This article addresses the empirical relationship between masculinity, hegemony and entrepreneurial identity as a largely neglected debate; this omission is addressed by outlining how 10 enterprising men who own and run small businesses perform, in the Goffmanesque sense, a style of ‘entrepreneurial masculinity’ in front of each other during their leisure lives when they meet as a local entrepreneurial fraternity in a semi-rural pub. By so doing, we expand upon prevailing ideas about how male actors perform entrepreneurial identity and develop ethnographic accounts of how gender, entrepreneurship and identity projection culturally intersect.