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For the last several years passing through McMinnville has always been a treat as Delford Smith added a new building or a new airplane to his collection at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum.

Mr. Smith is an entrepreneur from Washington who started Evergreen Helicopters in Oregon in 1960. From a start with one aircraft he built a worldwide enterprise that operated across the globe. By taking risks and putting personal stakes on the line he has demonstrated what is possible.

Recent news about the cessation of operations is disappointing, but Mr. Smith represents the best in feisty business owners by insisting that the operation is not done. At 83 he isn’t ready to head for the retirement home yet.

Running a business is never easy, but the one thing that can be counted on is uncertainty. While one business fights for survival after many years of a great run, others reach dizzying nadirs of valuation. Twitter, a business almost unknown a decade ago, has achieved a stratospheric valuation in the relative blink of an eye.

But between these two cases there are hundreds of thousands of business owners who believe in their vision of the future and work into the late hours of the night to make it happen. Many of those are engineers, architects and contractors who believe that their skills and knowledge are a critical part of the future.

With the economy finally coming out of its lows, the time has never been better to make the leap into ownership. These “leapers” will learn a number of critical lessons along the way. For some it will be the equivalent of a Harvard MBA at a fraction of the cost.

Some new owners will discover that it is a great deal more than the technical skill set that makes success; things such as finance, sales, accounting, HR and administration are critical to a flourishing enterprise.

What they’ll find even more, however, is that risk is the cornerstone of success. Those who are successful know what risks to take on and what risks to pass on. And the element of luck comes to play as well. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. After the hard work is put in, an opportunity arises to deliver.

While the high-tech businesses get all of the headline press, the world has great opportunities in those things that we need on a daily basis. We still need water, the garbage needs to be collected, the lights need to come on, the furnace needs to heat our homes and we need to get to work. These are very much brick-and-mortar issues that will never go away.

Long after everyone forgets what Twitter is, we’ll still want to get to a well-stocked grocery store.

Christian Steinbrecher is president of Columbia River Port Engineers Inc. and the immediate past president of the Oregon Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is the editor of ASCE Oregon’s Report Card on Oregon’s Infrastructure.