Let’s not confuse small business owner with entrepreneur. Yes, by definition, an entrepreneur is a business owner. However, I think of entrepreneurs as wildcatters who roam the landscape looking for investment and business opportunities. Most of us aren’t all that glamorous. You could say we’re usually mostly downright usual. For example… 

We’re usually amateurs when it comes to business. Most of us do not have MBAs, understand economic graphs and trends, have marketing budgets or even a clear idea of which customers and products are losing us money and which are our big profit makers.

Instead, we tend to be subject-matter-experts in some field — engineering, baking, fishing, blogging, writing, food service — and decide to try making a living at it. Remember, Microsoft Mogul Bill Gates was really a techno-geek with a knack for combining existing ideas.

We’re not usually all that smart. A lot of us were thrust into business ownership when some mother corporation outsized us in the name of efficiency. Or we just couldn’t get used to that too-tight collar and tie (or pantyhose and heels) and taking orders from a corporate manager who spent too much time with his nose too close behind the guy ahead of him on the way up the corporate ladder.

We usually get by with luck and guts. Take our bookkeeping skills, for example. We usually start out knowing next to nothing about income statements and balance sheets, what we can deduct and what we can’t, or when and how to file our tax returns. And, no we don’t usually get much smarter with age. Half the time we keep lousy tax records. The other half, we keep no records at all and just pray that the IRS passes over us in search of bigger fish to fry. An accountant can help us with this.

We usually fly by the seat of our pants and hope we don’t fall on our faces. We tend to wing it when it comes to contracts, proposals, profit projections. We make deals on a handshake and have learned to respect our gut reactions… sometimes wrongly.

We usually don’t know finances. Forget this image of suiting up and making a presentation (complete with balance sheets and tri-color charts) to the bank president. Most of us start out by digging deep into our own pockets. Many of us tap into our one biggest asset — our homes — and take out home equity loans. And a surprising number of us use our credit cards, yes, even with rates that can hover around 18%.

We usually don’t know HR. (That stands for human resources… you know… employees.) We may have a few employees, but not the “under 500” the U.S. government uses to define small business. Most of us have Mom, Pop and maybe an employee or two. And when we do have staff, we have no idea what to pay them or, half the time, what to do with them.

We’re usually far from rich. Maybe, after 20 or 30 years, if we’re really good and awfully lucky, we get to drive a luxury car or buy a vacation home in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Most of the time, though, while many of us pay our bills and make a respectable living, we’re just your average neighbors.

Finally, we’re usually awfully stubborn and awfully independent. We’d just as soon ruin our own lives by poor decisions than work for that quasi-competent corporate manager, who is perhaps more adept at ruining our lives for us.

The bottom line: No, most of us are not wealthy, and many of us do not really care about turning our businesses into multi-billion-dollar, multi-national corporations. We just love being our own bosses and we love knowing we are taking care of our families. All most of us usually want to do is work for ourselves and be left alone. Nothing unusual about that.

By John Ingrisano

John Ingrisano is a small business owner and the author of The Back to Basics Book of Selling: A Guide to A Successful Sales Career. Contact John at john@ TheFreestyleEntrepreneur.com.