Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Many startups struggle with convincing larger companies about the values of innovative, new ideas. To some extent, we also face similar problems.

My company, SpringTab, helps website owners collect information about the preferences of their visitors and personalize their content according to the gathered data. Although personalization is not an entirely new concept and it is quite popular among professional marketers, it could still get very difficult to persuade decision-makers at larger, hierarchical organizations about the benefits of our methods.

I believe that this is at least partly due to the fact that innovation is not necessarily in their best interest. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why managers at huge corporations are not more open to experimenting — even though they have the budget — to try new approaches.

These are the main reasons that I’ve come up with:

Organizational structure

At hierarchical organizations, communication flows from the top to the bottom. This traditional company structure discourages innovation and makes effective collaboration among co-workers almost impossible.

I believe Aaron Ross’s Predictable Revenue is a great concept that can help generate quality leads for your business. To a certain level, we apply these sales principles. But with hierarchical organizations, they don’t always work.

We always try to reach out to C-level people who could give us a referral to the right person at the company. And if it’s a larger corporation, more often than not what happens next is that the person we were directed to either delegates the tasks further down or doesn’t have the authority to make a decision.

I’ve talked with at least a dozen potential customers who saw the value in our product, but couldn’t help us make a sale due to an outdated organizational structure.

Fear

Innovation is risky, and mid-level managers wouldn’t want to risk their comfortable 9-to-5 jobs, especially if they could get by without trying anything new.

There’s no danger if you don’t make decisions

No one wants to take responsibility for business plans that have uncertain outcomes, and at larger corporations it’s easier to avoid making decisions.

Skill deficit

In rapidly evolving fields, such as online marketing, new techniques turn up at a much faster rate than in more traditional industries. But you have to be up to date to appreciate the advantages they could bring, and the need to educate your prospect could slow down any sales process.

Insufficient experimentation

It could take a lot of testing to figure out how a new approach could affect your bottom line and find which is the most effective way to implement the changes. Many companies are willing to finish their testing if the early results are not entirely positive, even though a more thorough process would bring a different outcome.

Lack of trust in outside consultants

Many companies, because of security reasons, avoid discussing company matters with outside consultants. As the saying goes, two heads are better than one, and this practice of distrust could be extremely damaging if a company faces a problem it can’t handle well on its own.

Centralization

Even when managers are open to new approaches, an overly centralized decision-making process could make it impossible for them to implement changes.

For example, if you need approval from the center to develop new features for a local website, and decision-makers are unreachable or not willing to pay attention to cultural differences, not much is going to happen.

Mission statement is not based on reality

What companies do and say are two different things. Managers at seemingly innovative firms might also face structural problems that could block innovation. And a great mission statement is not going to change anything if it doesn’t affect the day-to-day operation.

Focusing only on efficiency

As the Harvard Business Review points out, once a business figures out how to solve its customers’ problems, organizational structures and processes emerge to guide the company toward efficient operation.

This means that the company is going to focus on doing what it already does a bit cheaper and faster, instead of experimenting with transformational growth products.

Short-term thinking

I’ve heard many times that the company needs to overcome some difficulties before it could experiment with something new. The problem is that the house will always be on fire. And if an organization is only focusing on its current affairs and delays experimentation because of them, it will miss the chance to find something that could turn things around. Sooner or later the company will have a very serious problem: an outdated product.

Larger corporations can make great clients, but for the reasons I’ve listed, they are very hard to obtain. Some of the dedicated managers working at these firms are well aware of the dangers in short-term thinking and other structural problems I’ve written about. Finding them might give you a chance to convince a larger corporation about trying out a new approach, against all odds.

So, what do you think? Did you face similar problems? How do you try to convince managers working at hierarchical organizations about the advantages of your product?

Conrad Egusa is the CEO of Publicize, an innovative public relations company specialized in start-ups, and a guest contributor to TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and The Next Web. Earlier he co-founded Espacio, an incubator located in the heart of Medellin.

He is also a global mentor at 500 start-ups, The Founder Institute, ANDI (Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia), and the Spanish accelerator Zarpamos.

I had a chance to talk to him at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna about his unique approach to PR, and the advice he gives to start-ups trying to get featured in tech publications.

What do you advise to start-ups looking for guest blogging opportunities? How can they get the attention of major publications?

A mistake I see people make is that they write to TechCrunch and ask if they could write a guest article. It will not work, because the editors are busy, they don’t have time to respond, and they don’t know whether you’re a good writer or not. They receive hundreds of similar emails every day.

What I recommend is when you first contact them, introduce yourself and have the article written already. So when you send to them, you could say something like, I have an article below, it’s not self-promotional, it hasn’t been published elsewhere, could it be considered?

And if you send three or four good articles to a publication, in many cases they will ask you to write as a guest contributor.

I also believe it’s important to never use self-promotion and to give value in your articles, or at conferences…

Yes, you should absolutely avoid promoting yourself that way. If you send an article to editors about what your company does, they wouldn’t accept that.

Let’s say you have a start-up with great software for accounting. What you could say is, here is like three or four pieces of advice about how you as a start-up founder can be better at accounting. Or what we think the accounting and finance industry is going to be heading in the next two to three years.

So by doing that, you’re not directly self-promoting yourself, but at the same time, you’re positioning yourself as a thought leader for accounting. You could do that as well for SpringTab,* and actually any company could do that for their own industry.

And I think increasingly you are going to see more publications like TechCrunch or Forbes say, hey, like if you author an article like that, that adds value like you mentioned, and it’s in your space, we’re happy to publish it. I’ve done this myself I’ve seen friends and companies do this, and it is a very high returning investment

How did you get started? How did you do get your foot in the door? 

So, my path came really from start-ups. I raised funding in Northern California for my first company. Then I remember, I was in New York and I met this person named Matt Marshall, who is the founder of VentureBeat, and he said he was looking for writers, and it kind of got me on my path.

I think the biggest thing, the key to writing that I learned is rewriting. So I think a mistake a lot of people make is that they have the first draft, and they expect it to be perfect. But the reality is the first draft usually is just not. So if you like mentally go in your head like, well, you’re going to need five to 10 drafts to perfect an article, it just really helps.

Each publication has its own kind of style of writing as well that people should follow, but I think it can even help as modeling. So even if you just take an exact article and try to do a similar one based on that template on a different subject, it will help.

There’s a lot of strong writers who, like for example, submit an article to TechCrunch, and they are not going to accept it just because it doesn’t fit their style. So it’s important to try to match the style as well.

A lot of great start-ups get good local feedback and make some money, but at the same time, they struggle with reaching the next level. If a company like this had an office hour with Publicize, what would you recommend to them? What should they ask themselves? What is the most important thing to focus on?

I think the biggest thing is to amplify the message. For example, one of the companies that I’ve co-founded is a co-working space start-up.

Co-working spaces are really boring businesses. They rent an office in a building and charge slightly higher prices based on the square footage. There are hundreds around the world, so no one cares about them, right?

With this company, we got into TechCrunch, BBC, Financial Times, and all these others. And the reason why was that the mission that we pushed for wasn’t a co-working space. The mission was to turn our city into the Silicon Valley of South America.

An early-stage start-up usually isn’t that interesting because it probably doesn’t have that many features. But where you want to take it in three to five years could be interesting.

So when you are about to go to sleep, or you’re going to the gym and you’re daydreaming, you’re like, in four years SpringTab is going to have 500 employees and it is going to be taking the world, right? And whatever vision you see there, that’s what you should highlight to these big media publications.

Like, say hey, this is where we are today, but what’s really important is the steps you planned. You need to ask yourself, how is your venture going to change the world, how it’s going to look like when it’s a 100-million-dollar company.

Where you are today is less relevant for big publications, but where you want to head is something that they might want to cover.

Let’s talk about Hungary. We have three or four larger companies that lead by example, and we have like 40 or 50 other start-ups which are doing OK. It’s somewhat similar to Austria. If you had to write about an ecosystem like this, how would you put it to be interesting?  OK

I think what’s important to keep in mind is that every disadvantage is a potential advantage. It’s literally really like chess. The question is, how do you want to play it?

Hungary’s ecosystem isn’t like the Silicon Valley’s. On one hand that’s a disadvantage, but on the other hand, the fact that it’s small and growing shows that it has a lot more room to grow and a lot more potential. The reality is people don’t really want to write about Silicon Valley because everyone’s already written about it.

