ATTRIBUTES OF AN ENTREPRENEUR

There’s nothing better than working for yourself, having your own business, and being in charge of your own destiny. However, not everyone has the right mindset or the right personality to be a successful entrepreneur. The truth is that most people who have tried to start their own business have failed.


Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? You might if you possess these five key attributes shared by the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.
1. They're Innovative


You have to be able to differentiate yourself somehow from all of the others on the market if you want to be a successful entrepreneur. You can do this in many different ways. You can offer a new product or a new variation on an existing product. You can build up an iconic brand or offer a unique customer service experience. Whatever it is you choose to do, though, you need to find some way to set yourself apart and attract customers to your business if you want to be a success.
2. They Aren’t Afraid to Take a Chance


Starting a business is a risky endeavor since there is always a chance that your business will fail. Not only that, but you may have to take many risks over the course of growing your business, expanding into new markets, investing capital, and hiring new employees. If you hesitate or if you are afraid to jump in with both feet, you will never be able to grow your business or to make your business a success.
3. They're Willing to Work Hard


When you are operating your own business, your success or failure is 100 percent dependent upon you. You will need to work very hard, especially in the beginning, to get your business off the ground. Even once your business is established, you can’t let yourself fall behind or stop putting your all into it. This means being prepared to work at least as hard as you would if you were an employee for an existing business, and likely to work much harder. As the article 1 by Purolator points out, many entrepreneurs put in 60–80 hour work weeks. Of course, if you love your business and are passionate about what you do, hopefully it won’t feel like work.
4. They Know How to Manage Money and People


An entrepreneur can have the best idea in the world but he will not be successful in business unless he knows how to make that idea profitable and how to actually run a business. This means that it is important to know the practicalities of managing a business. You’ll need to set budgets, come up with a business plan, hire employees, and motivate staff to work for you if you want your business to work.
5. They Are Passionate About What They Do


Because running a business requires hard work, you need to be very passionate about it. Your passion will be what drives your business and what allows you to connect with customers and do something important. If you aren’t excited about your ideas and about making your business a success, you aren’t going to be a successful entrepreneur.

HOW ENTREPRENEUR COME UP WITH IDEA

How does entrepreneurs come up with ideas?


This article recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal and featured ideas and quotes other entrepreneurs and investors.


At the heart of any successful business is a great idea. Some seem so simple we wonder why nobody thought of them before. Others are so revolutionary we wonder how anybody could have thought of them at all.


But those great ideas don’t come on command. And that leaves lots of would-be entrepreneurs asking the same question: How did everybody else get inspiration to strike-and how can we work the same magic?


To find out, we turned to the experts-the start-up mentors who discuss launching businesses at our Accelerators blog, as well as other investors, advisers and professors who have seen and heard countless success stories, and entrepreneurs who have written success stories of their own. They saw inspiration coming from all sorts of sources-everyday puzzles, driving passions and the subconscious mind.


Here’s what they had to say.


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Look at What’s Bugging You


Ideas for startups often begin with a problem that needs to be solved. And they don’t usually come while you’re sitting around sipping coffee and contemplating life. They tend to reveal themselves while you’re hard at work on something else.


For instance, one company of mine, earFeeder, came about because I wanted news on music I loved and found it hard to get. So I created a service that checks your computer for the music you have stored there, then feeds you news from the Internet about those bands, along with ticket deals and other things.


David Cohen

Founder and CEO, TechStars


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You’re Never Too Old


Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, Paul Allen and Bill Gates with Microsoft, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs with Apple – those success stories lead some people to think that coming up with big ideas is a young person’s game. But the tech entrepreneurs who rose to early fame and fortune are just the outliers. The typical entrepreneur is a middle-aged professional who learns about a market need and starts a company with his own savings.


Research that my team completed in 2009 determined that the average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care and aerospace is 40. Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are aged over 50 as under 25, and twice as many over 60 as under 20.


Vivek Wadhwa

Vice president of academics and innovation, Singularity University


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Be Present in Life


Start your brainstorming with problems that you are personally invested in. Building a business is hard as hell and takes the kind of relentless dedication that comes from personal passion.


The next big question is “How?” Great ideas and innovations come from executing on your idea in a different way than everybody else is attacking it, if they’re attacking it at all. A great way to do this is to look outside of your industry to see how others are solving problems. Approaches that they think are routine might be out of the ordinary for you-and inspire great ideas.


Also, most businesspeople tend to ignore our creative side until we really need it. Making sure that your life has a balance of the arts is a great way to stay engaged creatively.


This last tip will seem insanely obvious. However, in the world we live in, it’s easier said than done: Simply be present in life.


