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Basic Text
Enterpreneurs
This unit is about entrepreneurs and small business. But let us make it clear from the beginning. All small business owners are entrepreneurs, but not all entrepreneurs are small business owners.
So who is an entrepreneur? "An innovator who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of starting a business to develop and market a new product?"
The history of the United States is the history of its entrepreneurs: Du Pont, Kodak, Proctor&Gamble, Ford Motor - they all started small and expanded.
It does not take much to start: a good idea, a few dollars, and lots of determination. An entrepreneur may form a sole proprietor or partnership at first; eventually, however, most form corporations to get more capital and to expand. Entrepreneurs are special people, the driving force behind innovation and growth. An entrepreneur may invent a product, but he or she also has the ability to develop that invention into a successfully marketed product.
Entrepreneurship in the 1970s and early 1980s was led by a few dynamic individuals. The trend in the late 1980s is to develop entrepreneurial teams. What makes teams more effective than individuals? Think about some possible reasons and then see a possible answer.
Small business
What is a "small" business, anyway? The Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a small business as one that is independently owned and operated, not dominant in its field of operation, and meets certain standards of size in terms of employees (fewer than 100) or annual receipts. See the table below for some guidelines on the sizes of various kinds of small businesses in USA.
| small business | employment size | assetsize | sales size |
| Independent contractor |
0 | 0 | Under $100 000 |
| Family size | 1-4 | Under $100 000 | $100 000-500 000 |
| Small | 5-19 | $100 000-500 000 | $500 000-$1 milion |
| Medium | 20-99 | $500 000-5 milion | $1-10 milion |
| Large | 100-499 | $5-25 milion | $10-50 milion |
| Medium business | 500-999 | $25-100 million | $50-250 million |
| Large business | 1 000+ | $100 million+ | $250 million+ |
| Government size buziness |
10 000+ | $2billion | $2billion+ |
There is nothing small about Small Business. Consider the following:
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