Four types of entrepreneurs and their dark sides by Pat Flynn

There are four different types of entrepreneurs and you need to know which one you are whether you have a business already or not, because each one comes with its own dark side. So, what you’re about to read is a part from an interview with Ryan Levesque, a good friend of mine who is the author of Ask, whose book I’ve reviewed before. He’s got a new book out called Choose and it’s really important for you to understand what kind of entrepreneur you are, because like each one comes with it’s own pitfall and it’s good to know these things upfront so you don’t set yourself up for failure later. – Pat Flynn

Mission based entrepreneurs

There are really four different types of people that I found who want to start a business. It’s what I call the four different entrepreneurial types. So, the first type of entrepreneur is what we call the mission-based entrepreneur. Mission-based entrepreneurs are drawn to starting a business because they have a cause that they’re passionate about. It’s a cause that they would die on a hill for.

Kristi Kennedy is an example that I talk about in the book. So, Kristi is a mom who has a son who is autistic and he was bullied in school as a young boy. And so as a mom, decided that she had to do something about it, so she went to the school and started to get involved and one thing lead to another and she started developing a program to help eliminating bullying from her child’s school, which lead the school district to ask if she would do it for the entire school district which lead the state to ask if she’d do it for the entire state, which lead to helping over 2,000 schools around the country with the program that she’s developed to eliminate bullying in elementary schools.

Now, she’s an example of that mission-based entrepreneur, right, someone who’s drawn to move people away from something negative in life and then build a business around it. And it’s in contrast with the second type of of entrepreneur which is the passion-based entrepreneur.

Passion-based entrepreneurs

They tend to have something that they’re passionate about. It’s like a hobby or a love, whether it’s Back to the Future and Delorians or a Lego or playing the guitar or learning how to paint or whatever it may be, they’ve got something that they love that they’re passionate about in their life and they want to transform that passion into their vocation. So, examples are like Charlie Wallace. Charlie is a story I tell in the book. Charlie is a traveling musician.

He’s part of a heavy metal rock band and to make a little bit of extra money, he started teaching people how to play guitar online. Well, he ended up growing that into a business that makes over $2 million a year. They just released their first LP and it landed on the Billboard Charts, hard rock Billboard Charts at like number 13.

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He was named one of the top 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Forbes and he’s just on this rocket ship. And it all started with this passion around playing the guitar that he transformed into his business. So, that’s the passion-based. Now, the difference between the two, are mission-based entrepreneurs typically wanna move people away from something negative in life, passion-based entrepreneurs wanna move people towards something positive that they love. Those are both in contrast with the third type of entrepreneur which is the most classic entrepreneur in the sense of the word.

Opportunity-based entrepreneurs

They don’t necessarily have a mission or a passion that they’re drawn to. They’re the type of person that sees opportunity everywhere, right. They’re the type of the person that says, how is that nobody has built a collapsible stand to hold a camera when you’re traveling so you can shoot selfie videos. Like, how is it that nobody has built something like this? Let’s create that, right? So, opportunity-based entrepreneurs tend to see gaps in the marketplace and ask themselves that question, how is it that nobody’s done this.

Undecided entrepreneur

And the fourth and final type of entrepreneurs, actually the type of entrepreneur that I consider myself to be, and it’s what we call the undecided entrepreneur. Now, the undecided entrepreneur is someone who knows they want to start a business, they know they want to go into business for themselves but they just don’t know what that would be.

Like, they’re in love with idea of being their own boss, having their own business, making their own hours, having that freedom, but as far as what type of business or what market to go into, they’re really undecided. Now, that’s who I was when I first got started and anyone in that situation, what I recommend as the prescription, is to start what I call a practice business.

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Now, just like learning how to drive a car, you don’t, most of us didn’t learn how to drive a car in our dream car, our forever car, right? Like, we learned in an old beater. Like, for me it was an old jeep, rusted out floor, stick shift, that’s what I learned how to drive. But here’s the thing, the skill of driving, learning that skill to drive a car, is something that you carry with you for the rest of your life. So, even if that first business that you start isn’t your dream business, your forever business, you’re learning the skills, you’re learning the steps just like learning how to drive, you’re learning the process that you can transfer into your forever business.

The dark side of each of four types of entrepreneurs

Mission-based entrepreneur, if you fall into that mission-based bucket, the thing that you need to watch out for is mission-based entrepreneurs tend to struggle with making money. They’re so drawn to the mission that they have in life that they put making money as being secondary to that mission and so they end up building a business that doesn’t give them what they want out of life. It doesn’t allow them to have the freedom they want or make the impact or leave the legacy that they want because they’re so drawn to the mission and they struggle with charging for what it is they wanna do.

Passion-based entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with their passion and building a business around it runs the risk of leading to you to become dispassionate about that thing. Like for example, if you love painting and you build a business around teaching people how to paint and suddenly that’s your J-O-B, that’s your job, and you need to make money doing that, you can lose the love that you once had about painting and so you need to be careful around that thing.

Opportunity-based entrepreneurs need to be careful that you don’t just, and maybe you experience this in the lead exam business where it’s a way to make money but one day you wake up and you ask yourself and you say, what the hell am I doing with my life? Like is this is really what I was put on this Earth to do? And you wake up one day and say, yeah, I’ve made some good money doing this but is this my calling? You sort of have this crisis of identity that can happen.

The undecided entrepreneur, the thing that you need to watch out there, is the just analysis paralysis. It’s just swimming in that forever sea of maybe this business, maybe that business, maybe this business, maybe that business, and never actually picking something and taking the steps to move forward. So once you kind of identify who you are, you can be aware of the shadow side to watch out for and just notice those signs in you that can hold you back from doing what it is that you want to do.