I’m sure you can relate to how overconnected we all are. Something as simple as having a cup of coffee becomes a juggling act of replying to emails and managing schedules. It’s easy to miss a potential piece to your innovation puzzle when it’s right under your nose if you aren’t there.


Angela Benton

Founder and CEO, NewME Accelerator


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Ideas Are Abundant; Drive Isn’t


Perhaps the greatest factor that determines whether or not an entrepreneur will be successful isn’t the business idea itself, but rather the entrepreneur’s willingness to try (and keep trying) to turn the idea into reality. Great ideas are abundant, but it’s what we decide to do with them that counts.


Samer Kurdi

Chairman of the global board, Entrepreneurs’ Organization


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Let Your Subconscious Do the Work


When the mind is occupied with a monotonous task, it can stimulate the subconscious into a eureka moment. That’s what happened to me. The business model for my company, ClearFit, which provides an easy way for companies to find employees and predict job fit, hatched in the back of my mind while I was driving 80 miles an hour, not thinking about work at all.


The subconscious mind runs in the background, silently affecting the outcome of many thoughts. So, take a break and smell the flowers, because while you’re out doing that, your mind may very well solve the problem that you are trying to solve or spark a solution to a problem you hadn’t considered before.


Ben Baldwin

Co-founder and CEO, ClearFit


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Attack Practical Problems


Make a note whenever you encounter a service or a customer experience that frustrates you, or wish you had a product that met your needs that you can’t find anywhere. Then ask yourself, is this a problem I could solve? And how much time and money would it take to test my idea?


That last point is crucial. As my sage Stanford professor Andy Rachleff encouraged me, “Make sure you can fail fast and cheaply.” In business school, I had a couple of big ideas. One was improving domestic airline service-which would have cost millions and taken years. I decided to pursue another opportunity that was a lot cheaper and would show results faster-a clothing line called Bonobos.


In the end, it took me just nine months and $15,000 of startup funds to get a little traction and market feedback.


Brian Spaly

Founder and CEO, Trunk Club


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Head Into the Weird Places


For entrepreneurs to stretch their brains, they should seek out the unusual.


Watch and listen to weird stuff. I enjoy watching obscure documentaries and listening to unusual podcasts. It’s thrilling to find cool ideas lurking just a few clicks away.


Walk in weird places. I take walks in hidden suburban neighborhoods, department stores, community colleges. When you’re walking with no purpose but walking, you see things in fresh ways, because you have the luxury of being in the present.


Talk to weird people. Striking up conversations with people who are different from you can be powerful. I still remember random conversations with strangers from decades ago, and how they shaped me.


Victor W. Hwang

Co-founder, CEO and managing director, T2 Venture Capital


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Search for a Better Way


As one goes about their daily life, it is useful if they routinely ask themselves, “Isn’t there a better way?” You would be surprised at how frequently the answer is, “Yes.” Other sources of inspiration for me are existing products. One should never feel that just because there is a product out there similar to yours that you can’t execute it and market it better.


Liz Lange

Fashion designer


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Think Big


There are several factors an entrepreneur should consider when choosing a business idea or opportunity.


Go big or go home: There are opportunities to make money by building businesses that marginally improve on existing products or services, but the real thrill sets in when the decision is made to go after an enormous idea that seems slightly crazy.


Make the world a better place: The best kind of entrepreneur pursues a business that simplifies or improves the lives of many people. He or she repeatedly asks “what if” when thinking about how the world works and how the status quo could be dramatically improved.


Fail fast: As overall startup costs decline and markets move much more quickly, it has become easier to test ideas without devastating consequences of failure.


Pivot quickly: Many of the most successful companies exist in a form that is entirely different from how they were first envisioned. A successful entrepreneur will realize when a company is moving in the wrong direction or is missing a much larger opportunity.


Kevin Colleran

Venture partner, General Catalyst Partners


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Taking It to Market


It is important to look at an idea in two ways: first, to consider the initial inspiration for the business, and second, the often very different concept that ends up being executed to create the new company. We typically think of these ideas as the thing that sets these great entrepreneurs on the path of success. However, an idea is only that until you do something with it. Great entrepreneurs also discover the strategies to deliver the new innovative solution to the market.


Ellen Rudnick

Clinical professor of entrepreneurship and executive director of the Michael P. Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business


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Listen to People Who Know


Entrepreneurs come up with great ideas in a number of ways. Here are some of the best.
Get customer feedback: Listen to customers and create products and services that give them more of what they like and/or remove what they dislike.
Listen to front-line employees: The workers who manufacture the widgets, interact with customers and so on see what takes too long to accomplish, what is too expensive, what causes problems. Talk to those workers, or even do those jobs yourself.
Reverse assumptions: Many great entrepreneurs come up with ideas by reversing assumptions. For example, the old assumption was that a bank needed to have tellers and branch locations. The ATM concept asked: How can we offer banking services without having a branch location and tellers?


