Many people have a real desire and inclination to start and run their own business, whether as a sole proprietor or as a small or potentially large company. They are often put off even before they start by a series of sometimes well-intentioned and sometimes not-so-well-intentioned people advising them that you have to be a special kind of person to be an entrepreneur or to take the risk of settling down. and run your own business. Sometimes this tip is promoted by people who like to see themselves as an icon in the business community, rather than something that is truly fact-based.
The US Small Business Administration provides a very helpful guide to the qualities needed to be an entrepreneur or start your own business. These tend to focus on an individual’s personality or identity characteristics. But the real value of this is that most of these characteristics can be learned or changed within an individual’s own frame of reference.
It is important that the person is comfortable taking risks. This does not mean taking unnecessary risks, it means being able to look at a situation relatively objectively, decide what the risks are and what are not, and feel comfortable taking a risk that you know is a risk in the first place. People often think that to be an entrepreneur you have to take a lot of unnecessary risks. This is far from true: it is the ability to assess risk and decide which ones are worth taking and which ones are not. This is the key to understanding this process.
An entrepreneur must be relatively independent. Perhaps the best example of this is that an entrepreneur shouldn’t be someone who seems genuinely insecure as a person. They need to be able to think for themselves, make judgments for themselves, and be largely comfortable with their own judgment. This does not mean that they do not seek advice or help from other people when they need it. However, it does mean that they have enough faith in their own judgment to evaluate other people’s advice and opinions before deciding whether or not they are valid.
An entrepreneur needs to be able to negotiate with people. This is key, whether they are formally negotiating around a legal contract of some kind, with financing from a bank or a business start-up advisory center or from an angel, in any case, they should be able to negotiate. all right. This is a skill that can be learned; in fact, it is very important to learn to trade well, otherwise, instinctively, practically anyone can do it quite badly.
There is a real need for someone who wants to be an entrepreneur or start their own business to be relatively creative. Again, this is a skill that people think they either have or don’t have. This tends to be a misunderstanding of what creativity really is. Everyone is creative in one way or another and everyone has creative abilities. These are often blocked internally by people’s own doubts or judgment or by labels given to them by other people in their life. It is important to recognize that creative thinking in this context refers to the ability to think in terms of process about a situation rather than thinking in black and white or the need for certainty in a given situation.
There is also a real need for some kind of support network for an entrepreneur or anyone running their own business. This is largely due to the pressures involved, as much as a person trusts their own instincts or judgment, there is still a great deal of pressure emanating from the very nature of being our entrepreneur or starting your own business. Having a support network can be invaluable in terms of encouragement and in terms of being an outlet for pent-up emotions, or simply as a way to escape the reality of running a business. A support network can be a formal or informal process, just family, friends, possibly coworkers. It can be a more formal process through some type of business association or professional meeting where common problems can be resolved.
