16 Entrepreneurial Traits To Be Developed By Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Hard Work: This involves the ability to work for long hours when necessary, to work intensely in spurts, and to cope with less than a normal amount of sleep. For instance, it requires hard work to handle the process of creating business plans for a business

Self-Confident: To succeed in life, entrepreneurs have to believe in themselves and in their ability to achieve the goals they have set for themselves.

Builds for the Future: The goal for most successful business people is to build a secure job and income for themselves which is based on their own abilities.

Profit-Oriented: Profit-oriented means recognizing that the business comes first. Once profits are generated, the entrepreneur can make decisions about how the profits can be used – to expand the enterprise.

Goal-Oriented: Sustainable success in business depends upon the ability to set realistic goals or targets for an organization and to work with determination to achieve them.

Persistent: All businesses have their problems, challenges, and disappointments. Being persistent in solving a problem is one of the keys to being a successful entrepreneur.

Copes for Failure: Coping with pitfalls involves recognizing the failures, learning from them and seeking new opportunities.

Responds to Feedback: Obtaining useful feedback and advice from colleagues, clients, suppliers et cetera is another important characteristic of entrepreneurs.

Demonstrates Initiative: Research and day-to-day observation show that successful entrepreneurs take the initiative and put themselves in positions where they are personally responsible for success or failure.

Willingness to listen: The successful entrepreneur is not an inward-looking person that never uses outside resources. Self-reliance does not exclude listening to superior advice from bank officials, accountants, and business advisers.

Setting Standards: Entrepreneurs are standards bearers. Setting standards of performance and then working hard to achieve set standards is another indicator of a successful entrepreneur. These standards can be income, quality, sales or product turnover

Copes with Uncertainty: Being an entrepreneur is much more uncertain than paid employment, where income is guaranteed. This uncertainly covers sales and turnover, material delivery, production, prices, and bank support.

Commitment: Starting and running an enterprise demands total commitment by the entrepreneur in terms of time, money, and lifestyle. It has to be a major priority in the entrepreneur’s life.

Being on Strengths: Successful business people base their work upon the strength(s) they have, such as manual skills, interpersonal skills, selling skills, organizational skills, writing skills, knowledge of a particular product or service, knowledge of people in a trade and ability to make use a network of contacts.

Reliability and Integrity: the quality of honesty, fair dealing and reliability in terms of doing what one has promised to do are essential traits of an entrepreneur.

Risk-Taker: Being an entrepreneur involves some risks. Entrepreneurs have the ability to take measured or calculated risks. Such risks involve working out the likely costs and gains, the chance of success and the belief in oneself to the risk payoff.

Key Success Factors (KSFs) In Business

Success refers to a circumstance “where preparation and opportunity meet.” Key Success Factors (KSFs) on the other hand are indicators that measure business achievements and help determine how well entrepreneurs are progressing towards actualization of set objectives (profitability, large market share, better image et cetera).

Below are five (5) essential success factors in business:

• Sell at a profit. Evaluate each and every product that you sell and determine if you are selling them profitably. If not, you may need to identify how to improve your profitability, whether by reducing your costs of production in order to sell larger quantity or increasing its price if the product is price inelastic.
• Reduce overhead costs. A lower overhead should be a continuing objective of the businesses. Therefore entrepreneur must cut down overhead cost as much as possible without reducing quality of the product
• Develop new products and maintain the old. Entrepreneurs must ensure that new products are created or chosen in response to the needs of the customers.
• Find and retain high-value customers. It is expedient that entrepreneurs exert the extra effort to ensure that they retain their top customers for them to be in business.
• Create and maintain customer satisfaction. A very important success factor needed to sustain old and new businesses is provision of the best service to the customers.

Satisfied customers are more likely to come back and tell others.

Author Bio: Sohail is a content marketer and a blogger, currently he is associated with Smiletutor.sg a private tuition agency in Singapore. His hobbies include writing, reading books, traveling and gardening.