Did you know August 21st is the day dedicated to celebrating entrepreneurs? The purpose of the World Entrepreneurs’ Day is to create awareness for entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership throughout the world. It is also the perfect day to celebrate those who venture to start their own business.
In fact, it is no secret that to become an entrepreneur you need a good amount of grit and passion as the hours are long, sacrifices are great and you are assaulted with new problems and challenges every day, since you have to consider every aspect of the business. With that said, an entrepreneurial career is both risky and amazingly rewarding, here’s five traits and skills we think are necessary to launch a startup.
Traits and skills of successful entrepreneurs
- Knows their weaknesses and builds their team around that. Successful projects are better done in a team, but nothing can be worse than choosing the wrong team as it ultimately leads to a startup’s fall. Knowing which skills you lack, allows you to look for them in other people and fill the gap, but also don’t forget to consider the passion of each team member. A highly skilled but lowly passionated team member will be a risk when things get difficult.
- Highly motivated individuals. When launching a startup it may take a while to see results, and it is a time when a lot of work will need to be done. It is key then, that you and your team have a reserve of internal motivation as it may be hard if you are relying on external feedback only, and it may cause you to quit too soon.
- Adaptability Change of plans? Do you need to redo an entire project? A successful entrepreneur will shake off any inconveniencies and start from scratch without getting into a huge rut. In fact, many entrepreneurs will tell you that their businesses turned out much differently from what they had originally envisioned. They’ll also likely tell you that they wouldn’t want their business to have turned out any other way.
- Eager to Learn No one knows everything. A new business doesn’t often have staff in every department due to lack of funding. It takes time and resources to build a team. That means entrepreneurs need to learn everything from accounting to marketing from the get-go.
- Ability to network and persuasiveness. Any successful entrepreneur will tell you what a key role their network played into launching the business. A mutual connection might introduce you to an investor, a person with the skill set you were in need of and so on. You might also have to look for those connections: this is where persuasiveness might come in handy, when asking for help, pitching to investors and more.
The road to entrepreneurship may be tricky, that’s why at RBS, to support all of our students with a dream of starting their own business, we have created the RBS4Entrepreneurship program, covering from A to Z on the startup world: tools and methodologies to build your pitch and your business model, opportunities to connect with your new co-founders and chances to meet other successful entrepreneurs to learn from.
You can also learn more about our Masters here
