Rate yourself for Entrepreneurship! Do you qualify?

    Entrepreneurship is a tough call. It requires a vast amount of commitment and determination on the part of the person who wants to be his own master. There are always discouraging factors, many of which are not seen before the business begins. Here is a rating that would enable you know if you are really cut out for the tremendous task of running your own business. Rate yourself!

•     Drive and energy level: The ability to work long hours for sustained periods with less than the normal amount of sleep. This is different from you nine to five job you probably are used to. The questions I normally ask participants at the seminars are: would you be ready to work for 18 hours in a day, bearing in mind that it’s your own business? Often in startups you have to be cleaner, delivery man, accounts clerk and marketing officer all rolled into one. This can take its toll on you!

•      Self-confidence: A belief in yourself and your ability to achieve your goals.Entrepreneurs need loads of self confidence! Sometimes they toy with ideas that nobody seems to understand. What if everyone around you says your idea is not realistic and all you have to go on is your gut feeling that keeps telling you: "This will work!" Your confidence must come from within when you have no support around you!

•   Setting challenging but realistic goals: The ability to set clear goals and objectives that are challenging, yet realistic and feasible.Goal setting is important for entrepreneurs. When you start a business, you should have a goal and some objectives in mind. Now we ought sound a warning here: your goals must not be financial alone! Many upstarts that I have spoken to want to make a certain amount of money over a period of time. This is great. But others goals such as having a large market share of the product that you sell or being a dominant provider of certain business in an area are also important. A doctor who starts a private clinic must view his service as both social and entrepreneurial and he could set a goal and say: "I want to improve health care delivery and reduce sickness to the barest minimum in the area in which I operate" Goals are of vast importance because they encourage us to have something to look forward to.

• Long-term involvement: A commitment to projects that will reach completion in five to seven years and to work toward distant goals. Entrepreneurship is usually a long haul activity. You do not expect to break even over night! You ought to be ready for a commitment of at least 3 to 5 years. What is important is that you turn money over for the first couple of years and you cut your losses to the minimum. The ability to consolidate in one business before we consider another is a very important thing to do.

• Using money as a performance measure: Money, in the form of salary, profits, or capital gains, should be viewed more as a measure of how the company is doing rather than as an end in itself. No doubt everyone who goes into business wants to make money. But there has to be a passion for what we do even before the money. Our passion should lead to our financial success and not the other way round.

• Persistent problem solving: Must have an intense and determined desire to solve problems toward the completion of tasks.Every entrepreneur should solve a problem. It is the ability to consistently solve problems that makes an entrepreneur relevant to larger society. Everything business in existence on the face of the earth ought to solve a problem. If any business does not do this, then it has no reason to exist.

• Taking moderate risks: Success is generally the result of calculated risk-taking that provides a reasonable and challenging chance of success. Our risks ought to be measured carefully. Some people have gambled considerable sums of money on one venture. It is often said, the higher the risk the larger the returns. But a good entrepreneur looks at worse case scenarios and tries to determine what can be done in certain situations.

• Learning from failure: Understanding your role in a failure can be helpful in avoiding similar problems in the future. Entrepreneurs learn from failure. They are not discouraged by it; a good entrepreneur sees failure as a school. Brian Tracey says we ought to "fail forward" What this means is that with every failure we should get better and know what to do next time.

•     Using criticism: You need to be able to seek and use criticism of the style and substance of your performance. Listen to critics. There would be those who would show you the weaknesses of your product or service, there would be others that would point you towards suppose better strategies and there would also be those who will show you where your strengths lie.