3 Key Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs

Asoka
Asoka is an Independent Finance Director and Management Consultant based in London. He works with growing companies as their part time Finance Director and is the Founder of AKCA Consulting, which helps companies improve their financial health.

I have been fortunate to meet several entrepreneurs in my career. However meeting three successful ones recently and discussing how they developed their respective businesses, made me conclude that they have similar traits that make them successful.

Here are my conclusions on the 3 key traits it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

Ability to identify an opportunity

All three entrepreneurs I described above had identified an opportunity and set up a business to take advantage of it.

Two of them were co-founders working in an industry where they saw an opportunity to resolve a big problem by providing the willingness and tenacity to bring together some disparate people and issues. They started with little capital and over a decade later have created a multi million pound business and are now looking to expand with the help of external capital.

The third entrepreneur went into a completely new sector of which he had no experience by buying an existing small business and changing the offering by adding value to charge much higher prices. It overtook the competition and over nearly two decades has turned into a multi million pound company.

In both these examples, they identified what would work and be able to earn money and had no previous experience of owning and running a business!

Risk taking

Having identified the opportunities described above, the entrepreneurs raised capital by investing their saving and in one case pretty much selling everything they owned including the family home!

Risk taking is not for the faint hearted but the risks these entrepreneurs took were well-considered ones, which they trusted to earn them back their capital.

Taking such well-considered risks are always necessary to build a successful business but at the end of the day there is no guarantee of success.

Determination

Some call it passion or drive but determination to succeed probably covers all these terms. None of the businesses I described above were easy to establish and through hard work over several years, have grown to become multi million pound businesses.

This determination enables the entrepreneur to overcome the obstacles in their way and always work for the long-term success of their business.

There are lots of other traits described about entrepreneurs but I find that the above 3 are always present in successful entrepreneurs.

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