Let me start by saying that “omnipreneur” is not yet an official word that you can find in dictionaries. At least in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, it’s mentioned in the section of new words and slang. In there, they say that “omnipreneur” = (noun) : a new breed of entrepreneur who run his businesses anywhere where the action is or where the action is less, depending on the goal at hand. This is a pretty specific definition of the word omnipreneur, because if you search on the internet you’ll see that other people give a more broader definition that goes like; an omnipreneur is someone who partakes in all sorts of businesses.
Well, I didn’t invent this word. But I am happy that this is not yet a recognized new word, because I couldn’t agree with these definitions, because it’s not the definition I use myself for this word.
Strictly speaking, an entrepreneur is a person that does business to earn money for him/herself and his/her stakeholders and shareholders. So simple put, you create a product/service/activity, get people to buy your product/service/experience, get that money by any means necessary and you’re an entrepreneur.
To me, an omnipreneur is someone that goes beyond his/her stakeholders and shareholders when doing business, and more importantly, it goes beyond just earning that cash, mula, plata, or whatever you call that thing we created that we exchange as a means of value. As an omnipreneur, you do business that don’t, in any sense, down grade and/or damage the (natural) environment you’re in. So, this means, with every decision you make you need to ask yourself, am I going to hurt people and/or the environment in doing this to earn money? If the answer is yes, you just don’t do it. Period. If it’s a maybe, then you need to halt your decision and go see why and/or if it indeed will result in (any) harm. So, this also means, even if you know that you’ll miss the window of opportunity for earning (some extra) money, if it’s a yes, you don’t do it and if it’s a maybe, you take the risk that you’ll lose that window of opportunity.
The 5P-Formula© when used helps you automate this decision making. Which is also the reason why I chose to incorporate this formula in the foundation of the Tiiendemanns Group from the start. Because with the Tiiendemanns Group my mission is to help create this organization into a (big) multinational, which puts people AND our environment before profit.
Let me be perfectly clear here. The Tiiendemanns Group is not a non-profit organization, it is a 100% FOR-PROFIT enterprise. But its profit maximalisation is engrained with benefitting the global society and the World as a whole. This is a different way of doing business, because it is about creating value for other people and even other creatures that don’t belong to your team or to your core stakeholders and shareholders.
Just to make this more graspable for you, if you take Apple, the first company in the modern era to reach a valuation of $ 1 trillion, if Steve Jobs and/or Tim Cook were true omnipreneurs, would Apple take the title of the first company to reach that mark? Who cares? Because asking that question is thinking the entrepreneurial way! Because they have reached that mark, while people in Asian countries are being treated poorly. The thing is, if you have a samsung or a windows phone, unfortunately, it wouldn’t matter, because all people making phones are being treated poorly, while the only ones profiting from the phones being sold are the stakeholders (governments and the shareholders/owners of their supplier companies) and their own shareholders. Not to mention the environmental damages they are directly responsible for, for making their devices with planned obsolescence in their design, so that they can keep the wheels of consumerism turning and keep earning billions that “they will all leave behind and give away when they die”.
So, the entrepreneurial and capitalistic way of thinking is to amass now all that you can (so that you can leave most when you die), even if it means destroying the environment or your own client base, and the omnipreneural way of thinking is to don’t take it all, if it means that when you die you leave the World in a better state than how you found it.
If Cook, Musk, Bezos, Ma, Buffet, the Trumps, etc… were omnipreuners, our World would already be prosperous and a true beacon of peace, freedom and equality. This is not the case, because unfortunately, greed is still the driving force in decision making in most businesses AND governments around our World. This will change and I’m still very confident that it will before it’s too late.
Getting more true omnipreneurs active in the World would surely help. With this blog post I hope and wish to contribute in us getting there!
Edit November 12th, 2022: in heart I know I am still an omnipreneur (or multipreneur), but for the simplicity of things I started calling myself publicly a ([social] activist) ecopreneur. In essence that should convey the omnipreneurship in it, however, for practical reasons this blog will be the only outlet wherein I call myself this and/or go in full detail about the meaning of it for me.