But a new ecosystem like Hungary, that’s exciting. That doesn’t exist yet. So by framing it a different way, you can create a story. Also, there are a couple of events that trigger interest. So as an example, the Netherlands, when I wrote about their ecosystem just got appointed someone from the government who is responsible for integration with start-ups.

That recently happened in Austria as well. There is a moment when you can see more news around an ecosystem because something has happened and maybe even more stuff will happen. So I think for Hungary, they can think about that as well. I would just look at all these storylines you can include.

* SpringTab is a start-up that I founded. It helps companies understand their audience on a deeper level and personalize their content according to the personal preferences of their visitors.

During our meeting, I also asked Conrad Egusa about website personalization and the importance of social data. I posted this part of the interview on SpringTab’s blog. Click here if you’d like to read it.

Today more and more graduates are seeking opportunities at companies where there are possibilities to contribute, grow, and being responsible for actions every day. Recent grads struggle with finding work that suits their needs in the labor market, therefore young people – even juveniles – show a tendency to begin with building ventures. Lots of people think that only entrepreneurship is solely the key to professional freedom and self-realization, which obviously has many benefits compared to being an employee. But are young people ready to take a job that comes with being a business professional, especially if you only have few work experiences? Is entrepreneurship the only way to be financially successful?

What to do after graduation?

There is lot of crap out there on the internet about entrepreneurship… Many people talk, make videos, do podcasts or webcasts, write blogs on the topic that triggers youngsters to choose the same path, to build the next big hit, and be on the cover of every business magazine. The question is, are people really capable of doing such a thing especially straight outta college?

Gary Vaynerchuk described pretty well the miscommunication of today’s success among younger generations. The idealization of entrepreneurship (building the next Uber and Airbnb) made everybody believe that being a company owner is the only way. The thing is, not everybody is born an entrepreneur. Period. Not everybody can be Steve Jobs. Period. There is just a fraction of people in this world capable of building Facebook, Google and Pied Piper. Most of us would make an exceptional second, third or fourth member of a developing organization, but we don’t want that because it is not sexy enough.

Think about the $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn that happened a few months back. Even latecomers, those who had 0.1 percent stake at the company are multimillionaires and have nothing to worry about financially for the rest of their lives. Do we know their names? Hell no. Are they rich? Huh… Instead of self-hopings and self-projections, we need to practice self-auditing to identify what is the right path for us.

Is entrepreneurship the right path for success-driven people?

Many people try the other way and join a company with high potential. Once I had a pretty engaging conversation about entrepreneurship with a fellow here in Hungary. He is the director of sales and business Development at a software company that does pretty well in Europe. Before coming to Budapest, he was building start-ups and small ventures in Romania, and had two successful exits by age 22. So I was wondering why he did not proceed with building his next thing and being his own boss.

The response was quite revealing to me. As he said, there is always going to be a boss, the form is just different whether it is your investor, customer, or partner. He embarks on a journey with a promising organization and helps the company achieve success than struggling with building something out of thin air. As he said, he is an intrapreneur. Intra what? A person who helps building things WITHIN a company, and exchanging his special skillset usually for a lot of money. He was making $5,000 per month, when the average salary in the country is $700. Most entrepreneur wannabes earn half or less of that.

Intrapreneurship might be one choice for self-starters

One of the biggest differences between entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship is the company culture you are working in. As a business owner, you have the privilege to shape your own company culture, design it the way you want, hire the people you would love to work with. Also, you have the chance to decide where you prefer to work from, which is a big advantage compared to the life of employees. As an intrapreneur you join a pre-existing work culture in which personally you do not have that much of an influence; there is only possibility to adapt to that specific environment.

For reshaping existing organizational cultures, you have to spend a long time at a certain place to gain trust before you can carry out changes. No matter which path you pursue, you need to feel comfortable with the environment you work in. It can be a restaurant, a retail store, a loft office, or a corporate office, think about what place suits you best. If it is hard to find something you want, you might have to think about creating a culture on your own, and shape it the way you want it to. Here is a hint how to do that.

But which path is right for me?

