What are the key pillars to success as an entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurship is often glorified these days as a path to true success and freedom for aspirational individuals looking to forge their own path in their career. A whole host of books, websites and videos have popped up that discuss this topic at length.
Of course, entrepreneurship has become an even more popular subject of discussion since the recent upheavals that have occurred in the world of work. More and more people are looking for new ways of operating and bringing their ideas to the market.
However, entrepreneurship requires an incredibly broad set of skills. Most of the time at least, being an entrepreneur is not something that you can just walk into blind, expecting to succeed.
Just like a building supported by pillars, being a successful entrepreneur requires its own set of pillars. With just one pillar missing, the whole metaphorical building comes crashing down, and your entrepreneurial venture is very likely to fail as a consequence.
Here are some of the qualities and skills that entrepreneurs need in order to succeed.
6 Vital Pillars to Success as an Entrepreneur
Passion
This is probably the most talked about and most important quality that entrepreneurs must bring to their ventures. In order to succeed, there is no way to escape the long hours and sacrifices that are required.
Without a set of values that result in true passion for what you are doing, it is difficult to sustain your sense of purpose as an entrepreneur. You must love what you do and have deep reasons for doing it.
Innovation
The reality of entrepreneurship today is that competition can be fierce. It can be very difficult to stand out when there are hundreds of other businesses attempting to do the same thing as you.
The only way to stand out from the crowd is to correctly manifest your creativity in the market, so that you can bring something new and useful that none of your competitors can match.
Scheduling / Time Management
To be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t just need your business in order, you need your whole life in order.
You need to be very clear and specific about what your daily schedule looks like, including all the aspects of your personal life too. Tasks need to be categorised and prioritised, taking into account their impact both inside and outside of the business.
With good time management and task prioritisation, you become much much more successful as an entrepreneur.
Good Judgement
You cannot be an entrepreneur at all if you are unable to make quality decisions. You need to be able to compare options wisely, as the impact of decisions can be huge. The difference between a good decision and a bad decision can often be measured in six or seven figures – some even in eight, nine or ten, depending on the scale of your ambition!
Good decision making requires you to be able to rigorously analyse your own reasoning, and to try to find faults in your own thinking. This is a key skill for reaching the right conclusions for your business.
Communicate with your Customers
Your customers are the real route to achieving your goals. If you have the skill and humility to listen to them, it is only a matter of time before you hit great success.
Being observant is key, and if you can communicate effectively with your customers, they will provide you with incredibly valuable information that can take your business to the next level. Things like complaints and feedback (positive or negative) are great examples of this.
In addition, how you talk to your customers is just as important as how you listen to them. If you can reach them on their level with your next big idea by using the right language, they might just buy it!
Visualise your Goals
In order to get a clear picture of what you are aiming for as an entrepreneur, it is very important to visualise what it looks like.
You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of not only yourself as the producer of a successful product, but also in the shoes of your customer. This helps you to truly understand their problem so you can solve it for them.
The One Thing You Need to Enable These Pillars to Success as an Entrepreneur
The six pillars we have shown above are by no means exhaustive. There are actually many more pillars involved in the overall picture of being a successful entrepreneur. In fact, there is actually no definitive number of them!
The most interesting thing here is there is actually one single thing that unites all of these pillars and enables them to function effectively. That one single thing is…
Thinking! The way that you (and your team members) think is truly what determines the success or failure of your entrepreneurial venture.
So what can be done about this? How can you be sure that thinking is being correctly applied in your business so that all of your goals can be reached?
The answer is Effective Intelligence.
One Pillar to Rule Them All!
Throughout the last 45 years, Effective Intelligence has been used with great success to enable huge leaps of progress for all types of businesses, large and small. Its positive impact has often been measured in the millions.
Some of the companies that have worked with Effective Intelligence include Shell, Nestlé and Philips Electronics.
Effective Intelligence allows an unprecedented level of awareness to come to fruition for you and your team, so that thinking at both the individual and team level can be properly analysed and evaluated.
With this awareness, over-active areas of the business can be toned down, weak areas can be strengthened, and team members can be re-organised so that everyone is performing optimally. It is no small feat to be able to do this, but Effective Intelligence carries it out with proven success.
You may have noticed that we gave each pillar a different colour. Well spotted! This is because Effective Intelligence operates on a tried-and-tested colour model of the mind. At its most essential level, it uses Blue, Red and Green. Each of these colours then has two shades, which we won’t get into now – but you may have noticed that too on the pillars!
Despite its apparent simplicity, this colour model is dangerously effective, and has transformed countless lives, even outside the sphere of business. Thinking of course affects your personal life too!
A Unique Opportunity for You
If you are curious to see how Effective Intelligence can transform your success as an entrepreneur, then you are in the right place.
We currently offer a FREE package, Your Key Strategic Insights, that offers you the chance to understand the way that you specifically think. You will just need to answer 24 questions, and that gives us all the data we need to show you your own unique thinking profile.
We could easily assign a healthy price to the amount of value given in this free package, but as we are an Educational Trust, we also want to be able to provide people with powerful insights on a pro bono basis whenever we can.
Click here to discover your Key Strategic Insights today, free of charge.
