

Success begins with a vision of who we are, what drives us and what we want. This vision of ourselves is the foundation that will give us guidance and direction in the conduct of our lives and businesses. Visioning involves development of a clear mental picture of what we would like to become in the next five to ten years.

Goal-setting involves developing a list of things you would like to achieve in your personal or professional lives—your goals. Goa

A．Who is more likely to become a successful entrepreneur？

B．What does it take to be a successful entrepreneur？

C．What does success mean and how is it measured？

D．What is the appropriate way to define success？