What Is an Entrepreneur? The Ultimate Guide to Wealth-Driven Entrepreneurship

Make Money, Wealth
Ivy, LyfStyled

1. What Is an Entrepreneur?

At LyfStyled, we redefine being an entrepreneur as more than just working for yourself. It’s about strategically aligning your business model, investments, and lifestyle choices to ensure your income isn’t just funding your next month—but building your legacy. True success isn’t measured by how hard you work, but by how well your business supports the life you actually want to live.

This approach prioritizes scalability, passive income, wealth preservation, and financial independence, so you’re not stuck in the grind—you’re leveraging your business to create lasting prosperity.

An entrepreneur is not just a business owner but a wealth architect—someone who builds, scales, and leverages businesses as vehicles for financial independence and lifestyle freedom. At LyfStyled, we recognize that entrepreneurship isn’t about endless hustle; it’s about designing a business that works for you, not one that traps you in another job.

Entrepreneur vs. Business Owner: What’s the Difference?

While every entrepreneur is a business owner, not all business owners are entrepreneurs.

A business owner runs a company, but an entrepreneur builds an asset. At LyfStyled, the distinction is simple:

A business owner focuses on day-to-day operations
A wealth-driven entrepreneur focuses on long-term wealth creation

Here’s how they differ:

Entrepreneur	Business Owner
Focuses on innovation and scaling	Focuses on managing a business
Seeks new opportunities and markets	Sticks to a proven business model
Prioritizes automation and scalability	Hands-on management approach

Why Understanding Entrepreneurship Matters for Wealth & Freedom

Imagine waking up every day with complete control over your time, your income, and your future. No boss, no fixed salary, and no limitations. This is the life of a true entrepreneur—someone who leverages innovation, risk, and business ownership to create financial independence and lifestyle freedom.

Entrepreneurship isn’t just about owning a business. It’s about building assets that generate wealth, scaling your income beyond what a job can offer, and designing a life that aligns with what matters most to you.

According to the IRS, the top 1% of wealth holders are business owners and investors, not employees. If wealth and freedom are your goals, entrepreneurship is one of the fastest ways to get there.

In this guide, we’ll break down what it truly means to be an entrepreneur, the different types of entrepreneurship, and how you can start your journey toward financial independence today.

“Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.”

2. The Wealth-Driven Entrepreneur: Why Entrepreneurship Is the Best Path to Financial Freedom

Wealth-Driven Entrepreneurship™ is the art of building a business with a purpose beyond just profits. It’s about creating financial systems that generate sustainable, long-term wealth while designing a life of freedom, impact, and abundance.

Entrepreneurship provides unlimited earning potential, unlike your traditional jobs which cap your income with a salary. Here’s why:

Scalability: Entrepreneurs can scale their businesses beyond their personal labor. Entrepreneurs are able to sell products (e.g., digital products, franchising, automation) and build a portfolio of assets that generates multiple streams of income for them.

Ownership & Equity: Entrepreneurs build assets that can later be sold, creating generational wealth. These assets can be sold as part of their business exit strategy or sold in portions to investors to generate capital to expand the business.

Multiple Income Streams: Many entrepreneurs generate wealth through multiple revenue streams (e.g., e-commerce, consulting, investments).

The population of millionaires has increased substantially over the past few years. Some people inherited their wealth, however a large majority of millionaires gained their wealth through entrepreneurship and business ownership. Fidelity Investments reports that 88% of millionaires are self-made, and many built their wealth through entrepreneurship.

Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of LVMH, exemplifies entrepreneurial drive through his strategic vision and relentless pursuit of excellence. Starting his journey in real estate, Arnault saw an opportunity in the luxury market and acquired Christian Dior in 1984, laying the foundation for what would become the world’s largest luxury conglomerate. His ability to identify undervalued brands, invest in innovation, and maintain brand exclusivity has made LVMH a powerhouse with over 75 luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon, and Sephora. Arnault’s approach—blending creativity with business acumen. This demonstrates how entrepreneurship is about foresight, calculated risk-taking, and the ability to scale while maintaining prestige.

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3. Types of Entrepreneurs

There’s no single path to entrepreneurship and even if you try to replicate the success process of one entrepreneur, there are no guarantees that the duplicate will work just as well. With this in mind, we have gathered the most common types of entrepreneurships below and present them in a grouping of 4 different types:

Solo Entrepreneurs | Solopreneurs

A Solo Entrepreneur (Solopreneur) is a one-person powerhouse who runs a business with agility, freedom, and full control. But at LyfStyled, being a solopreneur doesn’t mean doing everything alone. It’s about leveraging automation, delegation, and digital assets to scale without burnout.

Examples of solo entrepreneurs include but are not limited to freelancers, consultants, and digital creators. These types if entreprenuers are charaterised by having a registered company which they use to structure the administrative side of their business. They provide services or sell products and have a structured way of billing clients and paying taxes throught they company.

This could be a copywriter making six figures through freelance work.

Startup Founders

Startup founders are innovators who develop new products or services, often leveraging technology to disrupt existing markets or create entirely new ones.

Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, exemplifies a startup founder who transformed the food delivery industry. Inspired by his mother’s work in a restaurant, Xu identified the need for efficient delivery services. He co-founded DoorDash in 2013, focusing on scalable logistics and technology. Under his leadership, DoorDash expanded rapidly, and its IPO in 2020 made Xu a billionaire. Xu’s journey involved intensive work, strategic risk-taking, and a commitment to solving real-world problems.

Lifestyle Entrepreneurs

A Lifestyle Entrepreneur™ builds a business that fits their ideal life. They prioritize freedom, flexibility, and financial independence, ensuring their business serves their life goals instead of consuming them.

A great example of a lifestyle entrepreneur is Tim Ferriss, the bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek and a successful investor, podcaster, and digital entrepreneur.

Ferriss embodies lifestyle entrepreneurship because he designed his career to prioritize personal freedom and financial success simultaneously. Instead of scaling a company like a traditional startup founder, he focused on building systems that generate income while allowing him to live life on his own terms.

Serial Entrepreneurs

Serial entrepreneurs repeatedly create and sell businesses, continually seeking new opportunities and challenges.

Marc Lore is a notable serial entrepreneur who has founded and sold multiple companies. He co-founded Diapers.com, which was acquired by Amazon, and later founded Jet.com, sold to Walmart for $3.3 billion. Lore’s approach involves identifying market inefficiencies, rapidly building companies to address them, and executing strategic exits. His ventures demonstrate a pattern of innovation, calculated risk-taking, and successful scaling.

Entrepreneurship isn’t a one-size-fits-all journey. Whether you’re building a high-growth startup, creating a business that funds your ideal lifestyle, or launching multiple ventures as a serial entrepreneur, the approach you take will shape everything—from how you set up your business to the systems you need and the lifestyle you build around it.

Each type of entrepreneurship requires a different mindset, structure, and long-term strategy. Some entrepreneurs focus on rapid innovation and scaling, while others prioritize flexibility and freedom. The key to success lies in choosing the right model that aligns with your goals, implementing the right systems to sustain it, and designing your life around it.

In our deep dive into the Types of Entrepreneurship, we break down: