5 Mindblowing Facts About What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur

We all strive to be successful at what we do, especially as a new online business. Unfortunately, not everyone succeeds, and the reason why is not everyone understands the truth about success. We discuss what it takes to succeed in our free webinar training, and below we outline some mindblowing facts about what makes a successful entrepreneur:

Success is hard work

Success doesn’t always come easy, which is why Inc. says it takes a lot of work to accomplish goals and visions. Hard work is essential to improve business and to keep pushing forward even when things get tricky.

You may face your fears and start running that company, that position or that program. You will have given yourself a good start. The big question, however, is whether you have the energy and the willpower to do the work necessary to transport yourself to a successful destination.

Because let's face it, success is about completing a series of smaller tasks on a daily basis, tasks that slowly but surely lead you to accomplish your bigger goals and vision. That's why hard work is essential to your success. It will help you to show up every day, resisting daily annoyances and getting things done the right way, with no shortcuts.

You have to be willing to bravely show up every day.

Franchise Direct makes a good point that millennials often get accused of being lazy, but they’re the ones working really hard to be successful.

Millennials get a bad reputation, and are often called lazy and entitled. But the truth is: they’re the ones running America’s startups, and they’re not afraid to work 60-100 hours a week to reach their goals.

No one ever hit skyrocketing success by being cautious, and young entrepreneurs get that. They understand that they’ve got to be open to taking risks so that they can reap those sweet, sweet rewards.

Focus on the critical path

It’s easy to get distracted with life, but unless you focus and get done what you need to succeed, a business won’t amount to very much. See what else Forbes has to say about focusing:

If you ask most successful founders what the key to their success was, the answer you most often hear is focus. Sam Altman states: “Stay focused….Eliminate distractions. The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.”

Consistently identifying and focusing on the critical path is a key driver of success, or conversely if you don’t, an accelerated path to failure. Griffin adds: “The cause of a business running out of cash is often that the firm has lost focus and diverted resources to activities that are not on the critical path toward success. Cash starvation or indigestion is often a symptom of bad decisions, like premature scaling, trying to do too many things at once, or pivoting too often.”

Oftentimes, entrepreneurs conflate success with taking on a lot and moving fast. It’s easy to get sucked in when new opportunities are coming at you from all angles. Ann Winbald, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, sums it up, “It’s not about how fast you pedal, it's about how clearly you focus.” If you’re moving fast, but lose sight of the destination, it’s not going to get you anywhere. Blinders were invented for a reason.

Entrepreneurs come from all different backgrounds

Suitcase Entrepreneurs mentions a study called “The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur” which is based on a survey of 549 company founders who work in a variety of industries.

Here are the five main takeaways from the report that I found most interesting:

The average age of company founders when they started their current companies is 40.

Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds.

70% were married when they launched their first business.

60% had at least one child when they launched their first business (and 44% had two or more children).

The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.

If you’ve been letting self-limiting ideas hold you back from starting your own business or hitting your existing one out of the park, consider aligning yourself with a mentor, business partner, or other women entrepreneurs who are going after the same thing that you want.

I’ve personally found that doing this is a very powerful in maintaining my forward momentum.

They aren’t afraid of getting out there and doing it

An author on Forbes discusses various opinions of entrepreneurs and how they don’t waste time; they make up their minds to start a company and be successful.

The hardest part of any venture is starting. As Griffin writes, “Lots of people talk a good game about wanting to leave a big company for a startup, but when the time comes, most don’t do it.” The trick: just start. Once you set things in motion and you’ve already committed, there’s nowhere else to go but forward. Mark Suster, an entrepreneur and investor, echoes the sentiment: “You can read lots of books or blogs about being an entrepreneur, but the truth is you’ll really only learn when you get out there and do it….Entrepreneurs don’t ‘noodle’; they ‘do.’”

Medium The Startup also discusses how successful entrepreneurs are far from passive. They aren’t afraid to go after what they want!

Every successful entrepreneur knows that if something has to be done, it needs to be done by themselves. Parameters are set by them, and they ensure that the projects are following that path. They do not wait for someone to permit them and are highly proactive.

Being passionate about your business

The Balance Small Business reveals that it's more than just talent; it's also all about passion. Without being passionate about your business, it's hard to make it succeed. Passion needs to be the driving force behind success. 

Looking at other successful entrepreneurs, like Richard Branson or Steve Jobs, I think the main qualities that made them so successful among their competition are their incredible drive to succeed, their passion for their business and their personalities.

A successful entrepreneur starts with a great idea. Although, that isn’t always the case. Socialable might have been more ground-breaking in its beginnings, but the rest of the world caught on quickly to the social media boom and soon there were so many social media marketing agencies and blogs popping up that it seemed almost impossible to stand out among them. I still somehow managed to make Socialable a respectable social media marketing agency and blog and couldn’t be prouder of my success and Socialable’s. That is why I think people should not be discouraged by the fact that their business idea is not exactly original. It might be harder then if you were one of the few that offered the same services or sold the same product, but a truly ingenious entrepreneur can still dominate his or her niche no matter when they throw their hat in the pool.

Another important quality behind a successful entrepreneur is passion: the passion to work hard and the passion for your product or service. And passion leads to another important quality – drive. A person that is truly passionate about their idea will want more than anything to see it become successful and they will find the drive to see it through to the top. If you love what you do, you will do a better job and people will be able to sense it, and this, in my opinion, is something that works for everyone, not just entrepreneurs.

One of the ‘uglier’ sides of entrepreneurship is that it is, to be honest, really hard work. Really really hard work. Being the boss and feeling like your business is your brainchild can be very time-consuming and at times, very frustrating. Getting a business all the way up to the top by yourself requires a lot of your attention and that means working 18-hour days at times and you’ll often be faced with moments where nothing seems worth the effort. Being a successful entrepreneur requires so much hard work that it can drive you crazy sometimes – in the end, you will need to be strong both physically and mentally in order to be able to handle it all. I’m sure every successful entrepreneur has thought about quitting and moving to Tibet at some point in their careers, but the fact they were able to overcome that is what got them so far. And as any working mother will know juggling children and running a business makes it that much harder!

These facts tell us how much work it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, but you can make it happen. To learn how to make it happen, join us for our next free webinar training. You have the potential to develop a successful and profitable business!

Sources: Inc., Suitcase Entrepreneurs, Franchise Direct, Forbes, Medium The Startup