Are You an Entrepreneur?
“Going into business for yourself, becoming an entrepreneur, is the modern-day equivalent of pioneering on the old frontier.”
Paula Nelson
In the 15 years I’ve worked as an intuitive consultant and strategist, I’ve had lots of sessions with people who either had a dream of becoming an entrepreneur, or were taking the beginning steps of their journey on the entrepreneurial path.
And, if you landed on this particular post of my blog, I’m guessing you may fall into one of those two camps yourself.
If you do, let me ask you two questions –
1. When you think of an entrepreneur, what skills come to mind?
2. Why is it that 50% of all new businesses fail within the first five years?
Surveys have been taken to get the answers to the first question. If you answer the following, you’re in agreement with what most people think:
- risk taker/maverick
- visionary/creative
- passionate/driven
- courageous
- action taker
- lifetime learner
All of those qualities are necessary if you want to be a successful entrepreneur.
An entrepreneur is a dreamer, someone with a vision, but someone who must put that vision into action. As an entrepreneur you must commit your ideas to whatever it takes to bring them to reality. It takes courage and trust but also hope, discipline, and endurance. You start off solo but you must have other people in order to make your dreams real. You must be able to take risks in order to be successful. You must go out of your comfort zone and risk your time, your reputation, your money, your resources, and maybe even your personal life.
At the same time, you have to be able to analyze your business at all levels so that you can make good choices and adjust to circumstances. You need the courage to take action and the courage to be responsible for all the outcomes of those actions.
You need to be the dreamer who has the vision, but you also need to have or acquire the technical and business skills needed to make the vision a reality and to sustain the reality in your business. You need to be a lifelong learner when it comes to your products, your market, technical skills, and business, leadership, and management skills, but you also need to put all those skills into action.
So, you’ll have to manage all your resources including your time, your people, your projects, and your overall business. You have to be a dreamer and a risk taker and visionary in order to get your ideas started, but you’ve got to have the discipline to see them all through. As someone said, “You have to do stuff in order to get stuff.” You have to be a dreamer who works long hard hours and confronts every problem so that the problem doesn’t become bigger. All successful entrepreneurs seem to be in agreement about these things.
But that’s only half the story. Have you ever heard the old expression,” What gets you there might not keep you there.”? That’s oh-so-true for entrepreneurs.
The passion and the vision of the entrepreneur get you on the map, but without some key leadership and managerial skills, you very likely won’t stay there. To make it worse, some of these important skills might seem at odds with and even unnatural to passionate, forge-ahead entrepreneurs.
Aside from truly unavoidable circumstances, most start-ups and new businesses fail due to lack of key leadership and managerial skills.
These skills, along with entrepreneurial skills, can be learned. You may be inherently better at some of them than others, but they all can be learned.
Many entrepreneurs fail at their first and even second business, and then go on to be very successful. In many cases they failed because they did not know the entire skill set they needed. It’s my hope and intention to save you countless hours of frustration and even some business failures.
Entrepreneurs are admired, and rightly so, for their ability to shoulder risk and take action, to follow through on their visions, to be passionate and driven, and have endless numbers of new ideas. All of these talents and skills can lead to great success and are much to be admired. (But remember, these skills are only half of the equation for success.)
We’ll take a closer look at these skills in future posts.
Until next time,
James
Considering entrepreneurship? Got a passion and vision for your own biz and want to get it going? Consider scheduling a FREE Mapping Session with me so we can do some business brainstorming together!