4 Traits of Extremely Successful Entrepreneurs

According to Johan Norberg’s book, Progress, 94 percent of the world was living in extreme poverty in 1820. By 1950, the number was 72 percent; by 2015, it was 9.6 percent.

That’s a decline of nearly 90 percent. While other factors may be at play, capitalism has certainly helped. 

Once we became aware of its power, we commissioned a study, between 2013 and 2015, of successful entrepreneurs to look at the impact of capitalism and the propellants of business success. We did so with the goal of sharing the results with other business owners to help them grow their companies.

Out of this survey of 1,100 entrepreneurs, four key activities stood out as being most responsible for helping founder-led companies grow:

1. They keep the endgame in mind

The most successful entrepreneurs spend more time understanding the power of the capital markets than other, less successful, entrepreneurs.

Private equity, corporate mergers and acquisition departments, venture capital and debt providers: These are the main sources of investment in America’s growing businesses. A lot of entrepreneurs think they only need to pay attention to the “money people” when they get an offer for their companies.

Not so. The entrepreneurs who had the most success scaling – and eventually exiting – their businesses were the ones who became students of the capital markets, understanding what’s important to them and the trends in that sector.

2. They’re willing to change

The most successful entrepreneurs are the ones who undertake some form of “financial model transformation” while they run their businesses.

An example of this is Jim McCann, founder of 800-Flowers. Jim started his business with a bunch of retail flower shops but evolved the business into a global e-commerce gifting platform over the years.

He could have stuck with the flower shop and indeed 800-Flowers still sells flowers. But the underlying business model is entirely different from the brick-and-mortar one he started with, which made the company way more valuable. 

Extremely successful entrepreneurs evolve their financial models as technology evolves to create a more efficient, more valuable business.

3. They make themselves redundant

They remove themselves from the sales process of their companies. While it’s true that many entrepreneurs are also great salespeople, it’s also true that being your company’s best salesperson naturally puts a cap on the business’ revenue potential as well as its enterprise value.

Professionalizing sales and leveraging all available sales technologies to expand the impact of your sales activity is essential to creating a modernized revenue program. 

4. They know how to ruthlessly prioritize

Finally, creating a genuinely scalable management team-building process was the last vital activity of extremely successful entrepreneurs. That means starting with you: Do you know what you’re best at?

And does your job description match that? More importantly, does your job description keep you from doing things you’re not good at? Doing more of what you’re good at and less of what you’re bad at is the key to unlocking your productivity.

Cascading this approach down to your entire management team is the next step. The best entrepreneurs make sure that everyone on their team is judged not by their loyalty, but by their ability to perform. Essential to that is making sure everyone is in the right role. 

Once we understood that these four behaviors – mastering the capital markets, evolving your financial model to keep up with technology, developing a professionalized, tech-driven, sales program and creating a management culture based on performance, not loyalty – were the keys to entrepreneurial success, we knew we could help entrepreneurs scale. 

I’m sure you’ve thought about these four behaviors before, most successful business owners have. But many CEOs haven’t taken the step of redefining their job around them.

Everyone is so busy dealing with today’s “to do” lists that they rarely have time to grow their knowledge base and rethink how they add value to our businesses. 

When each of us chose to become entrepreneurs, historical economic research tells us that we also became foot soldiers in the fight against global poverty, whether we knew that or not.

Entrepreneurial companies are the core of the American economy and the American economy is the most vital economy in the world.

Rethinking how you add value as the leader of your company is more than just a way to create personal gain, it’s also a way to help change the planet for the better.

Source: Incafrica.com