Could you be a profitable entrepreneur? Three intriguing attributes would possibly assist | EUROtoday

You need to step out of the world of wage slavery, and arrange a enterprise of your individual? Preferably a enterprise that can be greater than a mere life-style for you – one that you may promote and from which you’ll retire on the proceeds?

Well, in enthusiastic about your possibilities of success, it helps to have a look at those that have trodden that path and ended up with a flourishing enterprise to their title.

In the interview collection The Decisions That Made Me a Leader, we spoke to half a dozen profitable entrepreneurs – too small a pattern from which to attract statistically helpful generalisations, however giant sufficient to identify some fascinating patterns.

I used to be struck by three intriguing attributes that will not assure enterprise success, however which do appear to assist.

First, I observed the diploma of rebelliousness exuded by a number of of them. They by no means fairly fitted in – maybe not into faculty, or college, or into the primary jobs they tried.

Duncan Bannatyne, well-known as one of many unique huge stars of the Dragons Den TV collection, actually by no means fitted into the navy, from which he was court-martialed and dishonourably discharged after getting right into a struggle with an officer. “I just thought it was right thing to do – he was poking me and shouting at me,” remembers Mr Bannatyne.

His perspective, he tells me, is that “authority should not be accepted”.

Simon Beckerman, founding father of on-line market Depop, attracts an identical conclusion about himself. “I’m quite a disobedient person in my own right,” he says. “I think I am unemployable.”

And it’s true that when you don’t find it easy to work for anyone else, going it alone is the obvious alternative career route.

Before she created the tea mixology brand Bird & Blend Tea Co, Krisi Smith had stumbled through many jobs – including cleaning out cat pens in a cattery (even though she is allergic to cats) and working as a “shot girl” selling spirits to club-goers.

“I was always asking questions and wanting to know why we were doing something and making suggestions,” she remembers. “And I feel that that tended to place individuals’s again up.” After seeing her employers treat staff and customers badly, she decided she wanted to run her own business ethically.

The second attribute that I noticed was a kind of impatience hard-wired into their personalities. It seems there is always an itch. They never stand still.

But if you thought their success in business came out of some kind of life-plan upon about which they had reflected and consciously embarked, you would be missing the point.

These entrepreneurs grabbed at opportunities, and indeed grabbed opportunities to make opportunities for themselves.

Timo Armoo, who set up the social media marketing company FanBytes, says he started his first venture at school, charging other pupils to help them with their maths assignments. Then, at the age of 17, he managed to secure interviews with Sir Richard Branson, Lord Sugar and James Caan after emailing the organisers of a business summit and offering to set out chairs in exchange for a press pass.

“I despatched it and inside 20 minutes I get again an e mail saying, ‘You’re crazy and yes, let’s do it’,” recalls Mr Armoo.

The impatience that one can observe even extends to the entrepreneurs leaving the very businesses they created. Self-aware founders understand the skills they have and do not have, and know that when a business matures, it often needs a management that can do the painstaking work of delivering sustainable growth, rather than one with the flair of creation and discovery.

At that point, impatience is exactly the wrong attribute. And anyway, the entrepreneurs we spoke to, being impatient, are ready to move on once the business is solid, so their minds wander to selling.

Take Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of Lastminute.com at the height of the dot-com boom during the late 1990s. She was the poster child of a new youthful entrepreneurial culture that sprung up at that time, as kids showed the grown-ups exactly what the internet was capable of.

But at the age of 31, she made the decision to step down as managing director of the company. “It was like being in a pop band where you had this one mega hit, and I didn’t want that to be the only thing that defined my life,” she says.

So to a third and final entrepreneurial attribute, which follows from the others: it’s a willingness to truly do issues, quite than merely take into consideration them. Or overthink them.

I feel this is what marks out those people – in business or perhaps even in charities or public service – that are of a genuine entrepreneurial spirit. They are the people who seem to get things done.

Some 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 descend into a fatalistic stupor. It gets them out of bed in the morning.

Richard Walker comes from a family with a track record in business – his father was the founder of the supermarket chain Iceland, where Richard is now executive chairman. But as a young qualified chartered surveyor, Richard says, “I additionally had this entrepreneurial itch to do my very own factor”.

He was advised by the legendary property developer Tony Gallagher to move to Poland. “So I did, because they just joined the EU. They were the size of Germany, 40 million people, very well-educated. There were no Brits living out there full-time running a private property company. So I decided I would.”

I’ve met numerous entrepreneurs, and I typically marvel if they’re deluded of their optimism. Many massively overrate their possibilities of success, and so they typically can’t even think about the numerous issues which will go improper with the following concept they’re toying with. They have too vivid an image of what can go proper.

But as delusions go, optimism is a blessing in case you refuse to be daunted by the disappointments.

Of course, the far largest attribute anybody in enterprise wants is sweet luck. Things ultimately labored out for all our company and luck absolutely performed an element in that.

We haven’t heard from the unknown names who tried to construct a enterprise, however whose efforts foundered. They might have had nice judgement, enterprise nous, all the fitting traits – however simply hit the improper product on the improper time. That doesn’t must have been their very own fault. Things typically prove unhealthy. In enterprise, they principally prove unhealthy.

Entrepreneurs are usually not some type of particular breed. We all have our eccentricities, our impatience and all of us get issues accomplished. And we don’t need to be fatalistic in pondering that you’re both born with entrepreneurship otherwise you’re not. The expertise of enterprise might be discovered and developed to some extent.

But if you’re asking your self, whether or not you’re minimize out to enterprise right into a life like these of the celebrities of our collection, it’s actually price analyzing the characters they’ve – the issues that transform strengths and the work they’ve put in.

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