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What Does It Take to Be a Successful Entrepreneur?

• 09 Jul 2020

The world is filled with aspiring entrepreneurs—people who believe they have what it takes to launch a company and build it into a profitable business. While anyone can start a business, not everyone will succeed.

Research by Harvard Business School Professor Shikhar Ghosh shows that up to 75 percent of startups fail. According to Zippia , 22 percent of small businesses fail within one year of being launched, half fail within five years, and approximately two-thirds fail within 10 years.

In light of these statistics, the question becomes: What does it take to be a successful entrepreneur ? What steps can aspiring entrepreneurs take to lay the groundwork for success?

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What Is an Entrepreneur?

An entrepreneur is someone who launches a business venture, typically in the form of a company that manufactures and sells a product or provides a service. Entrepreneurs are often viewed as innovators who identify a problem or opportunity, then develop a solution no one else has recognized.

In the online course Entrepreneurship Essentials , it’s noted that “entrepreneurs—either individuals or teams—actively scan the environment for opportunities, or discover them as they live and work. They form hypotheses about what customers want or need and how they can deliver value to the customer.”

Successful entrepreneurs don’t just charge ahead with their ideas. First, they seek to validate there’s demand.

One way they do so is through testing. According to Entrepreneurship Essentials , entrepreneurs “recruit people and invest money to determine if customers will indeed value the product and they can produce and deliver it at an acceptable cost. They often find different, even better ideas once in the marketplace.”

Check out the video below to learn more about what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

Entrepreneurship Requirements

Do you have dreams of one day becoming an entrepreneur and launching your own company? In addition to a business idea, doing so will require you to possess certain skills and characteristics .

1. Key Entrepreneurship Qualities and Behaviors

Several researchers have tried to pinpoint a specific entrepreneurial personality or profile in an attempt to quantify what makes some more successful than others.

In Entrepreneurship Essentials , it’s explained that there’s no single personality profile that leads someone to success as an entrepreneur. However, there are a number of characteristics shared by some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.

Some behaviors that are distinct from personality traits and associated with entrepreneurship include curiosity, pattern recognition, team building, structured experimentation, adaptation, decisiveness, and persistence.

While it can be argued that some people are more inclined to exhibit these behaviors than others, each of these qualities can be acquired through proper training and development .

2. Essential Entrepreneurial Skills

Especially in the earliest stages of launching a business, entrepreneurs are responsible for performing a variety of duties—it comes with the territory. Before you have an accounting department, marketing staff, and product development team, you'll likely need to perform some of these critical responsibilities.

Taking the time to develop certain skills before launching your business can drastically improve your chances of success. Here’s a list of some of the most critical skills all entrepreneurs should have:

• Communication skills , which you’ll leverage daily as you work with vendors, investors, customers, and various members of your growing team
• Organizational skills , which will empower you to work toward your goals efficiently
• Time management skills , which will be essential throughout your career, but especially early on, when you have multiple responsibilities
• Data-driven decision-making , which will enable you to make objective, measurable decisions about your products, services, business, and customers
• Strategic thinking , which will allow you to discover opportunities and threats that guide business decisions more easily
• Accounting basics , which will be especially important before you have a person or team dedicated to managing your business’s finances
• Resilience , because every entrepreneur faces challenges and struggles, and it takes resilience to bounce back

3. An Opportunity or Business Idea

For a new venture to succeed, the business plan must be centered around a solid opportunity. In Entrepreneurship Essentials , an opportunity is defined as a proposed venture to sell a product or service for which customers are willing to pay more than the required investments and operating costs.

An opportunity is more than a product idea, and it extends well beyond the initial act of getting into business. According to Entrepreneurship Essentials, “it’s a plan that shows how a venture will attract, retain, and reward all stakeholders, including customers, founders, employees, investors, distributors, and suppliers.”

That plan doesn’t end once you’ve identified an innovative business idea . Ideally, your concept should be validated before you commit resources, time, and effort to bring it to life. Once validated and pursued, you must constantly reevaluate your business to determine whether you need to adapt to new opportunities or threats.

4. Resources and Funding

Finally, to launch your business, you’ll need a source of funding to purchase equipment and materials, develop your product or service, iterate upon your offerings, and refine your processes. Exactly what funding looks like will vary depending on the type of business you’re launching and your industry.

For some entrepreneurs, self-funding is possible. In such cases, an entrepreneur might set aside enough money to pay for their living expenses while they get their business off the ground, in addition to the costs associated with the launch.

