The 10 P’s of entrepreneurship

Passion, persistence and perspective are just some of the attributes that can make an entrepreneur successful. After our post about the 10 Ds, we came up with words beginning with a P, to describe personality traits, that every businessman should have. Read on if you’d like to know why we picked these terms, or if you are interested in the stories, and examples we collected in connection with the 10 P’s of entrepreneurship.

What makes a business successful? What kind of attributes does an entrepreneur need to have to be able to build a prosperous company?

There are many articles written on this topic. You are very likely to find almost as many posts about the habits of influential CEOs, as famous artists.  But these won’t answer your questions. The founders of a multi-million dollar startup worked only four hours a day while others woke up at 4 A.M. and finished their daily tasks twelve hours later.

As you can see from our previous post on this topic, behavioural attributes can’t separate people who are suitable for entrepreneurship, from the ones who are not. It’s the desire to achieve great things, and the will to control fate, that makes someone fit for this job.

Of course ambition and the ability to work independently in itself is not enough to build a successful company.  There are a lot of other personality traits, that could raise the chances of success  for entrepreneurs. These can be described in many ways, but for this post, we decided to pick 10 simple terms, begging with a P.

Bellow, you can find an explanation for each of them, and where it felt suitable, we also added some examples. These were words we came up with:

PASSION

The most important P of all.  Without abounding passion for the dream or enterprise, all is wasted.  Enthusiasm comes from Passion.

Richard Brenson the founder of Virgin Group, believes that passion is one of  strongest predictors of success, because if you are passionate about something the force of your convictions will  spark other people’s interest and motivate them to help you achieve your goals.

PERSISTENCE

The ability to bounce back from setbacks.  Serial entrepreneurs continue to persist in their sequencing of their efforts.

Persistence is essential for startup founders because they might not see intent traction and success and often have to far longer for the results than expected. Slava Runin the founder of Indiegogo was rejected more than 90 times by venture capitalists You can read more about his story and the importance of persistence for entrepreneurs in this article on Mashable.  

PERFORMANCE

High performance is usually a measure of the entrepreneur’s own internal drive. In order to be successful, they have to keep up the highest standards throughout their endeavours.  Sometimes money is also performance measure, but in itself not a prime motivator for successful entrepreneurs.

PERCEPTIVE

Entrepreneurs are seers. They look under rocks for opportunities. They have a healthy regard for the future and the trends that will make that future. You can find business opportunities, where you least expect them to be. In this article Dorie Clark describes how a trip to a little-travelled region along Italy’s Adriatic coast helped him find new business ideas.

POSSIBILITIES

The Reverends Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller built followings on the concept of possibility thinking. ” The glass is half full”- could have been their motto.  

Being positive is crucial if you want to motivate others, and create a successful company.

PLEASURE

At the end of most well thought out, entrepreneurial endeavors are some form of reward. This hard work must be worth something. Entrepreneurs seem to be striving for some psychic as well as material pleasure at the end of their run.

PARTICIPATION

Entrepreneurs are basically team players. They may look like dictators, but their leadership styles are for the most part consultative and even collegial. Buy in from the team is highly important!

Even the most groundbreaking ideas are useless without a team to execute them. As an entrepreneur, you have to find people that you can trust and create a team that is able to share your enthusiasm for your projects. You can find a large collection of tips in this post, on creating effective small business teams.

POWER

This central locus of control may be considered as a power issue.  Entrepreneurs respect and delegate power when indicated, but usually reserve final decisions and their consequences for themselves.

PERSPECTIVE

Entrepreneurs have wide-ranging and broad views of their environment.  As a group, they are well read and well versed in a varied subject field. Their radars always on, and they are always looking for changes and opportunities.

POINTED

Focus on what needs to be done is a common denominator of entrepreneurial lifestyle. Others see this as narrow thinking when in reality it is the ability to think ahead and be goal oriented.

Working hard on stuff that doesn’t matter won’t help you reach your goal. A successful startup must focus on the market from Day One, and define a pain area where their solution will help customers writes Forbes contributor David Roth. You can find his post about the importance of focus here.

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These were the 10Ps we collected. What do you think? Have we found the most important one? Would you add something to the list? Let me know, your take on the most important attributes of entrepreneurship.

I’m happy to offer you a free consultation on it.