The silliest comment that I’ve ever encountered about entrepreneurs was in an online conversation—of course!—in which a fellow American was engaged in the time-honored national pastime of dissing the French. “They just don’t have the instinct for business innovation,” he said. “The French language doesn’t even have a word for ‘entrepreneur.’”

Not the strongest possible argument.

Far less silly, but almost as surprising, was when a friend recently opined that “being an entrepreneur isn’t a real job.” According to this economic worldview, something only counts as a job if an employer hires and pays you.¹ This is pretty obviously inaccurate; the existence of freelancers and independent contractors—business owners by definition—shows that a job is a job, regardless of the precise legal arrangement between the parties.

Being in the hot S.E.A.T.

After picking my jaw back up off the floor, I realized that my friend’s comment reflects the fact that many people don’t understand what it means to be an entrepreneur. In fact, entrepreneurs don’t always understand the exact nature of their job—even though they’re the ones who came up with it!

Four jobs in one: being an
entrepreneur is a balancing act

The truth is that being an entrepreneur isn’t just one job, it’s actually four distinct jobs: the Strategist, the Evangelist, the Administrator, and the Technician. They’re not necessarily all full-time jobs, especially at the outset, but each of these roles need to be filled in order for a business to succeed. To do this, business partners will divvy up these responsibilities between each other, and an entrepreneur will often hire employees to tend to some of them—but the owner(s) remain fundamentally responsible for making sure they get done.²

Whether building a medical practice or opening a hot dog stand, founding a consulting boutique or launching an e-commerce empire, every entrepreneurial endeavor contains these four jobs:

1. Strategist — aka the Visionary. The Strategist is the idea person, the architect and the dreamer, projecting their goals upon the canvas of the future and then building a business model to achieve those goals.
2. Evangelist — The Evangelist has an eye toward every single aspect of the business that faces the public: sales, marketing, customer service, public relations, brand management, investor relations, and more.
3. Administrator — aka the Manager. The overall vision is set by the Strategist; day-to-day tactics are implemented and managed by the Administrator. This includes finance & accounting, human resources, office management, and adapting feedback from the front lines into the overall business process model.
4. Technician — Finally, the actual job of production itself, whether it’s building widgets, baking pies, or writing code. That it comes last is fitting, because no work is possible unless the prior three jobs have been executed properly.

It’s a delicate balancing act, as the demands that each of these jobs place on the entrepreneur tend to wax and wane, and no one person is equally adept at all four.

In the weeks to come I’ll explore each of these four jobs in depth, and answer any questions I receive by email or in the comments.

1. I should note that my friend has spent his entire adult life in academia—in Canada—where he’s been rather insulated from the business world. He’s also a lot smarter than me, so I’m not at all ashamed to take this rare opportunity to tweak him. [↩]
2. I’d like to acknowledge a debt here to Michael E. Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited, which helped spur my thinking in this area more than any other resource. Gerber maintains that there are three distinct roles: Entrepreneur, Manager, and Technician. The 4-role S.E.A.T. model is a refinement based on my own knowledge and experience. [↩]