What is an entrepreneur and what are their characteristics?

If you are thinking of joining the group of globally rising entrepreneurs and starting your own business, you must first be clear about what an entrepreneur is and what characteristics you must promote to be successful.

What is an entrepreneur?

An entrepreneur is not only the person who creates a company but one who envisions a business opportunity and decides to take advantage of it by starting an activity on its own. Entrepreneurship is an attitude, a way of being and thinking that is reflected in business.

More broadly we can define the entrepreneurial initiative as “the propensity to induce changes in oneself, the ability to accept and support innovation caused by external factors, to welcome change, to take responsibility for one’s own actions (be they positive or negative), to finish what is started, to know in which direction it is going, to establish objectives and fulfill them and to have the necessary motivation for success”.

The seven characteristics of the entrepreneur

1. Passion

“If you’re passionate about something and work hard, you’ll end up being successful,” said Pierre Omidyar, the founder, and president of eBay. An entrepreneur firmly believes in his idea and is willing to invest time and resources to make it a reality. Without that passion, you will not have enough energy to face all the problems that will arise along the way, and you will lose motivation.

1. Future vision

An entrepreneur is able to glimpse the future, thanks to which he is one step ahead of the competition. They are people who see opportunities where others only notice problems. At some point, they realized that something could be done better and they glimpsed how the market would welcome their idea. When Jeff Bezos created Amazon, for example, he knew how to glimpse the potential of the Internet and made decisions based on his vision of “a company more focused on the consumer,” without being influenced by the opinions of Wall Street.

1. Creativity

One of the main characteristics of the entrepreneur is his ability to innovate, create or engineer. Recent companies usually have very limited resources, so you have to use them in an original way to get the most out of them. The entrepreneur not only uses his creativity to devise new products but also to extract the juice from the resources he has at his disposal, making more efficient management that allows him to go further.

1. Perseverance

Thomas Alva Edison, the man who patented more than a thousand inventions throughout his life, said that “ genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration “, meaning that the brightest idea will not come to fruition without hard work. A business is not built overnight, you have to deal with many obstacles, so the entrepreneur must be persistent in his goal.

1. Open Mentality

Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world, but few know that his first company called Traf-O-Data, whose objective was to process and analyze data, was practically a failure. However, that experience served as a springboard to create Microsoft. An entrepreneur must always be open to change and new ideas. Even if you have a business plan, you should have enough flexibility to change the focus if it is not working and look for new solutions.

1. Take risk

Starting a business already involves taking a risk. Therefore, it is not strange that in 47.4% of cases the fear of failure is the main barrier to start in the USA. In this regard, Robert Kiyosaki, an entrepreneur, and investor wrote: “anyone is able to see a risk, an entrepreneur sees the reward.” One of the characteristics of the entrepreneur is precise that they are not afraid of risks; they take them as opportunities, not as problems.

1. Curiosity

An entrepreneur is interested in everything that happens, is a curious person. Curiosity not only allows you to stay open to new opportunities and experiences but encourages you to seek them actively. During the search, discover new sources of inspiration that can be translated into original products or solutions to address the problems of the company. Curiosity is what keeps the entrepreneur innovating and what will keep the company afloat.