Are you a minder, finder or grinder?

I would not recommend this as an opening gambit at your average business networking meeting. And whether you are a manager, salesman or worker bee doesn't really matter in a sense. But it is important to know how the key person in the organisation (i.e. you) ticks. As chartered accountants we're typically seen as the number crunchers, but as any experienced accountant will know, it's the way entrepreneurs tick and deal with what the numbers are telling them that most affects their success in business.
Let us assume that you have taken the plunge, gone into business and hopefully avoided the siren voices of the franchise industry. You are now into the business development phase. At this stage, the biggest factor which will affect whether, and to what extent, the business will prosper is you. There are two aspects to this – behaviour and personality.

By behaviour I mean doing the right things on a day to day basis. This will involve all the boring but important stuff like business plans, product or service development, marketing, finance and quality control. This article is not about any of these. There is already plenty of information available on all these topics for anyone with the inclination to read it. What I want to concentrate on today is the personality of the entrepreneur.

Life is so busy nowadays that I doubt whether many people spend much time thinking about their personal development. Life is all about "focus". But one person's focus is another person's blinkers. If you want to make the most of your biggest resource you need to understand it fully.

As a start I suggest taking one of the many psychometric tests available. Most are based on the views of Carl Jung. Many will have heard of the Myers Briggs test which is often used on prospective employees. This test though is more concerned with how an employee will perform rather than who they are. Others might prefer the Enneagram approach. All these attempt to categorise people into certain "types", indicating their strengths and weaknesses and how they are likely to react in certain situations. Wikipedia has a very readable summary of all this.

There are many advantages to these tests. Firstly, knowledge is power. Secondly, it is quite liberating to realise that it's fine not be good at everything. So no more guilt trips and wasting time doing stuff that someone else with more aptitude in that area should be doing. We're talking delegation here. Thirdly, you should get some pointers about what you can do to maximise your performance and well-being as type "x". This will help your personal as well as your business life.

I don't think that there is any one type of person who is uniquely suited to being an entrepreneur. But there are certain types of behaviour which correlate closely with successful entrepreneurship and, more importantly, with failure. In my view, positive indicators are determination, good judgement, optimism tempered by realism, common sense and hard work. Negative indicators are basically the opposite. But do bear in mind that a weakness is just an over-used strength. In other words, a strength taken to extremes becomes a weakness. By understanding yourself, you are able to anticipate and adjust for any aspects of your own make-up which are sub-optimal from a business point of view. This might involve business coaching or delegation or both.

Over the years, I have had close contact with more than 1,000 businesses run by different types of people. Very few are natural entrepreneurs but many run successful businesses. The businesses that fail have one thing in common – the personality of the business owner (or more accurately the behaviour resulting from that personality).
So get those blindfolds and blinkers off. We can all be more successful by understanding our fundamental nature and adapting it effectively to the needs of our business.

Article Source: http://gamblingarticlessite.com

Julian Stafford is a partner are an accountant Cambridge. Staffords Cambridge LLP, a leading independent Chartered Accounting company, and specialises in advising new and developing SMEs.

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