Entrepreneurial Traits

         Becoming a successful entrepreneur is a lifelong process that involve various strategies, characteristic as well as quality and personality of a person. In addition, it cannot be denied that a successful entrepreneur tends to have most of the entrepreneurial traits.

1. Very Innovative - ( Steve Jobs )

            Steve Jobs was a co-founder of Apple Computer. He enrolled himself at Homestead High School on 1971 where he was first introduced to his future partner named Steve Wozniak. When Jobs turned 21, he and Wozniak formed their own company called Apple Computer. Both of them raised fund for their company by selling Job’s Volkswagen bus and Wozniak’s scientific calculator. Steve Jobs looked into the matters where at that time, the size of almost all computer are large and costly as not all individual could afford to buy it. So, they decide to innovate and redesign the computers by making it smaller, and cheaper with the idea of selling it for the purpose of personal usage. Both of them managed to produce a series of personal Apple computer that earns them a large amount of money. As the technology becomes modern day by day, they are able to produce many new products such as iPhone, Macbook air, iPod and so on that marks their later innovation.
            Being innovative is to find a way that coming up with a better idea or method. It is important because innovation is able to produce something new by enhancing existing products in the market that could satisfy more and more users. To add on, innovation may be linked to many positive changes in many aspects such as quality, productivity, competitiveness, and so on. Hence, being innovative acts as a key success point for an entrepreneur as we could run the risk of losing competitiveness in the industry as well as our customers.

2. Very Opportunistic - ( Bill Gates )

Bill Gates is the founder of the world’s largest software business, Microsoft. When he was 13, his parents enrolled him at Seattle’s Lakeside School and that is the time Bill Gates began to show an interest in computer programming. It is also the place where Bill Gates met his senior, Paul Allen, who acts as a friend and business partner for him due to their common interest over computers that brings them together. Bill Gates is said to be one of the successful entrepreneurs who is very opportunistic. It can be proved when Bill Gates joined Allen to work for Honeywell in the summer of 1974. During that time, Allen showed him an edition of magazine named Popular Electronics that featured an article about the Altair 8800 mini-computer kit. They took it as an opportunity and tried to contact the presidents of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System (MITS) Company named Ed Roberts. Even though in reality they didn’t even start any code writing for any software program, they told the presidents that they were working on a BASIC software program that would run on the Altair computer because they just wanted to know if MITS was interested in someone who were developing such software. After they got their feedback where the presidents asked them to demonstrate, both of them started to put their effort on it. After two months, their handworks paid off. The software program that they wrote within two months worked perfectly. At the end, both of them were employed by MITS.  They formed a partnership called Micro-Soft and they dropped the hyphen in less than a year to become Microsoft in 4 April 1975 where Bill Gates as the chief executive officer (CEO).

It is clear that being opportunistic is important for an entrepreneur to be successful. We should take the advantage of any situation as long as it is ethical in order to make a step closer to our dreams and accomplish what we want just like what Bill Gates did. Opportunities are like sunrises, if we wait too long, we’ll miss them. In fact, we should not miss out every single possible chance that enables us to perform ourselves and achieve our goals because we don’t know how far we can go and the improvement that we should make if we didn’t take the chances to do it.

3. Strong Perseverance - ( Richard Branson )

Richard Branson is the founder of Virgin Group. He suffered from dyslexia where he have difficulty with reading because of a slight disorder of his brain. Although it affects him, he never give up due to this reason. Branson started a youth-culture magazine named “Student” in 1966 and sold $8,000 for its first edition. He decided to distribute the first 50,000 copies after he covered the cost with advertising. In a later year, he moved to London. During that time, he had an idea to begin a mail-order record company called Virgin as an alternative way to raise the funds in helping his magazine’s effort. After that, he managed to expand his business venture by adding a new record shop named Virgin Records that is located at Oxford Street, London, followed by a recording studios in Oxfordshire, England. However, it was unfortunate that the airline Virgin Atlantic faced the financial problems that forced Richard Branson to sell the company of Virgin Record to THORN EMI for $1 billion in order to save Virgin Atlantic from collapse. Even though this happened, but still, he didn’t give up and remained determined to stay in the music business. After experiencing all the ups and downs in his life, again, he started a new record company named V2 and today, Virgin Groups hold more than 200 companies in more than 30 countries.

( Bill Gates )

In order to prove that Bill Gates had a strong perseverance, we can see through the situation when he was at the age of 15 in 1970. Bill Gates and his friend, Paul Allen, managed to develop “Traf-o-Data”, a computer program that monitored traffic patterns in Seattle area where both of them managed to earn $20,000. This acted as a driving force for them to start their own company. However, they failed to do so. Perhaps because of his parent’s influence where they wanted him to finish school and go on to college because his parents hope that he will become a lawyer in the future. No matter what, he didn’t give up his dreams and interest. After several years, both of them worked under Honeywell. During that time, they tried very hard to seek for opportunities and yes, his life changed with just a call to the company named Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System (MITS). All the efforts that Bill Gates and Allen put on enabled them to form a partnership called Micro-Soft which is a blend of ‘micro-computer’ and ‘software’. Within a year, the hyphen was dropped by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and became Microsoft.

It is noticeable that strong perseverance is important not only to an entrepreneur but also to all of us. It is an ability that can make a difference even when our efforts meet with disappointments or failure. Instead of giving up easily, we should learn from our mistakes and keep trying until we find the way that works because great works are performed not only by strength but also by perseverance.

4. Willing Risk Taker - ( Tony Fernandes )

Tony Fernandes is a Malaysian entrepreneur who born on 30 April 1964 in Kuala Lumpur. In a preliminary stage, Tony Fernandes was formerly a Warner Music executive in Malaysia but then he left to pursue his dream of starting a low-fare airlines that is affordable by everyone. From the action where he decided to start a low-fare airline, we can see that he is a risk taker. It is because he came from the music business and didn’t know anything about the airline industry. Although everyone laughed at him, he thought that it was something he pursued with a passion and a lot of hard works. When he turned 37 at the year of 2001, he dived into his new role where he moved into the airlines industry by acquiring AirAsia instead of starting from a scratch. At that time, AirAsia had run up a large debt. To solve this problem, he mortgaged his house and used his personal savings to acquire the company. All the debt was cleared after one year of his hardwork. Now, he has an estimated personal wealth around £400m according to Forbes magazine.
            A successful people like Tony Fernandes is different from an ordinary people as he took risk to accomplish his goals. So, as we can see, it is important for us to be willing to take the risk like him because unforeseen opportunities often come from risk-taking. In other words, sometimes we need to take risk in order to move forward. Of course, we need to ensure that the risk we take is a calculated risk. In short, if we never take risk in life, we will never see anything new.

5. High Self Confidence - ( Steve Jobs )

The way to success is not as easy as we think because there are so many possibilities for both failure and success to happen. Steve Jobs experienced a lot of the hard times in his life. He had been fired by the Apple company because several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws which resulted in disappointment of the customers. One of the examples would be the Macintosh computer. It was slow, did not behave or work as what they expected as well as lack of the colour graphics. On being fired by the company, what had been the focus of his life was gone. But, with high self-confidence on him, he knew that one day he would succeed in making a big impact on the world even though his idea or products had been rejected for so many times. Obviously, self-confidence makes him what he is today.

 Hence, it cannot be denied that self-confidence is important to a person in order to become a successful entrepreneur. It is because self-confidence that build in ourselves may lead to many positive impacts. Namely, performance, social ease, or even good mental health. Without confidence as an indicator, we might be fear even for making the first step that leads to success. Therefore, we, ourselves, need to have self-confidence to believe in our own no matter in what aspect.