What does a successful business owner look like?

Starting up and running your own business is hard. There are certain attributes you need to have that will help you succeed:

You have passion for what you do

You have to love what it is you offer/what you bring to your clients or customers.

Without this, it’s hard to get off the ground and, more importantly, keep going. With it – it’s easy for others to see it because you light up when you talk about your business and how you help others. And it draws people in. If you’re just in it for the money – people will see through it.

You have tenacity and resilience

There are many, many ups and downs when you run your own business. You need to be able to pick yourself up and dust yourself down and keep going when things have gone wrong. And things do go wrong. As Winston Churchill said:

‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm’

But please note, if you keep making the repeating the same mistakes, you will get the same result. You need to learn from the failures/mistakes and move on.

Not only tenacity and resilience – but it also helps to have bucket loads of optimism – that unswerving belief that you will crack it. Think Del Boy Trotter (but with more structure and constructive thinking perhaps!).

Great communications skills

If you enjoy speaking in public and you find it easy to talk to new people, or can communicate from the customers' perspective this is going to be very helpful.

The flip side of this, and arguably, more importantly, is your ability to listen. To your customers, your prospective customers, your suppliers, your staff. You learn far more by listening.

Selling doesn't faze you

This is a biggie! You will need to spend at least 50% of your time selling so it’s really important that you are comfortable with the selling process. At the scariest end of the spectrum this could be making cold calls. It really helps if you have a thickish skin and rejection doesn’t send you gibbering into a dark corner. 

The general rule is you need to make 70 contacts to get 10 conversations to get two sales. It is a numbers game and can be very daunting. (70 contacts doesn't necessarily mean 70 cold calls by the way - more that it can take seven approaches to someone before they will trust you enough to want to talk to you).

Had I truly understood how much selling was involved, I may well not have started on the journey!

You are comfortable taking risks

Entrepreneurship involves uncertainty. Do you enjoy the thrill of taking calculated risks or do you avoid uncertainty in life at all costs? If you answered yes to the latter, then starting your own business may not be for you.

You can’t be immobilised by the fear of ‘what to do for the best’ or waiting until something is perfect before you launch. So you need to be able to occasionally take a leap of faith and make decisions that you don't have the perfect information for. Sometimes they work, and sometimes, they don't (see Winston Churchill quote above!)

You have a support system

This is so important. One of the biggest issues business owners have is the feeling they are alone. So not only do your family and friends need to be in your corner – being part of a group of like-minded business owners is vital. They know what you’re going through and can cheer your successes with you and feel your pain and support you when it goes less well.

Join a mastermind group, or set up your own support group and meet regularly to keep on target and not feel alone.

You have self-discipline and you're an action taker

You need to be self-motivated (or be motivated by someone else who provides that foot in the back for you – this works brilliantly for me). Otherwise nothing will get done. You’ll be too easily distracted by things that don’t matter or divert you off the path off success.

And you need to take action. Polishing something to perfection before you release it into the world will hold you back.

‘Perfection is the enemy of progress’

Another great Winston Churchill quote.

Good enough really is good enough. JFDI as I like to say.

You are multi-skilled

You are now the head of sales, marketing, finance, operations, HR and chief bottle washer! There are lots of things you have to get to grips with.

Perhaps multi-skilled is wrong but you do need to understand all the moving parts of a business and how they work together.

If you don’t – get some skills. Take a course, read some books, get someone to help you. For example, just because money and finances frighten you, isn’t a good enough reason to ignore them. And if you'd rather bury your head in the sand than look at your numbers perhaps running a business isn’t right for you.

If you'd like to know more about what makes a successful business owner – check out my guide that gives the inside scoop on what it really takes to run your own business.

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