Perks and benefits of both:

• Responsibilities

Being a business owner can be super frustrating because it puts a hell of a lot of burden on your shoulders. Hiring people, hustling your way up, and talking to other serious business owners might sound appealing, but on the other hand you need to buy the toner for the printer, and the last pen for your office to make it operate. At least in the very beginning, and only if you want it to function properly. Though as an intrapreneur, because you are a specialist, you only focus on your special task and make that work at best. It does not mean specialists do not have other responsibilities than their field, but relatively much less than entrepreneurs. You need to analyze how much responsibility you are willing/can take within an organization and if you are experienced enough to multitask with myriads of different responsibilities. Can you fulfill your duties, manage your employees, delegate tasks properly to your team members at the same time? Or do you just want to stick to the sexy things? If the latter, you better be an intrapreneur.

• Risks and Benefits

Both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs face special kinds of risks, but what comes with the risks essentially differ. Business owners need to accept the financial hazard and uncertainty, however the potential growth and revenue projections can help fade that. While an entrepreneur earns more money (in case of a profitable business) and struggles with all difficulties of running a company, an intrapreneur has a pretty stable life with a healthy paycheck and other benefits. Intrapreneurs, however, need to deliver results by the time agreed upon, otherwise they are very likely having an unstable professional life as well.

• Incentives

Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are equally motivated by leaving a mark in the history of the company. If you are looking to create something big, achieving a lifelong dream and earning millions of dollars, entrepreneurship might be a fit for you. Whereas if you prefer stable paychecks, work-life balance and trying out yourself at different places intrapreneurship is worth considering.

Entrepreneurship Journey: The right path

On one hand, making up your mind to become a business owner can be super rewarding with lots of perks and publicity, where you can have a firm control over most things and form your own organizational culture. Though, as an intrapreneur you can challenge yourself at different places for stable paychecks and utilize company resources for innovation. Many world-changing products were born as a result of intrapreneurial efforts such as the Mac, iPod, Gmail, Google Maps, PlayStation, etc.

Despite these intrapreneurial people, the mentioned products would have never been invented if it had not been for entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin and Larry Page. All talented people were required for that success. Whatever choice you make when you begin pursuing your professional career, keep the things mentioned above in mind, and think what you as a person are capable of.

Have you ever thought about handling your organization as a marriage? If we just consider that ideally, a marriage is an agreement between two people, sharing common values and helping each other for common goals. When they fail, they both fail and when they succeed, it’s a shared success they achieved together.

But let’s get back to the early stage of a relationship and see some correlations between a team and private relationships.

Matchmaking and so on

When you hire someone, it’s like looking for someone on an internet dating website. You are searching for someone with certain expectations in mind, and it is the same in the other way around. The potential employee has some kind of idea about you and working at your organization. If you have the same positive intuition toward each other, you match.

When you make a match, it’s like going on an interview. It is the point when the picture starts to shape up. However, everything comes to the surface when you start “dating”, meaning the beginning of your collaboration. You form a team and slowly start getting to know more about each other.

In time, your relationship evolves into a “marriage”. In a team, you will have individual marriages, but then you have the whole team in your marriage. It will not be only a strong collaboration of two persons, it will be of your whole team. And then you start thinking, Wait a second, even one marriage is enough, why on earth would I think of multiple marriages at my workplace?

The answer is easy: It’s all about engagement for common values. You and your team’s fates are linked. If you fail, they fail too. And this must be understood; you are all in the same boat rowing in the same direction. Sometimes we tend to forget this, even in a marriage.

Factors of contentment

Based on the best practices I collected, here are the most important building blocks of a good marriage. See if you agree with applying them to your own team at work.

BE COMMITTED. Commitment to is the core of your relationship in the team, just as it is in a traditional marriage: “for better or worse; for richer or poorer; in sickness and in health; to love, to honor, and to cherish until death do us part”. So when it comes to team members, what you have to see is solid engagement to you and your collaboration.

TRUST. Trust defines the relationship from the beginning. A marriage could not work without it in a healthy way; trust is a baseline of the relationship. There is no perspective of the collaboration without trust either. The lack of trust only brings negative feelings toward the business.

TALK. Communication isn’t important only for progressing at work, but also for team members to tell their fears, frustrations, or share an experience. Communicating these things brings people closer, strengthens the team, and gives more perspective for the business in the long term. Otherwise, just as it would happen in a marriage, if you go silent in communication, you slowly become estranged from each other. You can even end up in divorce. This obviously shouldn’t happen in your organization.