Dave Lavinsky

Co-founder and president, Growthink Inc.


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Get Inspired by History


You often hear about the pursuit of the new new thing. But I believe entrepreneurs have a lot to gain by looking into history for inspiration.


In the mid-’90s, some beer enthusiasts and experts called us heretics for brewing beers with ingredients outside of the “traditional” water, yeast, hops and barley. So, I started researching ancient brewing cultures and learned that long ago, brewers in every corner of the world made beer with whatever was beautiful and natural and grew beneath the ground they lived on.


We now make a whole series of Ancient Ales inspired by historic and molecular evidence found in tombs and dig sites.


Sam Calagione

Founder and president, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery Inc.


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Be Prepared to Shift Gears


Entrepreneurs need to understand two things. For one thing, their first (or second or third) idea is often not the real opportunity. In fact, it might stink. They have to be on the lookout for why it stinks and be willing to shift course.


But they also need to understand that even if their idea has problems, there’s often a good opportunity buried within it. They need to talk to people and continue tweaking and transforming it. In the process, they encounter setbacks, rethink their approach, try again and redefine what they’re doing.


For all that, the idea may fail-it’s happened to many successful entrepreneurs. But they weren’t deterred by failure. They kept at it and were better positioned to recognize and shape the next idea into something truly great.


Donna Kelley

Associate professor of entrepreneurship and Frederic C. Hamilton chair of free enterprise, Babson College


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You Can’t Rush the Brain


I don’t know where great ideas come from. I am not sure anyone does. I am not even sure how I come up with my ideas. The brain does its thing, and out pops an idea.


While you are waiting for the brain to get its act together, do what you can do. Do the doable. Meet with people, schmooze, have a laugh or two. Build mock-ups and prototypes. At the very least, collect other people’s problems. That’s always a guaranteed doable.


The deep idea here is that action has a creative aspect distinct from thinking. And thinking need not come first. Mostly it doesn’t.


Saras D. Sarasvathy

Isidore Horween research associate professor of business administration, University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business


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What Not to Do


One thing that isn’t a rich vein of entrepreneurship gold: reading a market forecast from a big-name consulting firm and deciding to create a product to serve that need.


Guy Kawasaki

Author and former chief evangelist of Apple

HYPES ABOUT ENTREPRENEURS

Lies about entrepreneurs

Do you know the entrepreneurs are special people? Yes, right? Well, sorry pal, that was WRONG.

The media loves to showcase entrepreneurs as demi-good with flesh and blood. Well the media likes nothing more than telling fanciful decorated stories, garnished with spices and chicken flavor about entrepreneurs who has succeeded from an early stage. Well, all those were done to get you to buy there newspaper or whatever.

Example include a child who sells sweets at school or a dropout that built business empire or even an illiterate who doesn’t know how to read or write but made millions from his book, aspiring kid who set up an organized crime syndicate and robbed two street banks at a go and a that started using calculator from the womb-ok, so maybe I haven’t read about the last two.

All of these are just good stories and stories are sometimes twisted to become interesting like fables. You must understand that the media are there to sell. You most have read about and marveled at high-profile entrepreneurs who killed the lions to take the elephant.

Now listen, for every pushy and extrovert entrepreneurs there are half dozen equally successful, quieter entrepreneurs who shun the media spotlight and go ahead making there zillions if I must exaggerate.

Sadly a lot of people believe that you must be special to be entrepreneurs.  I say once again that they are wrong and even if you point a missile at me, I may keep shot but still say, “Wrong!” subtly. As far as you come up with a good business ideas that you can get passionate about, point its big picture, sit for days perfecting and then prepared to turn it into a commercial enterprises, you can be a successful entrepreneurs. You see no sweat! But there is sweat oh!

Any ordinary person can become an entrepreneur. Yes, you read that correctly. Entrepreneurship isn’t about experience. It’s about using your brain, motivating yourself, and building relationships with the right people. So yes, anyone can do it. Why not join?

Introduction To Business 101

You might have asked like I did, why are some people and organization more successful than others? Why do some people have wonderful careers, moving from position to position, up wards and never downwards, paid more or at best promoted faster?

Yet why is  it that other go from company to company, job to job and continually worrying about money and having financial high blood pressure. When I was younger, I thought everything high was meant for the rich like high blood pressure, his royal highness even high income flow. Now look at the poor man everything is low. Low blood pressure, low income rate, low skill, low thinking, low knowledge etc.

Your first break through in business is to discover that for every cause there is always an effect, which is everything happens for a reason. Aristotle knew this and postulated this firmly, an effect of some kind. Now this means that all achievement, happiness, business success and even failure, (don’t be scared my friend) are all the direct and indirect effects or results of specific cause or action. So this means for whatever you are facing now, you are responsible for it.  

