Leonard C. Green, entrepreneurship lecturer at Babson College, once said, “Entrepreneurs are not risk takers. They are calculated risk takers.”
He was absolutely right. When assessing a business decision, one of the first and most important things for an entrepreneur to understand is the difference between risk and calculated risk.
Risk is dangerous; risk takers go all in and wager everything they’ve got on a win or lose result. Calculated risk however, is the opposite of that, and involves doing everything possible to mitigate disaster.
Calculated risk takers are actually highly risk averse because, every step of the way through a decision making process, they further reduce their potential to fail. They take every available opportunity to save time, money and resource in order to cover themselves.
So how can entrepreneurs ensure they take the latter kind of calculated risks?