020 – The 10 Qualities of a Successful Entrepreneur – Golden Nugget Friday with Shelley Rogers

Welcome to Golden nugget Friday episode where we will share the 10 qualities of successful Entrepreneurs, provide you with a tool to see if you have some of the top 10 qualities? Lastly, highlight the key to success by understanding how to apply your greatest talents and strengths in everyday life with your executive, employees, even family and friends.

The top 10 list was not developed by me it is based on the research conducted by Gallup. Gallup is a company based in USA that deliver analytics and advice to help leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems. With more than 80 years of experience with its global reach, Gallup knows more about the attitudes and behaviours of employees, customers, students and citizens than any other organization in the world. They conducted research from 2,500 entrepreneurs to understand what it takes to create a business, scale it, make profits and create jobs.

Dr. Sangeeta Badal from Gallup explain the importance of entrepreneurial talent and provide details about the assessment.

I personally like how the assessment focuses on the positive attributes and strengths and when you have the self-awareness of your strengths and focus on them it builds confidence.  Before we discuss the top 10 qualities of successful Entrepreneurs lets dive into what inspired this topic.  When I asked my last guest Catriona Pollard what’s your biggest strength as an Entrepreneur her response hits #3 on our top 10 list. I loved her response when she said, “I spend time thinking about my biz thinking about my industry and thinking about what’s going on in my business Landscape try and meno over and adapt and be flexible to fit in to that.”

Entrepreneurship is as important as innovation for national and global economic growth. “Innovation is essential, and we need it. According to Gallup Poll’s the real magic starts with entrepreneurs,” “Entrepreneurs create customers. And customers, in turn, create jobs and economic growth,” they add.  Countries need thinkers and doers. “Entrepreneurship is the horse, and innovation is the cart,” Clifton and Badal explain. Creativity, ideas, discovery and innovation are one side of the growth coin – the other side is commercialisation.

They explain the ten key talents of successful entrepreneurs are:

1. Business Focus
2. Confidence
3. Creative Thinking
4. Delegation
5. Determination
6. Independence
7. Knowledge-seeking
8. Promotion
9. Relationship-Building
10. Risk-Taking.

We have teamed up with Audible to offer you two free audiobooks.  You can access the links for this offer just click below.

‘Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder,’ delves into the psychology of the entrepreneur.  The book and online questionnaire  help aspiring founders answer these questions to discover their innate entrepreneurial talents along with areas of improvement for individuals and teams. The book is only 161-pages and makes for an engaging and thought-provoking read, for entrepreneurs as well as management consultants and coaches.

So back to the question…Can one learn to be an entrepreneur, or is it a quality a person is born with?  Some level of talent is innate; some can be nurtured. Each of these traits can be classified in three levels: dominant, contributing and supporting.

They say the key to success is to fully understand how to apply your greatest talents and strengths in your everyday life.  So how do you do that????  First step is knowing what your strengths are!  And you can do that really easy with Gallup’s Strengths finder assessment.  I found it very helpful!  This is a different assessment from the Entrepreneurial assessment I just talked about! However, fantastic tool for your management team or board of directors to complete.  I had my executive team complete prior to our annual strategy session retreat.  Then I charted everyone strengths on a spreadsheet grouping them into four categories:

1. Executing
2. Influencing
3. Relationship Building
4. Strategic Thinking.

It was very easy to identify if we were lacking in any areas or abundant in another areas.  For example, if my board of directors did not have anyone in strategic thinking or my company executives lacked people with execution then we would have a real problem in our organization! So it’s a great tool to help manage people or even consider having potential new hires to complete.  If you are hiring someone for executive sales position it would be helpful if they have strengths in the influencing or relationship building categories.

In conclusion there are two powerful assessment tools to help you and your business:

1)  Entrepreneurial Profile tool
2) The Clifton’s Strengths Finder

Over 14,244,183 people have downloaded this very powerful assessment tool I suggest you check it out!

FREE Resource:

Table 1 – Talents of a Successful Entrepreneur

Assessment Tools

BOOK:  Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder