The Traits Of Successful Entrepreneurs That Will Make Your Startup Take Off

Your business will always be a direct mirror of your inner world.

It’s a mirror that doesn’t care about the version that looks good in interviews, but the version of you that still flinches when you open your mouth to ask for what you’re worth.

Your business will always have your exact shape. All of your strengths will be apparent… and your weaknesses will be like dents in your startup.

If you’ve ever felt that developing your business feels more like developing yourself and your own inner self, that’s why.

I believe that success starts with a pen, paper, and the ability to look within – not with an epic startup idea.

In this article, I’ll help you develop those traits of successful entrepreneurs that you must cultivate over the next few years if you want to be successful.

Make sure to read it cautiously and think about how this article applies to you. Don’t just read it for entertainment, okay?

Why Flexibility is Essential: Adapting to Startup Dynamics

A small startup, at the very beginning of its development, is a stage with a high degree of uncertainty. Your project might become an ordinary, decent project that will bring in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Or maybe… it might earn you millions of dollars in a few years. Who knows?

Or it might become a project that drains your money and time for several years, leaving you unhappy because you got involved in it. You might continue hoping and hoping, but nothing may happen for years.

These three scenarios are all possible, and you need to think about them at this early stage (fingers crossed for the second though).

Right now, your startup is like your baby. All the actions you take, any changes you make in their life, have a very large effect. They multiply greatly in the future and can have a significant impact on the future development of that person.

Where you will be with this business in a year or two will be a completely different situation.

It will be a different you.

You will think differently, you will have different scales of money and time, you will have different limitations, a different situation, different stress, different risks, and you will make decisions differently.

Hopefully, in a better way.

You need to understand that it won’t be easy; it will most likely be very difficult. Therefore, the importance of the decisions you make now could theoretically cost you millions of dollars or several years of your life and effort.

Don’t thank me; I’m merely sharing experiences I’ve seen myself.

But I hope these considerations and this experience can somehow help you and allow you to achieve your goals without losing millions of dollars or several years of your life.

Also, companies evolve from one crisis to another, and each crisis demands changes in structure and leadership style. If you just started your business, it probably runs hot and fluid, where your involvement is incredibly important.

But as your company evolves, your structure must also evolve to support its increased scale in complexity. That’s where you’ll have to learn to delegate and create systemized processes.

Are you ready to adapt and even change some of your traits for your business to evolve into a big healthy baby success?

The Importance of Imagination for Entrepreneurs

Another idea that I find very interesting is that one of the most important traits of an entrepreneur is imagination.

A person with a vivid imagination can easily envision different situations and how they and others will act in those situations.

This gives them a significant competitive advantage over others.

If you can imagine various scenarios, both positive and negative, you can definitely prepare for them, at least hypothetically, by playing out these scenarios in your head much better.

I’m not saying you should be overly pessimistic or optimistic, by the way. However, you have to be able to prepare for all eventualities.

And you can’t do that without imagination.

This doesn’t guarantee you success, but it does guarantee a higher likelihood of making successful decisions in the future.

Let me give you a VERY basic example of imagination, just so you can picture what I mean (or shall I say imagine?)

Let’s say you’re on a sales call, and you close a deal. You nail the discovery process, you lay out your amazing offer, and the prospect agrees to your outrageous price.

Hell yeah.

You ask, “Sweet. Can you send me your email so I can send you the invoice?”

“No, I can’t pay invoices”, “I live in Turkmenistan (or whatever the hell), and we don’t do invoices there. Can I pay through PayPal or Bitcoin?”

You would have to be prepared for ALL eventualities to handle that situation properly.

I don’t care how the client wants to pay. If they’re Turkmenistani and they can only pay through an exchange of 72 goats, I will accept that payment.

Basically, you need imagination to prepare for every scenario 😉.

Take another (more serious) example…

When you’re starting a business or startup, it is crucial to be prepared to delegate tasks from the very beginning.

You must be ready to delegate tasks to others and stop doing everything yourself. A business implies growth and expansion, which means you won’t be able to handle all tasks on your own as you do now.

And to delegate properly, you need imagination. You have to be able to imagine what your team will do. Otherwise, you can’t really tell them what to do, can you?

I had some imagination some time ago, and I came up with the 8D Framework to support you on your entrepreneurship journey.

It’s a free step-by-step guide to help you launch your startup from start to finish. Whenever you feel confused about your business, just refer back to the framework, and you’ll get instant clarity.

(and it won’t even charge you a GOAT for it. Completely goat-free).

Risk Tolerance: Embracing Failure and Losses

Of course, another important quality of an entrepreneur is the willingness to take risks.

The readiness to go through failures, to lose something.

It’s like with investments, like being an investor. You cannot become a good investor in the stock market if you are not ready for losses. If you take even minimal losses in money or time very painfully, you will not be able to think clearly and continue doing something.

This can only be learned through your own experience, most likely.

Listen, you also have to be willing to work for free sometimes.

Very often, agreements between co-founders imply that one of the co-founders simply works for free on some project for several months.

In fact, this is also normal. It all depends heavily on priorities, and for different people, money has different meanings.

But if you are talking about a project worth millions of dollars, counting thousands of dollars and carefully tracking your time in thousands of dollars often becomes inappropriate.

Your co-founders, partners, or investors might perceive this as a negative signal that you are too petty, too meticulous, and too scrupulously counting relatively small amounts of money for them.

I have been in these situations myself.

I had to work for several months, almost a year, for free, without a salary, without any return, simply for a share in the project that represented much larger money than all my salary for those several months.

It’s not very pleasant to do, but you have to be ready for it.

Big earnings always imply big risks. As a co-founder, you are obliged to take these risks. This is your role, this is your destiny in this project.

In the open market, there are no large earnings, several hundred or several thousand percent returns without taking risks.

So be ready to lose money or time, getting nothing in return and demanding nothing for it right now.

If you or your co-founder are not ready to take such risks, you should reconsider your relationship.

4 More Vital Virtues Of Startup Founders: Some Might Shock You

Obviously, there are tons of traits of successful entrepreneurs, but I don’t need to write a whole section for each and every one of them.

It actually might be easier to have some of them in a checklist, so you can easily see what you have and what you still need to build:

• Laziness: You have to simplify things. To do things faster. To delegate and go sip cocktails in the Bahamas.
• Curiosity: The key to growth and development is the drive to see and try new opportunities. In psychology, this trait is called “Openness to experience”. If you’re not extremely open-minded and curious about your field, is it really the business for you?
• Dependence on the opinion of others: You can’t possibly know everything. If you want to grow and scale, you’ll have to hire experts and mentors. The right talent is often the highest ROI activity you can make for your business.
• The desire to understand what other people want: If you couldn’t care less about people, their needs, and their emotions – I don’t know how you’ll succeed. The more you understand your market and target audience, the more you can impact them with your solution. Aaaaand the more cash you can make.
• Passion for entrepreneurship: You can’t even begin to imagine how much your life can improve by building a successful business. But it’s not for everyone, you know? It can get really hard… and it most definitely WILL at times. You really need to want the life of the leader. You can’t just want the outcomes, you need to want the whole life. The problems as well, since you’ll be dealing with those all day, every day.

You Gotta Value Money: Liquidity and Risk in Early-Stage Startups

Another key principle is the value of money.

Money is a highly liquid asset. In fact, it’s the most liquid asset.

The founder, who invests money, is investing the most liquid asset. This is something that is valued equally by everyone in the market.

If a founder invests money in a project, I believe that their share for this money, especially in the early stages of the project when it is not yet generating any profit, is very high.

This is because they are investing the most liquid thing possible into the project.

Expertise or time as an employee is also valuable, of course, but it does not have the same level of liquidity as money.

A co-founder who invests money is taking a significant risk because they are investing the most liquid asset that can exist in the economy.

You also shouldn’t have negative and ‘evil’ beliefs about money if you want to attract it. Money is never evil, the person can be.

Poverty won’t be solved by you staying poor instead of working on your business. You can do incredible things with more money and freedom, and it’s okay to chase that.

Permit yourself to value money.

Takeaways

As I said in the beginning, success starts with introspection. It’s becoming the version of you that has the success that will bring it.

Right now, if you’re not where you want to be financially, it’s most likely because you don’t have the traits of the version of you that DOES make the money. Here are some of his/her traits:

• Flexibility: You need to be able to adapt to different scenarios and outcomes. Companies evolve from one crisis to another and you’ll have to change your leadership style and structure multiple times in your business journey.
• Imagination: If you can’t imagine both good and bad scenarios, you won’t be able to adapt. Take a very simple example: What are all the ways that a client could potentially pay you? Do you have the imagination to envision that?
• Risk tolerance: The greatest teacher, failure is. I mean, if Yoda says so, you know it’s true. The outcome you can get is directly proportional to the amount of risk and discomfort you can manage.
• Laziness: Build systems and delegate.
• Curiosity: You have to be OBSESSED with your topic.
• Dependence on the opinions of others: Not dependence on everyone’s opinions, though. But if you want to grow, you’ll have to trust some experts.
• The desire to understand what other people want: You have to care about your market. People can sense when you really want to find the best possible solution for them.
• Passion for entrepreneurship: Yeah, obviously.
• Valuing money: In a startup, money is incredibly important since it’s the most liquid investment. I think it’s more valuable than time and expertise since it’s so liquid. Also, revisit your negative beliefs about money.