If you’re like most people, you look at successful business people and think, “Gosh, how in the world did they get so lucky!”
While luck does have something to do with it, success often comes from what they did to push their business to the top. These successful people have certain characteristics that give them the tools to do what you only imagine doing for your business. Finding out what those characteristics are could put you in a better position of moving your business forward towards success.
Some of the following characteristics of successful entrepreneurs are from the most successful business people in the nation: William (Bill) Zinke, Larry Levy, and Carol Levy.
Table of Contents
Characteristic #1: Make Mistakes Once
You can’t run a business without mistakes. Actually, making mistakes is the best way to grow your business, as long as you learn from those mistakes. If you are not able to accept that you made a mistake, and change the way you are doing something in your business, you’ll never move forward.
Characteristic #2: Thick Skinned
Being an entrepreneur is not easy. You have to be strong enough to handle the disappointments that come along with the job.
When you’ve been hit, get up, brush yourself off, and move on. It’s the only way your business will survive and succeed.
Characteristic #3: Be a Dreamer
Business people dream about what they would like their business to be like in five, 10, 15 years. When they dream, they create a vision, and then goals. These goals are what successful entrepreneurs use to achieve their vision.
Characteristic #4: Believe in Personal Strength
You must believe you can run a successful business to run a successful business. When you know you can do something, you are much more motivated and able to bring out your strengths easily.
Characteristic #5: Leader as Opposed to Manager
There’s a difference between a leader and manager. A leader will take people on an adventure to reach success, while a manager will instruct people what to do to reach a goal. When you’re a leader, you have support from everyone, when you’re a manager, you’re supporting everyone else. Just look at our 5 Key Leadership Traits.
Characteristic #6: Trusting
If you can’t trust people to help you reach goals, you’ll run your business alone. To grow a business to the success you imagine, you need help, and that comes from trusting people.
Characteristic #7: Commitment
Building and growing a business takes a lot of time and work. It’s consistent work. A business owner will not reach success if there isn’t commitment and dedication to the work that needs to be done.
Characteristic #8: Flexibility
The road to business success isn’t smooth. There are potholes, curves, and sometimes you have to make a U-turn. To handle all of the changes that come along with the road to success, entrepreneurs need to be flexible. They need to adjust, adapt, and move on.
Characteristic #9: Good Decision Maker
Entrepreneurs make many decisions about the direction they want to take their business. They must make good decisions most of the time, and be results driven. While mistakes along the way are common, there should always be more good choice than bad ones.
Characteristic #10: Resourceful
Successful entrepreneurs can’t do it all, but they can find people and tools to do it all. Being able to pull from many different places to get the job done will not only move a business forward, but it will grow it quicker and easier too.
The Characteristics of Entrepreneurs
Now you know the most common characteristics of entrepreneurs. Do you have them? If you do, you may have what it takes to grow your business to the success you crave. If you don’t have some of these characteristics, don’t worry. Many times, entrepreneurs can learn how to bring them out and put them into practice. It can take some time, but now that you know what they are, you can start working on yourself, so you can start working on your business.
What are some of the characteristics that you think make entrepreneurs successful?
About Carson Derrow
I believe you’ve hit all the major points for entrepreneurship. If there was one missing, I think it’s “Planning and Preparation.” All those characteristics are good, and dreaming is a necessity, but what are you going to do with all the if you don’t have a game plan? How will you react if you don’t prepare for the next step in growing a business? Part of that is adaptation, part of it is knowing how you’re going to adapt. Maybe you have a routine, maybe you just need some quiet time, but everyone adapts differently.
Planning doesn’t always work the way you think it will, and that’s why flexibility is necessary. Nevertheless, I think entrepreneurs have not only a goal in mind, but a sense of how to achieve that goal. They don’t just jump in and say, “Here goes nothing!” In my own opinion, I think they jump in thinking, “I’m going to do “A” which will get me to “B” and end with ‘C’.” They know their goals and they know hot to get the results because they have it all thought out.
Thick skinned. This is needed a lot; to make things that don’t work the way we expected them to, to work anyway, and even yield better results (in terms of profits or lessons that can be learnt from a given situation to keep the vision alive).