Becoming a successful entrepreneur is a
dream many people share. I have dreamt of it since I was a child and now past
40 I have become half a successful entrepreneur. What constitute success is of
course different from person to person. Some want to become superrich,
some want power, others want freedom in terms of time, place, creativity etc
and some just want to have a generally good time. What your ambition is will of
course have a great impact on how you address a start-up.
To become a successful entrepreneur a
person has to have many character traits that are not common among the general
population and he must also be able to withstand some of the feelings and
behaviours that society in general consider signs of success. The below
character traits are very common among successful entrepreneurs and some are
not common among the population in general while some are. It’s the combination
of having enough of an entrepreneurial personality that makes you successful.
Most likely you have some of the traits listed below, but not all and with
certainty some of them are stronger in you than others.
Please don’t look at the list in a
fatalistic way as if “either you have them or you don’t”, many of the
personality traits are functions of choices, training or experience and not
given by genetics.
Do you need special skills and education to
become a successful entrepreneur? Not necessarily – and a formal higher
education is not a necessity at all – as a key characteristic of an
entrepreneur is curiosity and capacity to learn which will make it possible to
learn by doing and take on skill requirements on the go.
Trust me here, I have a major in both entrepreneurship
and business and while those are nice to have I have seen many people around me
who have only high school diplomas outperform me time and time again. It’s all
about being able to learn on the spot and learning from mistakes made, some
people embrace that while others refuse to accept they have made mistakes or
have gaps in their knowledge.
It has been said that as long as you have
just a bit over average intelligence it will no longer have an impact on your
success which instead will depend on determination, will to learn and hard
work. Being intelligent enough to make thousands of correct micro-decisions as
the start-up matures is what is required. Those micro decisions is what set the
company culture, define your products and make your company special.
You can practise and maintain intelligence
on the job by constantly confronting yourself with equations of sorts, business
model puzzles, system challenges. Again, it is not so much about genetics as
the will to improve over time – all the time.
Experience from business and start-ups in
particular are of course an extremely good asset to posses when you pursue your
own start-up. You don’t have it? Then join another start-up as a partner
or employee and get it. It’s as simple as that.
An entrepreneur must be willing to take
risks, after all 50 percent of all start-ups fail. If you need safety – get a
job.
When you decide on becoming an entrepreneur
you should keep in mind that the risks you must take to succeed should all be
calculated risks, entrepreneurship
is not a black-jack table where you might win big but the odds are always in
favour of the house. Make a solid analysis of the market you are about to enter
and your capacity to succeed on that market to lower the risk.
As with much else concerning
entrepreneurship it is not so much about talent and having the perfect business
idea but about your capacity to execute the idea and – foremost – to have the
energy and endurance to do so. The major risks are all associated with your
competence and capacity.
Can you learn about handling pressure
related to risks? Yes you can. Try smaller risks at first and you will grow
used to the risk as a part of your life and will then be able to take on more
and more.
If you are afraid to put yourself in front
of your potential clients by bringing your goods to the market you have already
failed and if you need investors but are afraid they will reject you it will
hamper your business’ potential growth and development.
You must have the guts to get out there and
put yourself in front of your stakeholders, be it the bank, clients, business
partners, potential employees, investors or others. If you don’t have the
guts to do so you should get a normal job.
Can you practise how to handle rejection?
Absolutely, get a sales job in any sphere and you will have all the
opportunities to practise both sales processes and the emotions of being
rejected.
It takes an enormous effort and usually
much longer time than initially expected to build a successful business. The
stories about immediate success that have become urban legends are based on
cases so rare that there is a greater chance of becoming
rich by buying a lottery ticket. Entrepreneurs
who are unwilling or unable to work hard for a long time even when it feels
like the business is about to go under are not likely to become successful
but rather likely to lose speed and succumb due to inactivity and exhaustion.
How do you build the strength needed to work hard over longer periods of time?
Join the military, practise demanding sports like triathlon or mountaineering –
both are not only physically challenging but it takes time to pass the goalposts
too – or get a job in any prestigious investment bank or management consulting
firm with a reputation for working their employees until they break down.
