Are you an Entrepreneur? Let’s find out.
So, what is an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur is a self-made businessperson who sets up and runs their own business, risking their financial position in the hope to making a successful, profitable business. Most entrepreneurs are known for being smart and innovative, great at coming up with new ideas and improving things. Two of the most well-known entrepreneurs worldwide are Bill Gates, who set up Microsoft, and Mark Zuckerberg, who set up Facebook.
So, is an entrepreneur born or made?
In reality, everyone is capable of becoming an entrepreneur, to some degree. Many people have actually done entrepreneurial things in their life already but may not have realised this. Kids that have developed and followed through with an idea like making and selling cookies when they were younger – this is just like setting up a mini company. There are of course many different levels of entrepreneurship, depending on the business idea and the level of risk someone is prepared to take. Three things separate entrepreneurs apart:
- The experience that they have with the idea
- The correct idea of success
- Their past education
Above all it is vital to have a good mind-set when starting your business journey, because if there is an image of failure in your head, you probably will not succeed. Believing in you is the most important thing to becoming a successful entrepreneur.
There are a number of characteristics and skills to successful in setting up and following through with your own business idea. Firstly, the key characteristics include the following:
- Risk Taking: To be a successful entrepreneur you have to take some sort of risk, whether you like it or not. When you see a gap in the market and you have a chance to succeed with your idea, you must take the risk to go for it.
- Creativity: While being an entrepreneur you have to be innovative, always thinking outside the box, looking to improve anything you can with generating new ideas all of the time.
- Confidence: Confidence is a great characteristic because it helps you along the way with every decision you have to make. If you are confident in your choices, this will put your mind-set in a good frame to help you achieve your goals and succeed.
Secondly, some of the key skills that entrepreneurs have include:
- Resilience: This is a great skill to have because if something isn’t going the way you expected or you hit some bumps in the road, you will be able to pick yourself back up and try again to succeed better than ever.
- Strategic Thinker: Before making any moves towards growing your business there must be some sort of planning, and with that if you develop the skill of strategic thinking, or long-term thinking, you could be many steps ahead before you even start building up your business.
- Human Relations: If you have or develop the skill of working well with people, not only can you be a great entrepreneur, but you can teach others how to be one as well. Entrepreneurs generally develop to become a great ‘people’s person’ and will make life much easier for all the team members to help further business opportunities.
- Coping with Failure: As an entrepreneur it is almost impossible to create and develop an idea that will succeed on the first try. It is key to note that everyone, somewhere along his or her life journey, will fail at something. What makes great entrepreneurs is how they pick themselves back up and try again after a failure. A good example is the Dyson vacuum cleaner, which was not made in a day. In reality, it took over 5,000 failed prototypes and 15 years to create the successful model that is made today. So, nobody should doubt themselves and follow their idea and their dreams.
So, to answer the question, “Is an entrepreneur born or made?” Whilst you may not have been born with all of these characteristics and skills of an entrepreneur, if some of them sound like you, then you have every chance to be a successful entrepreneur. The ones you don’t have you can learn.
I hope this helps put in perspective what it is like to be an entrepreneur, and maybe one day you will be one, but it all comes down to having a great idea, along with hard work and dedication.