COORDINATE. Coordination in a marriage is necessary and is all about figuring out how you will do your every day. Here I mean division of tasks that use everyone’s talent and abilities, but in a way where your efforts are actually coordinated. For example, a couple decides to redo the floor in the kitchen on their own. They work as a team and go through every stage of getting the new floor; they remove the old tiles and lay down the new ones together. They won’t compete with each other, or let one do the all the work. When working on a project, satisfactory completion is possible if all your team members add full support according to their skills and capacity.

PAY ATTENTION. Attention to the others is also a fundamental factor in a marriage. Without consideration, it is all about selfishness and individuals who will not lead anywhere in the long term; selfish players always set back a team.

DREAM. The clarity of vision is as important in a team as it is in a marriage. If you have dreams and plans, you know which direction you are heading, you will not get lost during your busy working days. Until you have goals to accomplish, you will be on the right track. They are motivational and always remind us what we are striving for.

To compare a marriage to a start-up is not a bad idea since the relationships are founded on the same values in both situations. Ideally, you work for something that is equally important to everyone in the team, because it also benefits all. The willingness to help and actively participate in sorting out a problem together is another factor. It is also crucial that you are respectful toward the others, and accept their strengths and weaknesses.

You create the culture

Team culture is created by each member of the team itself – by consistently and actively delivering value at work. It might also mean that in the early stage of the start-up, the culture of the business is the leader himself. And later on when it comes to the engagement in “marriages”, the individuals will work together where the key word is “we”. And this “we” feeling will make the organization strong, successful, and your team more in sync.

So I think these ideas might be great starting points of your business. If you always keep these in mind, you will see that work will become enjoyable not only for you but for your whole team. After all, this is what we all strive to.

Rand Fishkin is one of the most influential people in the SEO industry. He is the founder of Moz, the leading marketing software company in this field.

The revenue of his firm grew from $800 thousand to $29 million over six years, and the number of annual visitors to their site increased from 1 million to 36 million in this period. At the Business of Software Conference Europe, he talked about the things he wishes he had done differently during his career and the decisions that he wouldn’t change.

I had a chance to ask him about content marketing and the creation of tools like the Open Site Explorer after his speech at the conference in Dublin.

On the stage, you said that you hate all the products and all the tools and that you hate yours a little bit less…

I’m just an incredibly picky person when it comes to products, particularly in the space of web marketing tools. So, I shouldn’t say I hate everything. Occasionally I find tools that have some particular function that I really like.

I was tweeting last week about postreach.co, which I thought to do a great job at twitter URL sharing and analytics. But I think it does pay actually as an entrepreneur to be very picky about products and to have a very high bar for what you think is acceptable.

What do you expect from your tools as a product manager and product designer? Do you agree with Gaudi, who said that whatever he does, it’s never finished?

It’s never finished, it’s never good enough, there is always something else and something more.

One of the things that I do as a product designer is to surround myself with people who do their individual elements of the product design. Experts in experience design, data architects who put together the information that powers the product, front and back end engineers, people who can help with the integration, conversion rate optimization and marketing specialists and so on.

I try to find people who are better at each of those than I am. And then my job is essentially just be a critic. To go and take a look at each one and say that’s good, here’s how it could be better. Or that’s good, but not good enough. Or that’s not even good, which I say a lot of the time.

But before I let something launch I really like it to be not just good enough but impressive.

Steve Jobs always talked about the little big details and he micromanaged a lot of processes. What do you think about that?

I think this is one of the reasons that I like doing product management, and work as an individual contributor rather than a CEO.

I think as CEO you shouldn’t be a micromanager. It doesn’t make sense. Steve Jobs is an exception to this rule, and you have to be a very optimistic person to think that you’re the next Steve Jobs. You’ve got to have a really high opinion of yourself.

I don’t have that high of an opinion of myself. I would say that when I concentrate and focus on one particular product or a project like the URL explorer, I can do a decent job of being that critic. But I don’t think I could micromanage as a CEO.

You said that you’d like to hire fewer people but only the best ones. Many people told me that they rather do, for example, what Real Madrid did. They look for talented 10-year-old kids, train them, and then a few of them will become superstars.

