There is a significant difference between running a small business and being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship goes beyond simply managing inventory and selling products like groceries. While starting such a business certainly requires valuable skills, it isn’t typically considered entrepreneurship.

To understand the distinction, it’s important to define entrepreneurship clearly: it is about striving to solve a problem and finding innovative solutions. Introducing more mobile phones to the market isn’t entrepreneurship—it’s competition. The key criteria that distinguish great entrepreneurs from others are:

• What problem are you trying to solve?
• How are you creating value?
• How are you empowering people?
• What is the final impact your business is creating?

The metric that defines success in entrepreneurship is value creation, not merely adding to existing problems.