ABSTRACT
The entrepreneur creates the venture by establishing the functional relationships that comprise production and consumption. The actions undertaken by the entrepreneur intend to move the venture along a continuum from 100 per cent blueprint to 100 per cent actualized, with all the gradations in between. The profitability can be considered in terms of whether the price covers the direct costs (gross margin) and whether it covers the indirect costs (operating margin). The latter is dependent upon the scale of the business in the sense of over how many units the indirect costs can be spread. This leads to the second level of the profitability question, namely the scale of the business. The movement from imagination to realization is mediated by the questions of possibility and profitability, the answer to which rests on a mixture of hope, evidence, and personal aspirations.