Determination is also an absolute
requirement for success as the opposite – giving up – will lead to immediate business
failure. Can you train and develop determination? Absolutely, put yourself
to the test as often as you can and you will gain willpower and become better
at resisting the urge to give in to pressure. Willpower and determination also
increase with age as both are related to patience, which we all know is not a
typical trait among younger people.
The perception which makes it possible for
an entrepreneur to see opportunities where others see problems is a key
personality trait of a successful entrepreneur and might be one that comes not
only with curiosity but also with a generally positive mindset, something that
is harder to train and develop than many other traits of the successful
entrepreneur.
Being able to see opportunities, have the
creativity to come up with business ideas from the perceived opportunity, to
structure the idea into a plan and have the management capacity to transform
that business
plan into a real business is a rare combination of personality traits and
that make entrepreneurs a very special breed in society.
People skills are essential for an
entrepreneur. Being able to sell the business idea and plan to company
stakeholders, being able to manage staff, being able to attract clients all
require people skills, and that goes for online businesses too as understanding
human behaviour is key to online
marketing.
Can people skills be trained? Of course
they can, just put yourself among people, interact with them and pay attention
to their feelings and responses and you will get there even if it might take
you time, especially if you are an introvert like me.
Analysing something is to examine something
methodically and in detail, typically in order to explain and interpret it.
Being able to analyse the business idea and the business
plan are important for an entrepreneur, analysing the business and its
continuous challenges is essential and being able to analyse oneself is
critical. Many great analysts master to analyse something outside them but
don’t even consider, let alone try, analysing their own behaviour. Analysing
yourself can be a burden if it slows you down and make you doubt your own
capacity but it’s critical for the learning process and the adaptation needed
to be successful entrepreneur.
Can you train and develop an analytical
mind? Yes, it’s all about learning by doing while having somebody or,
preferably, a group of people commenting on your thinking. In time you will
improve.
Procrastination is an enemy to all kinds of
success. Even with endurance and physical capacity you need to get to work and
get the work done. If you walk around in circles, sit down staring at the wall
or play computer games all morning you have a problem because you are extremely
unproductive and is wasting your most precious resource – your time.
Just get to it, start with writing one
email, adjust one string of code, pack one box or whatever you need to do –
just do something and then continue with something else. Shifting from one task
to another can be a solution if you get bored but stopping altogether is a path
to failure.
Being effective and efficient is to be able
to decide what is needed to do and do it in the smartest possible way. The
opposite is to do the wrong things in a great way – or even worse, to do the
wrong things in a bad way - which is of course a total waste of all sorts of
resources and a path to failure.
Strategy and tactics are related to
effectiveness and efficiency. Strategy is what to do, tactics is how to do it
and there is a huge difference between the two.
Developing effectiveness require that you
prioritise and continuously ask yourself if what you are doing is the most
important thing to do for success right now? By continuing to ask yourself that
question and answering it truthfully you will develop a good sense for what is
effective and what is efficient.
If you have to show off and express your
success through luxuries and other symbols of status it will cost you resources
you could have and probably should have invested in meeting the needs of your
clients and this can cause your business to fail.
If you feel you are too important to deal
with and work with the simpler tasks of your business operation and therefore
hire people to do this work for you it will consume resources you could have and
should have used to build the foundation of your business. You will also miss
out on important knowledge about your business, which increase the likelihood
of you making mistakes and these mistakes can cost you clients, effectiveness
and efficiency.
Entrepreneurs who cannot decide on what to
focus on but have side jobs, continuously start new projects and launch new
products and services despite not yet making money on any of them will likely
burn the capital they have before having operational profits and therefore they
might risk bankruptcy due to a very bad cash flow. Doing everything half good
is exactly the same as doing nothing really good at all.
If you want to become a successful entrepreneur you can forget about social
balance and should not feel bad about forgetting it. If long vacations,
sleep-in mornings, weekends at the golf course, culture events with your
partner, watching your children or other distractions are important for you to
function as a person you are not an entrepreneur. All these joyful activities
that makes a life complete are not for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs don’t live
complete and balanced lives.
