It takes an entrepreneurial spirit in your belly to start a business and make it succeed. The fire can come from a lot of different places: you are tried of working for someone else and building their dreams and goals, you want to work on your own schedule, you have a great idea for a product that will help people and you want them to have it, you had a personal experience where you encountered a problem that many other people have and you have the solution, you want to work from home or any other reason that motivates you. The main thing is you are motivated because it’s a fun, but can be a tough road getting to success
Here are a few of the common characteristics among the emotional and personal fabric of people ready to consider an entrepreneurial venture. You don’t have to fit all of these categories to be a good candidate for entrepreneurship, but you should have a few. In general, the more you have in common with these characteristics, the closer you probably are to being ready to try going out on your own.
1. People who are successful at establishing their own business tend to have had role models who worked for themselves. It’s usually easier to get a job with a company than to start your own business; people who strike out on their own often have the direct example of a parent, close family member, role model or mentor to look to.
2.You’re a lousy employee. No need to sugar-coat this one. People who start their own businesses tend to have been fired from or quit more than one job. I’m not saying you were laid off for lack of work or moved from one job to a better-paying one. You were asked to leave, or you quit before they could fire you. Think of it as the marketplace telling you that the only person who can effectively motivate and manage you is yourself.
3.You see more than one definition of “job security.” Some people can stay with a company for twenty-five or thirty years. They look very secure. But how many people do you know who are able to stay with one company for that long in this day of age? In our rapidly changing economy, job security can be frighteningly fleeting vs. betting on yourself and being in control.
4. You’ve gone as far as you can go, or you’re not going anywhere at all. Sometimes the motivation to start a new venture comes from having reached the top of the pile where you are, looking around, and saying, “What’s next” Early success can be wonderful, but early retirement can sometimes drive energetic and motivated people totally crazy.
5. You’ve done the market research already and built a business plan. Don’t even talk to me about your great business idea if you haven’t put the time into figuring out if there’s a market for your product or service and built the financials and business plan around it. As the people behind any number of failed ventures will tell you, “cool great ideas” do not necessarily translate into “profitable.” Don’t bother building it if you haven’t figured out whether there’s a good chance the customers will come and it has the potential to be a “business”.
6. You’ve got the support of your family. Starting a business is stressful under the best of circumstances. Trying to do it without the support of your spouse or other significant family members or friends would probably be unbearable.
7. You know you cannot do it alone. You might excel at promoting a business. Maybe you love running the financial end of the enterprise. You could be someone who starts a business because you have unique creative or technical know-how to create a product.Any of the above is possible, but it’s unlikely that you are going to excel at all of these tasks or at all of the tasks involved in running any business. Forget all that doing it alone stuff. You are going to need some help sometime.
The willingness to get that help and having employees, partners or consultants for those areas in which you are not an expert is one big indicator of likely future success. The truth is that no successful entrepreneur has ever succeeded alone. The key is to recognize your strengths, lean into them and fill the gaps. Some people feel insecure and need to be the smartest person in the room, an entrepreneur recognizes that he/she can not be an expert in all things all the time and that not being the smartest person in the room really is the key to success.
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