Self-funding isn’t the only option available. There are many other paths you might take, such as:

• Securing an SBA loan from the Small Business Administration
• Raising capital from investors
• Applying for grants (this may be especially suitable for nonprofit organizations)
• Crowdfunding from the public
• Relying on a line of credit

Every form of funding comes with benefits and risks. Self-funding, for example, allows you to retain complete control over your business and potential profits, but also requires you to carry the risk of failure. Raising capital from investors, on the other hand, allows you to spread your risk and, potentially, launch your business quicker—but it forces you to give up a portion of your control. Ultimately, you must decide what makes the most sense for your business.

Your Path to Becoming an Entrepreneur

Countless aspiring entrepreneurs have an interesting, innovative, and compelling business idea, but don’t have the skills or qualities to carry it through to fruition. Similarly, many others have the skills and qualities, but lack an idea to pursue. Even those with a brilliant idea and the necessary skills can fail to get their project off the ground if they don’t have access to funding. Successful entrepreneurship requires a blend of all these components.

The good news is: Successful entrepreneurs aren’t born—they’re made. With the right training , instruction, and development, everyone has the potential to become an entrepreneur.

Are you interested in learning the ins and outs of entrepreneurship? Explore our four-week online course Entrepreneurship Essentials and our other entrepreneurship and innovation courses to learn to speak the language of the startup world. If you aren't sure which course is the right fit, download our free course flowchart to determine which best aligns with your goals.

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So You Want to Be an Entrepreneur?

• Emily Heyward

One founder’s advice on what you should know before you quit your day job.

Starting a business is not easy, and scaling it is even harder. You may think you’re sitting on a completely original idea, but chances are the same cultural forces that led you to your business plan are also influencing someone else. That doesn’t mean you should give up, or that you should rush to market before you’re ready. It’s not about who’s first, it’s about who does it best, and best these days is the business that delivers the most value to the consumer. Consumers have more power and choice than ever before, and they’re going to choose and stick with the companies who are clearly on their side. How will you make their lives easier, more pleasant, more meaningful? How will you go out of your way for them at every turn? When considering your competitive advantage, start with the needs of the people you’re ultimately there to serve. If you have a genuine connection to your idea, and you’re solving a real problem in a way that adds more value to people’s lives, you’re well on your way.

When I graduated from college in 2001, I didn’t have a single friend whose plan was to start his or her own business. Med school, law school, finance, consulting: these were the coveted jobs, the clear paths laid out before us. I took a job in advertising, which was seen as much more rebellious than the reality. I worked in advertising for a few years, and learned an incredible amount about how brands get built and communicated. But I grew restless and bored, tasked with coming up with new campaigns for old and broken products that lacked relevance, unable to influence the products themselves. During that time, I was lucky to have an amazing boss who explained a simple principle that fundamentally altered my path. What she told me was that stress is not about how much you have on your plate; it’s about how much control you have over the outcomes. Suddenly I realized why every Sunday night I was overcome with a feeling of dread. It wasn’t because I had too much going on at work. It was because I had too little power to effect change.

• EH Emily Heyward is the author of Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One (Portfolio; June 9, 2020). She is the co-founder and chief brand officer at Red Antler, a full-service brand company based in Brooklyn. Emily was named among the Most Important Entrepreneurs of the Decade by Inc.  magazine, and has also been recognized as a Top Female Founder by Inc. and one of Entrepreneur’s Most Powerful Women of 2019.

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• DOI: 10.3390/educsci14090983
• Corpus ID: 272547446

Entrepreneurial Intentions: Entrepreneurship Education Programs, Cognitive Motivational Factors of Planned Behavior, and Business Incubation Centers

• Temoor Anjum , Julián Andrés Díaz Tautiva , +1 author Petra Heidler
• Published in Education sciences 5 September 2024
• Business, Education, Psychology

77 References

Influences of university education support on entrepreneurship orientation and entrepreneurship intention: application of theory of planned behavior, entrepreneurial intentions among business students: the mediating role of attitude and the moderating role of university support, does entrepreneurship education influence entrepreneurial intention among students in hei’s, entrepreneurship education, academic major, and university students’ social entrepreneurial intention: the perspective of planned behavior theory, exploring entrepreneurial readiness of youth and startup success components: entrepreneurship training as a moderator, entrepreneurial intention among latin american university students, antecedents and boundary conditions of entrepreneurial intentions: perspective of theory of planned behaviour, the role of entrepreneurial passion in the formation of students’ entrepreneurial intentions, the role of internship and business incubation programs in forming entrepreneurial intentions: an empirical analysis from pakistan, entrepreneurial intentions, related papers.

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