I like Real Madrid’s approach but I only like it at a later stage. Early stage, when you’re starting a new club, you better get those incredibly talented folks. You can’t play professional soccer against Real Madrid or Barcelona or AC Milan with 10-year-olds. You’re never going to win a game this way. No one is going to cheer for you. You won’t get any fans.

You need these phenomenal players to help accelerate your new club, and then you can build a training program. So today, I think it’s great that MOZ hires a lot of junior people, who we think are smart and talented and can become the star players over time. And if some of them don’t live up to their potentials, that’s ok. We’re 215 people.

When there are only five people at your firm, forget about it.

What advice would you give to your younger self? How would you build up a company in today’s crowded market?

I like spaces that are not as overly crowded with venture-backed companies, where investors don’t like to put money for some reason or another. Maybe there’s a huge entrenched player that is totally market dominant and no one thinks that anyone could take them on. Maybe there’s a sector that people just don’t like for one reason or another. They have an aversion to it, they think it’s tacky or spammy or manipulative or doesn’t have long term potential. I like those fields and I would probably choose something like that.

I don’t think there is a specific process that will help you find your field. But you can stumble upon it almost by accident, just by keeping yourself open to the world. If you look for these little markers in things that you know you like, then these things sort of come together.

When you do find your field, how can you convince five players to join you, if you have nothing and you’re just getting started?

I think one the great things that content marketing does for you is that it doesn’t just build up your audience for your future product. It also builds up your potential to reach employees or even co-founders.

It’s one of the things that Moz did kind of nicely for me. Back in the day, seomoz.org kind of built up its reputation, so a lot of folks knew who we were and some of them were potentially interested when we put out a job.

So actually, I like content marketing even from an employer standpoint.

Shifting to content marketing – we do content marketing and we spend a lot of time on research and outreach. Do you have any special advice in connection with them?

There are two things that I really like to do whenever I create content. I try to ask myself two questions. One is “how am I creating unique value”, meaning value that’s different than any of the other content on this topic.

Am I providing a unique data set that no one else has access to because I got my own research or I’ve crawled data on the web or I’ve found an API? Have I created a visual that explains everything in one very easy to digest graphic that has that high virality potential? Have I found people, a company or a founder or something else that nobody else has gotten access to?

If I don’t have that unique value I can write a really long and really great blog post but it won’t go anywhere.

The second thing that I ask is “who is going to help me amplify this piece and why”. Do I have a list of 10 people who are super passionate about my topic? If I don’t have that list of people who I’m confident will help me amplify it, I don’t make it.

You talk about creating content that creates unique value as passionately as you talk about your products.

It’s similar right? You want to get to that exceptional, viable product.

How do you find people who can help to amplify your content?

I don’t necessarily look for the biggest influencers in the field, that doesn’t bother me too much. I look for someone who I know is passionate about the topic, or someone who has specifically asked about it.

So, for example, if I see someone who has asked a question like “Oh, I wish there were a tool, or a post…” Great! Now I can make that post and then I can ping them and say,”Hey, you know that thing you wanted, I made that, here it is”.

I like that better than sort of reaching out and saying, “hey, I mentioned you here”. I get a lot of those all the time and I ignore them.

Do you know of any great tools that can help you find people who are asking stuff?

Twitter search is pretty solid for that and Google is not actually bad for it. On Medium, you can do searches on that and it works pretty well, too.

I think that another thing that a lot of smart folks do is to identify ten or twelve websites where there’s a conversation going on. That could be like old school forums, or it could be a Google+ community. Google+ is a very, very niche social network nowadays.

It could also be folks who are having those conversations on podcasts or webinars or whatever. They identify where those conversations are taking place and pay attention to those until they see something coming out of it.

Rather than proactively creating content they reactively create content, based on what they see is going on in an industry or in a forum.

Reactively creating content – it feels like instead of push marketing you pull people in.

Yes. Like I know three people who talked about this topic recently and I know that they are all interested in it and then I make that; I just do the thing that they want.

Successful businessmen have common personality traits. Studying these attributes will help you decide if you could be one of them.

Do I have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? Will I succeed if a start a business of my own? Am I strong, or determined enough to risk my hard earned savings?

Most entrepreneurs probably asked themselves questions like these, before they founded their first company. Of course, no amount of self-examination can tell you whether you will succeed on a career path, or not, estimating your chances properly could help to avoid failures.

