Four Characteristics Of An Entrepreneur

Introduction:

Not everyone can become an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur requires the courage to devote your whole life to your job. One needs to organize, operate and acknowledge the risks that the business brings with it.

"An entrepreneur is one who creates a new business in the face of risk and uncertainty for the purpose of achieving profit and growth by identifying significant opportunities and assembling the necessary resources to capitalize on them.” (Scarborough, 2012, p. 20)

In order to succeed in entrepreneurship, one needs to design a competitive business plan and build a solid strategic plan, which eliminates possible competitors.

In this paper I will focus on what the characteristics of an entrepreneur are and then summarize

They need to be able to do their job with confidence that what they are doing is right. When it comes to entrepreneurship, it is a known fact that being an entrepreneur comes with risk. The risk of failure and the risk of making mistakes. This leads me to my next point.

• Risk-takers: a person cannot become an entrepreneur if they do not want to take a risk and want to remain in their “comfort” zone. They need to be able to take risks and they need to be confident in their actions.

• Confidence: an entrepreneur needs to be confident in their actions. They need to convince the people standing in front of them that they are the best and that they are unique. There is no use of being an unconfident entrepreneur, because the chances that you will be able to sell yourself are very low.

• Determination: entrepreneurship is not a formula that you use and if you apply it correctly, it will work. On the contrary, entrepreneurship requires determination because failure doesn’t mean an entrepreneur should give up. Only if a person is determined to achieve his/her goal he can

An entrepreneur needs to have an open mind to criticism and change and therefore needs to be flexible.

• Organizing: to start a start-up business, one needs to develop a business plan. This helps you set your goals, your target customers, your channels, etc. This however requires a person being organized. One cannot write a business plan without being organized. This is therefore an important characteristic.

• Innovative: everyone can start a business. Everyone can call himself or herself an “entrepreneur”. But a real entrepreneur has to have something that differentiates his product/service from the existing. This requires innovation.

• Staying down-to-earth: an aspect I recognized throughout the show “Shark Tank” is that it is important that an entrepreneur stays down-to-earth and doesn’t overestimate his or her capacities, as well as overestimate the value of his business. This is important because it shows weather or not a person is able to think realistically or not. A person can be passionate about something but has to remain a clear head on the reality around him or