The Top 10 Characteristics of the ‘Complete Entrepreneur’ (Part 2)

The Complete Entrepreneur?

Following on from last week’s blog, I want to focus on the importance of having the right entrepreneurial mind-set and, specifically, complete my examination of a model for the ‘Complete Entrepreneur’. This may be particularly apt if you are seriously considering starting up your own professional service business but are wondering if such a step really is for you. Over the next ten weeks or so, I will continue this theme drawing on key sections from my FREE Guide 01: Personal Motivation and Circumstance.

The ‘Complete Entrepreneur’ cont.

If you missed my first five characteristics, see The Top 10 Characteristics of the ‘Complete Entrepreneur’ (Part 1)

#6 Decision making tempo.
This one is critical. Building a business is about momentum. Experimenting with new service offerings. Qualifying opportunities in or out. Hiring new people. Expanding into new markets. As the person at the apex (or even as the singleton pioneer) you will need to make a raft of decisions everyday. The best leaders I worked for prior to starting out on my own had this very special quality. That of making decisions with tempo. It is so seductive to wait for more information, more data … but know this … you will never have the complete data set. Far better to make progress-enabling decisions and get them right 80% of the time than to put all your colleagues into morale-sapping stasis with protracted deferment. There is a stratagem in the military that refers to winning the battle by ‘getting inside the enemy’s decision making cycle’. The analogy carries to the commercial world in so much as you will steer your firm to the top of the market if you can ride the constantly spinning OODA (observe-orientate-decide-act loop *1) faster than your competition.

#7 Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal.
There is a very thin line between dogmatic tenacity and delusion. This quality, therefore, is not about hanging onto a dream when every new bit of information tells you it is doomed (this is a well-known psychological trap known as cognitive dissonance). It is, however, about the mental tenacity to see a way around the everyday challenge, minutiae and bureaucracy that the world can throw at you. As I was taught in the Royal Marines, in the face of whatever was thrown at us, you need to ‘improvise, adapt, overcome.’ Put another way, as my Gran used to say, ‘It takes a carpenter to build a shed but any donkey can kick one down.’ Be aware, the world is full of donkeys who revel in why something can’t be done; an entrepreneur is constantly, without tire, looking to prove them wrong.

#8 You are in business, to be in business.
This was one of the best bits of advice I got on stepping out and talks to another key attribute required – business savvy. A good entrepreneur does not ‘smoke his own dope’ in relation to getting too puffed up with the rhetoric of business. All the MBA-type analysis, business planning, product development is for nought if you aren’t actually out there trading. I meet many who love the cerebral aspect of it all, they have the shiniest service offering you have ever seen but appear to have totally lost the point that it is all fundamentally about selling a service for more than it costs you to provide it. Rather, an entrepreneur, just gets out there and does business. Be receptive to what the market wants as opposed to belligerently sticking to your original offer on the basis clients will eventually come to you. We had another expression at Moorhouse which sought to encourage us into action whenever we were starting to pontificate – ‘Stop polishing stones, start throwing some.’

#9 Courage.
Plain and simple. Of all variants. Later in this guide I will cover your attitude to business risk but you will need a well of moral courage also. Why? Well, you are about to grow a people business and leadership of such an organisation will invariably throw at you human conundrums also. You can have no idea now of the variety of issues that will come your way for resolution. All you should know is that, occasionally, situations arise that will test your integrity. When this happens, hold the line. Never, ever seek short term popularity or the easy route when you know it comes at a compromise of your values, integrity or sense of fairness. Such a position will always slowly unwind.

#10 Luck.
There is an inherent danger in seeking to nail down the attributes of a successful entrepreneur and, for completeness, I am going to call it out. You base such an analysis on your own experience, great leaders you have worked for, CEO biographies you have read etc. Many of the attributes I have listed you intuitively knew already – optimism, risk-taking, courage etc. What these studies sometimes often fail to acknowledge, however, is the ‘silent evidence’ – all the stories of those that didn’t succeed. These tales are less often written up (which is a shame because done well they can carry far more useful information than the pro forma success story). If you could access it, this ‘graveyard’ will be full of people with similar traits. So the reality could be that the only attribute of real consequence – that really separates the winners from the ‘nearly rans’ – is luck. Plain and simple. I certainly had my fair share of this – more of which later – so maybe I am also guilty of a retrospective ‘narrative fallacy’ when I list all these other factors. Maybe. I would like to believe, it is more than just luck but you will need to judge that for yourself. What I can be sure of, however, is that you will certainly need a dose of it. But then doesn’t luck come to those that are inclined to look for it!

So how did you do? Do you personally qualify for the cape and superhero underpants?

Let me reiterate again, this is a platonic ideal of the entrepreneur – he or she doesn’t exist in reality to this idealised form.

In the next blog, I will address an aspirant entrepreneur on the topic of ‘Attitude to Risk’.

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*1 The OODA Loop is a concept developed by military strategist and USAF Colonel John Boyd.