What could be the difference between the two?

A lot!

I myself could not believe it until it was proven by our facilitator during our Ka-Entrep sessions in 2007 at CSE. Our seminar facilitator asked us one by one, and all the while we thought we were in business, but as it turned out most were just self-employed, we really don’t have a business but just a job at home.

“So what is your business?” The facilitator asked, “I do homemade salad dressings, the feedback I’m getting are good. In fact, I get lots of orders. I can say business is really good” replied the participant.

“You make the salad dressings yourself?” the facilitator continued. “Yes, ma’m!” was the the quick reply “it’s my own formula, my secret recipe.”

“So I take it that you won’t entrust your secret formula to anybody else, so only you must work to do your salad dressings, right?”

“I make personalized items – mugs, plates, t-shirts, keychains, even personalized chocolate bars” when it was my turn.

“Do you have anybody helping you?”

“No ma’m, I do all the work myself.”

She then said “since you’re doing all the work yourself, and you are here attending to this seminar, it only means that there is no production happening in your business now?”

“Yes ma’m, but I have no pending orders anyway”

“aaahhhh, so you have no pending orders right now. I presume you also do the marketing and promotion of your business right?”

Most participants almost have the same flow of discussions. It was then that the difference was made clear to us.

If your business can’t run without you, if your items can’t be produced by someone else, if you’re doing all the work from ordering, purchasing, marketing, production, selling and so on and so forth… then you’re not really an entrepreneur! You don’t have a business!

You just have a job at home.

What if you got sick? Or you have to attend to important matters, like this seminar for example, then your business is put on hold. Business should not be like that! An entrepreneur does not always have to be around for his business to function.

A good quality of an entrepreneur is that he can multiply himself… master the art of delegation, learn how to set specific steps and standards so you can entrust them to somebody and still get the same result as if he did them himself. That is what an entrepreneur is. Only then can he say that he have a business and not just a job at home.

Maybe at the start, it is just home-based work, not yet a real business. With lack of capital, experience and all. It’s understandable, but it should not stay that way. Remember and learn how to apply these three word… leveraging, networking and delegating. And elevate your self-employment status to that of a full-pledged entrepreneur.