Now you know that success itself isn't and accident. Sir Isaac Newton in his third principle of motion said, “Action and reaction are equal and opposite?”        

Brain Tracy puts it this way, “Thoughts are cause and conditions are effects?” therefore you become what you think about most of the time. All the people and situations in your life have only the meaning you give them by the way you think about them. And when you change your thinking, you change your life and sometimes in seconds.
Check http://biztalksblogs.wordpress.com

Welcome to BizTalk

My quest to succeed in life overshadowed me, I began to ask, “Why me?” Am I the only one meant to suffer? Why are some rich and poor? What makes the rich richer and the poor poorer? All this was asked because poverty had confronted me.Same could be yours story but its about to change.

In college I had financial problems and I couldn't find a way to keep up with my studies and this caused me pains and to be honest with you. I shed tears for day. Not until I started asking questions did I get the answers I was looking for.  I decided to tell you this because I wasn’t born rich and if now I am rich, it is because I understood that virtually 80% to today’s rich folks are first generation and that they earn 80% of the money leaving the rest of the 20% for those below to share.

Before we continue, my name is Azuaru Augustine Chisomnazu and I am delighted that you are here reading my blog. Count yourself lucky. Secondly I would like to know you and interact with you and assist you to leave up to your goal.

Now you came here for a purpose, either because you were searching through Google or someone referred you. You are welcomed and you are at the right place so read on.

<H>Warning <H>

         This blog is for ambitions men and women, simply put “human beings”, who want to achieve everything possible that there is. When I say everything possible I don’t mean helping to assisting you to become fraudster, number one world terrorist or at worst, hacking World Bank. If your intention was for all the above, please check the next blog site closest to mine, maybe they might be of help and if they can’t, keep looking for you will find. Now that’s not an encouragement so don’t implicate me.

<biggest warning> This blog could  change you life forever  because this blog site for those people who want to do more, have more and fulfill their dreams. These people are those working in the business world but some of what you will learn will help even in your private lives. Anyone of these principles can save you months and even years of hard work and worst can cost months and even years of frustration and underachievement.

Come on, I know it and even you my dear friend can admit it that it is cool becoming your own boss or to be at the top of your field.

Here is a question for you: if I give you $50,000 what would you use it for? Of course some fools would take out $1000 for hosting emergency finance freedom party, which will end soon, then think of how they will be spend the rest probably on clothing, girlfriend maintenance, heaps of pizzas and loading of your fridge. Yet another will say, I will open a well-furnished business and then go on with life. Each of the above lacks one thing, “self-discipline”. The former lack self-discipline for spending, and instead of investing he spends while the latter lack the self-discipline of planning which is why lots of business collapse like the tower of Babel. If you don’t know that tower, forget it and read on.

No doubt 80% of folks out there lack self-discipline yet they want to venture into one or two business or even move to the top of their field. They dream and fantasize how they are going to be the boss “someday,” how will spray cash without thinking or thinking that its rim of paper. Yea, if wishes were horse, even beggars would ride. So why wishing that you own a business, is because of researching your market niche, you postpone or at worse blame events, someone or an object for not achieving that. Listen at what Brain Tracy has to say, “Losers make excuses, winners make progress. Now how can you tell if your favorite excuse is valid or not?,” simple question I guess, just look around and ask,  is there anyone else who has my same excuse who is successful anyway?”

Being successful isn't all about the material thing you accomplish or acquire that matters, what matters is the quality of the person you become to accomplish well above average. I say this because I love you. Development of self-discipline of the high read that sets everything in tune of you.

Maybe you want to hit your first million or maybe you are already doing it. What every category you are, this blog, “BizTalk” is here to help you earn it and even more. Winning Edge principle states that: Small difference ability in key areas can lead to enormous differences in result.

Any ordinary person can become an entrepreneur and even raise to the top of his/her field. Yes, read it again if you don’t get it. Being in business isn't about experience or any special training, it’s about using your brain, motivating yourself and building relationships with the right people.

If you think that you can’t do it. Well, I long to see you donate $700,000 to that orphanage home and yet it looks like you have just given out a penny I want to see you go 3D rather than 2D. I want to see you at the top with me.

You could say but I have no skill or money. Don’t worry, and ask questions about your niche. At worst you may not have an idea about a business but yet you want to strike your own. That will be just fine. This blog  will help you find the right concept for your business, or have you taken some initial step and want to take it to the next level. You might even have the seed idea and yet don’t known how grow it into a full blown business. You might even be a thriving business but can’t deal with your competitors, that's OK  Wipe you tears and lean on me but if you are as heavy as an elephant then you have to say his to the ground. Check my next blog.