REQUIREMENTS TO BE A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR

Accelerate your business with these expert tips on "What it takes to be a successful entrepreneur". Analyse and discover this TIP!

In this TIP we are going to talk to you about the requirements to be a successful entrepreneur and we are going to give you tips so that you can acquire the necessary habits. Entrepreneurs can be anyone who has the firm intention to be an entrepreneur. 

You have to work on your attitude as well as your aptitude:

• Attitudes: personality traits.
• Skills: knowledge and skills. 

Let us see what these requirements are:

Focus on the customer

The first of these requirements to be a successful entrepreneur is to have the right orientation. An entrepreneur is essentially a person oriented towards his customers and towards satisfying their needs or solving their problems.

It is very common to find entrepreneurs who fall madly in love with their idea, of your product, your production processes or the cash register.

Everything in entrepreneurship is important, but the customer should be the axis around which any business should revolve. It is essential to know your customer, to identify their needs in order to satisfy them effectively; this is the basis for a large part of the success of an enterprise!!!.

Target-oriented

The second of the requirements of a successful entrepreneur is that he or she is someone who goal-oriented. The entrepreneur is a dreamer with his feet on the ground and therefore his goals must be both ambitious and realistic.

Therefore, the good entrepreneur engages in a continuous process of replacing achieved goals with new ones.

Conformism is not usually a good travelling companion for an entrepreneur. And "resting on one's laurels" when a goal has been achieved is not the right attitude. 

Always in action execution:

The entrepreneur must be a person of action, someone who continuously executes without losing sight of planning. The entrepreneur must always give meaning to everything he or she does.

Concentrate efforts to reach goals, avoid dispersion, avoid wasting time, make the most of time. Move quickly from dream ideas to action. Eliminate "laziness" or "I'll do it tomorrow". 

The entrepreneur always moves forward where he can, he does not stop at a difficulty. There are difficulties that resolve themselves when you move forward in parallel, skirting the obstacles.

Perseverance, enthusiasm, spirit of sacrifice

Another requirement for being a successful entrepreneur is perseverance. Results do not come overnight. Entrepreneurship is a race of obstacles, sometimes foreseen, sometimes unforeseen.

Sometimes, less-than-stellar projects succeed because of the vigour with which the entrepreneur takes them forward.

Therefore, the constanciaperseverance in bad times is an indispensable characteristic of an entrepreneur.

This requires that the entrepreneur possesses a high degree of self-confidence and a firm belief in your project once it has been validated. 

Do not confuse perseveranceillusion and optimism, always necessary, with stubbornness, "blindness", people who do not listen and do only what they want. Being stubborn is a typical cause of failure.

 The entrepreneur is a person who is increasing his or her capacity to work and to spirit of sacrifice. He dedicates all the necessary hours to his project and doesn't stop until he sees it take off, he always finds something to improve.

He does not expect results in the short term, but perseveres in the medium and long term so that results come gradually.

Beware of the impatient who leave things half done!!!!! When creating companies, haste is a bad counsellor.

It moves away from victimhood and lamentations, cries little and does a lot.

Assuming and managing risks

Risk is an inherent element of entrepreneurship. Therefore, one of the requirements of the entrepreneur is to be capable of risk management.

It starts with identifying the risk, taking appropriate measures to mitigate damage, and executing by assuming and controlling the consequences of each risk. For more information, click on this link (+).

Creativity and innovation

Creativity is a great ally of the entrepreneur as it allows him/her to find imaginative solutions to real problems inside and outside the organisation, on the one hand, and to design new ways of satisfying needs, on the other.  

There are many ways for you to learn to be more creative and innovative.

Communicating and convincing

Not to be confused with persuasion or manipulation!!!.

Persuading means convincing and attracting wills towards a specific goal, which in the case of the entrepreneur is none other than to move his project forward by attracting all possible support: investors, financial entities, suppliers, employees, clients, etc.

Therefore, you must cultivate your communication skills and practice an effective pitch for each interlocutor. More information in this link (+).

Surround yourself with talent

Entrepreneurship requires talent, and it is not always the case that entrepreneurs or their partners have all the knowledge, tools and skills necessary to develop their projects.

Therefore, the entrepreneur must be someone capable of attracting talentIn other words, to bring in people to fill the entrepreneur's gaps. 

It is very common to fall into the error of nepotism or cronyism and to incorporate people close to the project but lacking the appropriate profiles to carry out their functions.

Attracting talent means attracting the best talent and this talent is rarely found in the immediate environment of family or friends, it has to be sought further afield.

Realistic optimism

All the entrepreneur's requirements are important but this one is especially so.

Pessimists don't start businesses because they always see too many risks to start and quit too quickly. 

Over-optimistic people fail in their attempts because they do not test beforehand and are not aware of all the difficulties that have to be overcome. There is a medio virtum that you have to achieve. 

Perfectionist vs. sloppy

Perfectionists take too long to reach the customer, "the best is the enemy of the good".

In the world of entrepreneurship it is better to secure the bronze medal and leave the gold medal for others because it is more important to get to the customer quickly than to get there perfectly. If when we launch the product we don't see the colours of the shame of the failures, it is because we have taken too long to launch. 

The bungler is also very dangerous... again half virtum.

Hard skills

We leave for the end two fundamental attributes in an entrepreneur, which have to do with what is called hard skills or professionals:

The first of these lies in the fact that the entrepreneur must be an expert in what it undertakes.

This implies training, knowledge and experience in the sector he/she is going to enter; he/she must also know the market, production processes, customers and their needs, trends, the influence of substitute products, technological tools and all those that contribute to greater productivity and competitiveness: office automation, problem analysis and decision-making, organisation and maximisation of resources, etc.

Therefore, the entrepreneur should not neglect their own training.

Acceleration programmes are particularly useful in that they open horizons, broaden the spectrum of relationships and open eyes to opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed.

A shorter learning and experience curve, generally speaking, means shorter lead times and savings in resources.

Soft skills

The analysis of the entrepreneur's hard skills must also be complemented with the analysis of soft skills, which are non-technical aptitudes that have to do with the way the entrepreneur interacts with others, how he/she deals with problems and how he/she works with his/her project.

We have dedicated a specific TIP to this topic, which you can read in:

• Soft Skills (+).
• Entrepreneurial skills (+).