What attribute Makes an Entrepreneur

The Making of an Entreprenuer 

1. Tenacity – the most important attribute of an entrepreneur is never being willing to give up.

2. Street Smarts – getting out and understanding customers is far more important than book smarts or computer research.

3. Ability to Pivot – it’s not good enough to be tenacious and smart.  You also need to be sure you have a great product/market fit and that it is a big enough market to make money.  The best entrepreneurs fine tune their product and their business model until they find this groove.

4. Resiliency – being an entrepreneur is sexy … for those who haven’t done it.  In reality it’s gritty, tough work where you will be filled with self doubt.  Entrepreneurs are survivors.

5. Inspiration – Tenacity + street smarts is not enough without inspiration.  You need to lead teams and convince others to move mountains when by all means they shouldn’t believe they can.

6. Perspiration – We all know people who can stand up at a conference and deliver a rousing speech or who sound awesome in front of customers.  But it takes more than inspiration to build a successful business.  It takes perspiration also.

7. Willingness to Accept Risk – I’m not talking about crazy risks, but entrepreneurs are people who are willing to start a business on a leap of faith.  They don’t wait on the sidelines forever doing “side projects” until the day when they’re ready to start a company.  If you aren’t willing to take a shot by going full time on your startup it tells investors you aren’t confident enough in the idea or in yourself.

8. Attention to Detail – If you’re going to lead an early stage business you need to be on top of all your details.  You need to know your financial model.  You need to be involved in the product design.  You need to have a details grasp of your sales pipeline.  You need to be hand on.

9. Competitiveness – The best entrepreneurs hate losing.  Whether in person life or business they play to win.  It consumes them.  Sharing the market is not enough – they want to win every deal, hire every great employee and sign-up every partner.  And they want to do it at the expense of the competition.  As Leo Durocher famously said, “nice guys finish last.”

10. Decisiveness / Gets Things Done – Entrepreneurs don’t “noodle,” they “do.”  This is what separates entrepreneurs from big company executives, consultants and investors.  Everybody else has the luxury of “analysis” and Monday-morning quarterbacking.  Entrepreneurs are faced with a deluge of daily decisions – much of it minutiae.  All of it requiring decisions and action.

11. Domain Experience – Domain experience is not an absolute requirement.  In fact, some people would argue that the uber successful ventures come from people outside the industry willing to challenge the conventional wisdom.  But I believe that having domain experience and relationships gives you an unfair advantage.  Better that you start with this than from scratch.

12. Integrity – I believe that integrity and honesty are very important to most venture capital investors.  Unfortunately, I don’t believe that they are required to make a lot of money.  This post talks about my views on this attribute.

Do you think we have more? Leave your comment

Dealing with Business Limitations in Africa

In the Continent of Africa businesses deal with limitations that are out of their control, example, some taxes and levies from international market don’t let Africa businesses to trade in internationally. In this blog we shall be discussing some internal and external deficit limiting Africa business to trade in International market.

1.       Mental Limitation/Deficit: Mental deficit implies, most Africa businesses don’t have the thinking mechanism to extend beyond. The way to overcome mental deficit/limitation is by reading and exposure. Except you have a credible point of reference, the way things function from your natural world.

2.       Trust Deficit/Limitation: Research has shown that in a society where trust is low, businesses remain small, it’s difficult to build businesses when trust is low, where trust is high it is possible to build large businesses, one of the fundamental reason Africa can’t build large businesses is lack of trust. Africa need a relationship trust strategy, Africa need to buy trust, every large scale business person has a network of people there can call and without any resistance get those people to do huge favour for them because there are trusted. Every big businessman should have a trust network they can call on when in need. It takes time to build such relationship, building a circle of influence and friends takes time, it means you have not disappointed them for the last 20yrs. So therefore they can trust you when in need. Trust in critical in business, you have to be ethical, you have to make a lot of sacrifice, you have to invest in long term benefit, not short term benefit, don’t take advantage of relationship, don’t start asking favour from people after meeting them for one week, one month, one year, you start asking for favour after you have met them for a minimum of ten years when they trust you, that’s when you start drawing from the bank of trust, when you start drawing from the bank of trust too early, you won’t get anything to withdraw when you are in critical time.

3.       Skill and Competency Deficit: Africa is getting better in skill, but it still has a massive skill deficit, some of the reasons skill deficit is a challenge is because of: (1) Nepotism:  Africans tend to promote and recommend people not qualify because we are related to them in some way, Africans bring people not competent enough to run their businesses just because of their relationship status. Because of the skill deficit most business don’t have the credibility of how money is handle, how the business is run, when your approach banks for loan/fund its difficult to get approval, that becomes a serious enabling factor.

4.       Resources Deficit: Africa has resources limitations in both human and financial, borrowing money/obtaining a loan in Africa is tedious, difficult and extremely expensive, for example in Zambabwe, if you are borrowing money, it is recommended that money is borrowed short-term because of high interest rate which is at 33-34%.

5.       Relationship Deficit: Africa businesses don’t have people that can recommend them, and open doors and make way on a handshake, and that’s quite challenging, if someone can recommended you, that facilitate a process to get you through faster and quickly. When you don’t have recommendation its makes it difficult to scale through.