What Type of Person Starts a Business?

What type of person starts a business? What type of person do you have to be?

You might have said a person has to be entrepreneurial. That's a small piece of it.

I used to love listening to Jim Rohn tapes. One thing that always stuck with me is the idea of what kind of person do you have to be to have a successful business? Jim Rohn mostly spoke about network marketing businesses. However, some of the rules of that also apply to starting a "traditional" business.

First, let's be sure that you are talking about a business. A business makes you money, and maybe makes even more money, when you aren't there. If you have to be the one working, it's a job, not a business. Perhaps you are self-employed, but that just means that you own your job. But, you still have to show up and work to make money. A business doesn't need you there. You're just an optional accessory.

So, the idea is to set up a business where you can eventually extract yourself.

What kind of person do you have to be to do that?

You have to be able to hire people, good people, to do the work that's needed to keep your business running. You need to be somebody with good judgement about people, good management skills, and a good teacher to be able to impart your knowledge of the business to others so that they can do it as well or better than you.

You have to be the type of person who can set up systems and processes to keep your business running. These will include sales funnels, bookkeeping and accounting systems, personnel systems, management and metrics systems, and even production systems. Your employees need systems to know where they fit in.

You have to be the type of person who can describe those systems and processes to others. You need good communications skills. This will help you in management, sales, and customer service.

You have to be the type of person who knows how to manage money and understand the financials of your business. You may be able to out earn your incompetence for a while. But, it will eventually catch up with you in a spectacular fashion.

You'll notice none of this mentions anything about intelligence, having a unique product, or even having a top-level education. Many entrepreneurs, billionaires even, did not finish college when they became successful. In some cases, the entrepreneur wasn't even the smartest person in the company. Was Walmart unique? Was Dell the only computer company? Was Microsoft the only software company around?

Entrepreneurs are often the type of person who has a vision, has a team, is able to communicate that vision, and is able to set up a system that allows the business to execute on that vision.

You can be a landscaping king, a freight brokering mogul, a restaurant owner, a carwash owner, or any number of not very unique businesses. The work doesn't have to be glamorous. It just has to make money and be able to support having well-paid employees to do the work. You can watch old episodes of Dirty Jobs for ideas.

If you are looking for a silver bullet for your business idea, forget it. You can have the perfect business handed to you and ruin it with incompetence. Many businesses just get by because the owners never grow beyond what they knew when they started it. They are stunted; and they stunt their business as a result. They can never walk away because they don't have employees they trust and because there are no systems in place other than them bossing people around.

If you want to start a business, you need to start with making yourself the type of person who can put all the pieces together and set it to operate and grow automatically. You can continue to work at your business. However, it should not depend on you being there to make all the decisions.

Do that, and you'll be the type of person who starts a business rather than create for themselves another job.

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