Volker Hartzsch is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold 19 companies over the last 22 years. This article will explore some of the key competencies for a career in entrepreneurship, looking at the mindset required to position founders for success.
When people talk about entrepreneurial growth, they tend to focus on aspects such as hitting sales objectives and hiring the right people. Despite the entrepreneur’s mindset playing a critical role in their success, it is a factor that is overlooked surprisingly often.
The entrepreneurial mindset requires founders to think in a specific way, particularly in terms of their approach to challenges and mistakes. It hinges on an inherent need to grow and improve, with successful entrepreneurs demonstrating resilience and determination, never giving up and trying over and over again.
For a founder, an entrepreneurial mindset is crucial, propelling them and their business forward and positioning them to meet everyday challenges and experience growth. To be successful in business requires a steadfast commitment to a very narrow vision, with this conviction driving the entrepreneur to complete all of the steps necessary to transform their corporate vision into a profitable reality.
It is a common misconception that entrepreneurs are born rather than grown. In reality, anyone can learn how to become an entrepreneur by honing their skills, building habits and learning basic business hacks to help them launch their own business and drive it to success.
The biggest obstacle to acquiring an entrepreneurial mindset is not the economy, failure or bad ideas, but rather insecurity and self-doubt. Many people have excellent ideas for a new business but allow doubt to stand in the way of pursuing their dreams, giving up at the first hurdle.
Learning to act with confidence is integral to success. Be it staging product launches or pitching to potential investors, people watch seasoned entrepreneurs perform these tasks with confidence and ease, assuming they have a natural flair and have always been good at it. In reality, the key to mastering any new skill is practice, particularly when it comes to speaking with confidence. The more practice the entrepreneur puts in, the better they will become.
Entrepreneurial success also demands decisiveness, with the founder forced to address problems and situations, consider all of the available data and make confident decisions that enable them and the business to move forward. Indecision is also a huge contributor to business failure, with businesses and dreams killed by a failure to take action.
All great entrepreneurs are accountable for their actions, accepting that they are responsible for everything the happens within the business, including all outcomes, good and bad. Entrepreneurship requires incredible resilience, as well as humility and the ability to be coached, as in order to achieve big things in life the entrepreneur will need to be willing to learn from others, nourishing a growth mindset.
