Important Characteristics Every Business Owner Should Have

At the core of every great businessperson, is a set of solid characteristics. There are certain traits that every entrepreneur in the world has. If you are lucky enough to have these traits, you will succeed in the world of business. Some people think that anyone can start a business and make a decent profit. That is not true. It takes a special person to undertake the epic task of starting a company. If you don’t have what it takes, you will fail in your business career. Here are some important characteristics every business owner should have.

Photo courtesy of Mish Sukharev

Motivation

As you likely know, starting a business takes a lot of hard work and dedication. If you don’t have the motivation, you will struggle to survive as a business person. You will be working many hours with little reward for the first year or two of your business. You need some motivation to drive you forwards, or you will find that you give up before you make a success of your company. If you are a lazy person who gives up easily, you will never make it. Nobody can make you work. You need to want to work.

Creativity

It’s fine having motivation, but if you have nothing to work towards, what is the point? At the heart of every new business is a fantastic idea. You need to think of something original, which will make your company unique. Otherwise, you will not stand out from the crowd. Creative people always have new ideas and can expand on the ideas of others. That means that you can see ways to improve products and services. Few people are creative by nature. Many try to come up with new ideas, but few are innovative without trying.

Charisma

When you start a business, you need people to buy into it. That means that you have to find ways to convince people of how great your company is. If you are not a charismatic person, you will find it hard to sell your company to others. When you meet business contacts or clients, you need to charm them. When people fake charm, it can seem a little sleazy. Nobody wants to work with someone who is creepy and fake. Naturally charismatic people can sell anything to anything to anyone. If, when you talk to people, you can engage with them on a meaningful level right away, you are charismatic.

Decisiveness

Do you struggle to make decisions? If you do, maybe you are not the right person to start a business. When you are running a company, you need to make a lot of key decisions. If you hesitate or take too long to make a decision, you could lose money and waste opportunities. For example, let’s say there is Manchester office space available for a limited time. You might be unsure of whether you want to open a branch of your business in Manchester. A decisive person will make a decision fast and stick to it. An indecisive person will hesitate and miss an excellent opportunity.

Compassion

If you are not compassionate, it means that you don’t understand the needs of others. Your company provides products or services to people. Whether your business is B2B or B2C, you will still be serving someone. If you fail to understand what people need from you, your business will fail too. Studies show that people with a high level of compassion suit managerial roles best. Sometimes, it is difficult to understand what people need or want. If you are perceptive, you will pick up what people are thinking and develop your business to suit them.

Practicality

Trying to do a million things in a short space of time might not be a practical decision. When people don’t approach things in a practical manner, they find it hard to cope with all the jobs they have to do. A great entrepreneur is someone who can manage their time and their workload. If you dive into projects too fast or make irrational decisions, you will find it hard to make the most of your business. In fact, you might let the work overwhelm you. If that happens, you could stress yourself out and break down.

Intelligence

Intelligence doesn’t always mean that you are academic or that you have loads of qualifications. In fact, intelligence has little to do with degrees. What makes a person intelligent is how they approach certain situations. You will need to be emotionally intelligent in that you need to understand how others feel. You will also need to be intelligent in the way that you talk to people and sell to them. Running a company is a lot like a balancing act. You need to handle loads of projects at once. If you lack intelligence, you will find that you can’t handle the workload.

Resilience

When you first start a business, you will fail at something. Failure is part of life. It doesn’t matter if you don’t succeed the first time you try to do something. What matters is that you try again. When you take a hit, you need to get back up again and start over. If you let failure hold you back, you will never make a success of your life. It takes true resilience to try again when you fail at something. Failure knocks people’s confidence. That is normal. You need to get over it and move on, though if you want to be a great business owner.

Independence

When you run a business, you can’t afford to rely on anyone except yourself. You are the master of your destiny. In other careers, you always have people above you to look after you and check that you are doing things right. When you work for yourself, you are the only person who you can trust. If you need constant reassurance from others, you will not make a great entrepreneur. You need to find ways to work on an independent level so that you can go it alone.