Could you be a successful entrepreneur? Three Intriguing Attributes Could Help

Do you want to escape the world of wage slavery and start your own business? Preferably a business that will be more than just a lifestyle for you – a business that you can sell and retire with the proceeds from?

Well, when thinking about your chances of success, it helps to look at those who have taken this path and ended up having a successful business under their belt.

In the Decisions That Made Me a Leader interview series, we spoke to half a dozen successful entrepreneurs—a sample too small to draw statistically useful generalizations, but large enough to spot interesting trends.

I was struck by three intriguing attributes that may not guarantee business success, but seem to help.

First of all, I noticed the degree of rebellion that several of them exuded. They never really fit in – maybe not in school, college, or the first jobs they tried.

Duncan Bannatyne, famous as one of the great original stars of the TV series Dragons Den, certainly never joined the navy, from which he was court-martialled and dishonorably discharged after getting into a fight with an officer. “I just thought it was the right thing to do: he was pushing me and yelling at me,” Mr. Bannatyne recalled.

His attitude, he told me, is that “authority should not be accepted.”

Simon Beckerman, founder of online marketplace Depop, draws a similar conclusion about himself. “I’m a pretty disobedient person myself,” he says. “I think I’m unemployable.”

And it’s true that when it’s not easy to work for someone else, going it alone is the obvious career alternative.

Before starting the tea mixology brand Bird & Blend Tea Co, Krisi Smith had many jobs, including cleaning cat enclosures at a cattery (even though she is allergic to cats) and working as a “shot girl” selling cat food. spirits at the club. -the viewers.

“I was always asking questions, wanting to know why we were doing something and making suggestions,” she recalls. “And I think that tended to lift people’s spirits.” After seeing her employers mistreat her staff and customers, she decided she wanted to run her own business ethically.

The second attribute I noticed was a sort of impatience ingrained in their personality. It seems like there’s always an itch. They never stay still.

But if you thought that their business success was the result of some sort of life plan that they had thought through and consciously undertaken, you would be missing the point.

These entrepreneurs seized the opportunities, and even seized the opportunities to create opportunities for themselves.

Timo Armoo, who created social media marketing company FanBytes, says he started his first business at school, tasking other students with helping them with their maths homework. Then, at the age of 17, he managed to secure interviews with Sir Richard Branson, Lord Sugar and James Caan after emailing the organizers of a business summit and offering to set up chairs in exchange of a press card.

“I sent it and after 20 minutes I get an email saying, ‘You’re crazy and yes, let’s do it,'” Mr. Armoo ​​recalls.

The impatience that can be observed even extends to entrepreneurs who leave the very companies they created. Self-aware founders understand the skills they have and don’t have, and know that as a company matures, it often needs management that can do the painstaking work of generating a sustainable growth, rather than management with a flair for creation and discovery.

At this point, impatience is simply not a good attribute. And anyway, the impatient entrepreneurs we spoke with are ready to move on once the business is solid, so their minds wander to sales.

Take Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of Lastminute.com at the height of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s. She was the example of a new, youthful entrepreneurial culture that arose around that time, as children showed adults exactly what the Internet was capable of.

But at 31, she made the decision to leave her position as general manager of the company. “It was like being in a pop group with a mega hit, and I didn’t want that to be the only thing that defined my life,” she says.

So let’s move on to a third and final entrepreneurial attribute, which flows from the others: it’s the desire to actually do things, rather than just think about them. Or overthink it.

I think that’s what distinguishes people – in business or maybe even in charity or public service – who have a real entrepreneurial spirit. They are the ones who seem to get things done.

Part of it comes down to a kind of optimism. They believe that their own actions have a good chance of achieving something, so they are less likely than most of us to slip into a fatalistic stupor. It gets them out of bed in the morning.

Richard Walker comes from a family with business experience: his father was the founder of the Iceland supermarket chain, of which Richard is now executive chairman. But as a young qualified chartered surveyor, Richard says: “I also had this urge to set out to do my own thing.”

Legendary property developer Tony Gallagher advised him to move to Poland. “That’s what I did, because they just joined the EU. They were the size of Germany, 40 million people, and highly educated. No Brits lived there full time and ran a private property company. So I decided to do it.”

I have met many entrepreneurs and I sometimes wonder if they are wrong in their optimism. Many massively overestimate their chances of success, and they often can’t even imagine the many things that could go wrong with the next idea they play with. They have too precise an idea of ​​what can happen.

But when it comes to delusions, optimism is a blessing if you refuse to be intimidated by disappointments.

Of course, by far the most important attribute that anyone in business needs is luck. Things ultimately worked out for all of our guests and luck surely played a role in that.

We haven’t heard about the unknown names who tried to start a business but whose efforts failed. They may have had good judgment, business acumen, and all the right traits, but they simply chose the wrong product at the wrong time. It doesn’t have to be their fault. Things sometimes go wrong. In business, they Above all It runs rough.

Entrepreneurs are not a special breed. We all have our quirks, our impatience, and we all get things done. And we don’t want to be fatalistic in thinking that either you’re born with entrepreneurship or you’re not. Business skills can be learned and developed to some extent.

But if you’re wondering if you’re cut out to venture into a life like that of our show’s stars, it’s certainly worth examining the characters they have – the flaws that turn out to be strengths and the work they accomplished. In.

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