According to Lorena Schott, entrepreneurs pop up in all types of industries and can have widely different backgrounds. “Really anyone can be an entrepreneur, given the idea and the right tools to develop it into a functional business,” she said.

Schott should know. The director of marketing communications at WESST has met thousands of entrepreneurs since joining the business development organization in 2009. WESST is a nonprofit organization that offers business consulting, workshops, financial resources, business incubation, and support to help entrepreneurs start and grow a business.

“An entrepreneur is someone who sees a need and takes on the financial risk to start a business to fill that need,” she said in a WESST blog post. “It may sound vague, but that’s the point; there is no cookie-cutter entrepreneur…”

Schott contrasts the ‘classic’ entrepreneur — someone who creates a business like a new restaurant or a tech start-up — with today’s entrepreneurs. “There has been a shift in the global job market that has opened the door for entrepreneurship to become more mainstream,” she said.