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My friend Gigie Peñalosa has been successfully running her own
company, VCP Trading International, Inc., while my other friend Gina
Camacho is a very successful Paralegal at Hinshaw & Culbertson
LLP, Los Angeles, California.
They both have high rational and emotional
intelligence and are highly creative. They are both driven and
sociable. Gigie is happy to be an entrepreneur and Gina is equally
happy to be an employee. Gigie looksback to those days when she was
still employed and is exultant that she made that decision to be her
own boss, work in her own time and build a business.
Gina is delighted to have a steady job,
income and perks such as a retirement plan.
Who can be an entrepreneur? Who are comfortable
with an eight-to-five routine?
According to Author Bill Wagner, in “The
Entrepreneur Next Door”, there is a certain personality type that
fits the entrepreneur. He defines personality as a manifestation of
a person’s core. “It is who people are when they are alone. It
is the essence of the person who looks back when that person looks
into a mirror. Personality is the stable, least changing aspect of a
person’s natural style. I discovered and witnessed that if people
know and understand the behavioral requirements of a particular
position, they have a better chance of manifesting and maintaining
that behavior.
“Research studies indicate that if you have
the right personality to do a particular job, your chances of
success are five times greater than if you have the wrong
personality. There is another side to these studies, and that
is—there is always a small percentage of people with the wrong
personality for a job who are successful.”
These are some of Mr. Wagner’s conclusions:
a. The key to entrepreneurial success is to be
aware of the traits you have and to develop or hire the essential
success traits that you need to bridge the gap.
b. True personality traits are difficult to mask
especially when someone is drunk, sick or angry.
c. By understanding your personality, you can
leverage your strengths, improve your weaknesses and limitations,
and discover the type of organizations that you’re best served in
creating.
d. For every strength there is a corresponding
and diametrically opposed developmental consideration or potential
limitations that can cause us to sabotage ourselves.
e. Failure to plan is planned failure.
f. Get yourself a coach or join a
CEO/entrepreneur peer group. By reading about and observing the
strategies of successful entrepreneurs with different personalities,
you can discern what will work for you and how you might leverage
that knowledge and awareness.
g. There are three broad categories of
personalities: Generalist (strategic thinkers, big picture,
preferring to be measured by overall results, more risk-oriented),
Specialist (tactical thinkers, detail-oriented, experts, more
risk-averse) and Transition (similar amount of dominance and
compliance, thereby making it difficult to really determine the
personality).
h. Generalists are motivated by ego, status,
sense of urgency and independence. They have a tendency to learn at
a faster pace.
i. Specialists are motivated by stability,
security and structure.
They have a tendency to learn at a slower pace.
j. Female entrepreneurs seem to have more drive
and sociability than their male counterparts.
k. Male entrepreneurs seem to be more aggressive
and analytical thantheir female counterparts.
l. Entrepreneurs are rarely satisfied with
either their performance or the performance of their people.
m. One of the challenges business owners have is
that they have very little appreciation for why others can’t do
what entrepreneurs so easily accomplish. But if employees could
accomplish the same things as entrepreneurs, they wouldn’t be
their employees; they would become their competition.
n. Most entrepreneurial types not only have an
innate urge to ‘get back to work,’ many have the inner drive to
accumulate wealth and continue to increase their financial security.
Mr. Wagner included a simple entrepreneurial
profile survey in his book. You might want to try it.
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