An Entrepreneur

Entrepreneural skills is one topic which has been stressed over the years, but then Who really is an entrepreneur? and What does it take to be an entrepreneur? Before we can talk about who is an entrepreneur, we first need to understand what entrepreneurship is. Most older textbooks talk about the three production factors: land, capital and labor. Now, these don't always mean what we think they do. Land is more than just the real estate a business builds its factory or offices on. In economic terms, land is all the natural resources used in an enterprise, so this includes the ores and minerals mined from the ground and the native plants and animals. It does not include the manmade or organized resources such as an orchard or a herd of cattle. These are examples of the second factor of production: capital. Even though most people think of money as capital, it's really the least important form of capital. In economic terms, capital is the human creations that produce wealth, such as a car used as a taxi, an oven used to bake food for sale, a furnace used to make steel, as well as the interest that money can earn. The third factor is labor. This refers to all human endeavors that produce wealth, both physical and mental. Some people believe that it is the sole source of wealth, that labor alone creates value. Others believe that land is the only factor that creates wealth. Still others believe that capital is the key to wealth. But land, labor and capital have always been around, though widely unused or misused. What, then, has made these three factors of production work together to create wealth and improve people's lives? The answer is the fourth factor of production: entrepreneurship. This is the ability to see what others who came before missed, to make connections between things that others had not, to get all three other factors to work together to create that which had not existed before. It is this insight, this creativity, that makes the other three factors productive. Now, who is an entrepreneur? One example was a young man who was born in Bavaria in 1829 and emigrated in 1847 with his family to New York City, where his older brother opened a dry goods store (a store selling clothes, cloth, shoes, hats, almost anything but food). In 1853, he became a U.S. citizen and sailed to San Francisco to open a branch of his brother's store and become a supplier to the increasing number of miners following the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. He was a good businessman and his store thrived. He was so trustworthy and successful that one of his customers, Jacob Davis of Reno, Nevada, came to him with an idea. Davis was a tailor, and his customers complained that their pants started to come apart in the same places over and over, the pockets and seams. He had developed a way to rivet these stress points and used a strong fabric often used for work clothes, serge. He thought it was a good idea but lacked the $68 it took to file a patent. The San Francisco merchant saw the possibilities and became Davis' partner, and their patent was granted on May 20, 1873. The merchant had been born Loeb Strauss, but when he became a citizen in 1853, he changed it to Levi. Similarly, the pants he made were originally called "waist overalls," and it was not until about 1960 that they were popularly called jeans. Even though much of the company's early history was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco Fire, May 20 is still celebrated by the company as the birthday of blue jeans.