An entrepreneur running a lifestyle business....hmmmm!

Here’s a quick thought about entrepreneurs. Someone described themselves to me recently as “an entrepreneur running a “lifestyle” business". Hmmm – that caused me a little trouble!

For those of you not familiar with the term, a lifestyle business is one where the owners run the business in order to fund a certain lifestyle. Usually one of nice house, nice cars, kids at private school, expensive holidays. Let me start by saying that there is nothing wrong with that. If someone has worked hard to build a business and they want to use it to fund a comfortable life then that’s fine.

The bit that troubled me was the use of the word “entrepreneur” in the same sentence as “lifestyle business”. In my dictionary an entrepreneur, amongst their many attributes, is a risk-taker. A lifestyle business strikes me as one that is completely de-risked.

An entrepreneur probably makes one or two “bet-the-company” decisions a year. Shall we build that new product; shall we buy that company etc. The lifestyle business owner will run a mile rather than make a “bet-the-company” decision.

The lifestyle business owner lives in a world of stability, reliability, predictability and steady income. The entrepreneur goes out of his way to create a volatile environment so that he can be disruptive and this brings with it a lack of predictability.

I admire people who are a) good enough and b) content enough to run their business for their lifestyle. But my message to the guy who told me he was “an entrepreneur running a “lifestyle” business” is: you can’t be both – they are poles apart.