The problem is, finding the right questions to ask yourself could be as hard as answering them objectively.

Most people dream of becoming their own boss, but the majority of them will never fulfil this dream. And the ones who finally set up their own a company does it for significantly different reasons. A decision like this could be inspired by a great idea as well as a termination letter.

The personality traits that make somebody successful in entrepreneurship may also differ from industry to industry. After all, it’s hard to imagine that a person who runs a successful accounting firm is also a perfect manager for an art gallery.

With that said, successful entrepreneurs have common characteristics, and if you happen to possess similar personality traits to them, there is a higher chance of success, when you decide to choose the riskier path.

What are the 10 Ds of entrepreneurship?

There are plenty of articles about the attributes of successful businessmen. One of the most influential studies on this field is written by William D. Bygrave.

In his book The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship Bygrave describes the events that made him and other economy professors define the most important personal attributes with simple terms.

In the 80s, many magazines published articles based on behavioral studies, with self-evaluation exercises to help readers decide, whether they should enterprise.

Later, more researchers looked into the problem and found that these tests were useless since there is no set of behavioural attributes that could separate entrepreneurs from nonentrepreneurs. They also came up with two personality traits you need to have if you want to start a successful business.

One of them is the desire to achieve great things, which is not very surprising, given that a bit of ambition could help you in almost any professions. The other one is more characteristic of the entrepreneurs. It is a will to control your own fate.

Bygrave described these and other important personality traits from the findings using ten words beginning with D. These definitions provide a great starting point if you’d like to create your own “competency test”.

Of course not every successful entrepreneur possess all the Ds, and the rate how characteristic these words are will defer from person to person. But if the following descriptions are familiar to you, or you could imagine yourself operating the portrayed way, there’s a good chance, that entrepreneurship will be suitable for you.

The definitions of Bygrave may also inspire you to find focus and develop new, and more productive habits if you are already running a business. For further inspiration we have collected a few blog posts and videos in connection with the expressions. You can find these, and Bygrave’s 10 Ds of entrepreneurship bellow:

Dream

Entrepreneurs have a vision of what the future could be like for them and their businesses. And, more important, they have the ability to implement their dreams.

Recomended posts, and videos:

– When a Disney executive turned to Steve Jobs for advice on revitalizing the company’s stores he answered with two words: “Dream bigger“. In this article on Forbes.com the author shares his thoughts on how to do that exactly.

– Easy-to-believe myths may ensure that your dream projects will never come to fruition. You can learn more about those, from the TED talk of a Brazilian entrepreneur Bel Pesce.

Decisiveness

They don’t procrastinate. They make decisions swiftly. Their swiftness is a key factor in their success.

Recomended post:

We published a longer post earlier on how to avoid procrastination, become decisive, and manage your time better with productivity hacks. You can read if here.

Doers

Once they decide on a course of action, they implement it as quickly as possible.

Recomended post:

Being a dreamer and a doer at the same time is not an easy thing to achieve. These tips on Entreprenour.com could help you balance your attributes.

Determination

They implement their ventures with total commitment. They seldom give up, even when confronted by obstacles that seem insurmountable.

Recomended post:

Gallup has published a series of article on the talents of successful entrepreneurs. The one we recommend is also about determination.

Dedication

They are totally dedicated to their businesses, sometimes at considerable cost to their relationships with friends and families. They work tirelessly. Twelve-hour days, and seven-day work weeks are not uncommon when an entrepreneur is striving to get a business off the ground.

Elizabeth Gilbert the author of ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ was working as a waitress for six years, while trying to find a publisher. Her TED Talk teaches important lessons about dedication.  

Devotion

Entrepreneurs love what they do. It is that love that sustains them when the going gets tough. And it is love of their product or service that makes them so effective at selling it.

Details

It is said that the devil resides in the details. That is never more true than in starting and growing a business. The entrepreneur must be on top of the critical details.

Destiny

They want to be in charge of their own destiny rather than dependent on an employer.

Dollars

Getting rich is not the prime motivator of entrepreneurs. Money is more a measure of success. They assume that if they are successful they will be rewarded.

Distribute

Entrepreneurs distribute the ownership of their businesses with key employees who are critical to the success of the business.