Can You Be A Successful Entrepreneur?

In Micheal Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited he breaks down small business owners as technicians, managers and entrepreneurs.

In our business I tend to be the manager/technician and my brother is the entrepreneur. He can’t look at much of anything without a business model popping up in his head.

So, are you cut out to be an entrepreneur?

Daniel Isenberg had a couple of posts in the Harvard Business Review on that very subject. The first – Should You Be An Entrepreneur? Take This Test has about 20 yes/no statements to determine your affinity to run a business. Statements like:

• I always look for new and better ways to do things
• I like to question conventional wisdom
• Whenever there is a problem, I am ready to jump right in
• I worked after school and during vacations when I was growing up
• And my favorite – I could have written a better test than Isenberg (and here is what I would change ….)

One statement he didn’t include was “I want to get rich”.  Real entrepreneurs do it for the challenge, excitement and creativity  rather than just to get rich.

Isenberg followed up this post with a 2-Minute Opportunity Checklist For Entrepreneurs. In this post he poses 18 questions to determine if your business idea can be successful. Questions like:

• Does your business idea soothe someone’s pain, discomfort, frustration, or dissatisfaction?
• Are there lots of those people out there?
• Do these people (or companies, or governments) have money to pay for it?
• Can you keep your fixed costs low during launch?

He added a few that I feel are a little extraneous, but the principle is sound.

Being a successful entrepreneur takes the mind-set to look for opportunities, the knowledge to market them properly and the drive to see them through.

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