Six Success Factors – Entrepreneurial Ability

Welcome to the second in a series of blog posts based around Rich Schefren’s webinar. In the first post, I discussed Rich’s methodology behind setting up an online business and today’s post concentrates on your entrepreneurial ability. Like the first post, this is split into four different sections and here I will try to encourage you to start thinking like an entrepreneur and making sure your time is spent effectively working on your business.

1. Resourceful vs Searching for Resources

The main trap a lot of people fall into when they first start out online is they hunt around for resources rather than sitting back and think about how they can work things out for themselves. An entrepreneur by design is someone who likes to figure things out and is not someone who wants a list of instructions on how to “become successful” – they are resourceful.

Somebody who essentially does what they are told are usually found working in a job, they are not usually the type of people who can build and run a business for themselves.

Searching for resources long term essentially makes you dependent on them, less likely to succeed and you will waste a tremendous amount of time.

How can you tell which area you fall into? Well, if you are scanning your inbox every day for details of the next big thing, that killer tip which is going to make you rich, then you are looking for resources. I found myself in this situation a few months ago when I was wondering which direction to take next. In

I must stress there is a huge difference between simply waiting around for your next info fix to fall into your lap and getting a mentor. By all means find someone who can teach you the basics of running an online business and internet marketing (HINT: you get lots of this information for FREE on my blog!) and you should become more resourceful by nature.

2. Cause & Effect – Intuition

I learned a lot about the relationships between cause and effect when I went through Rich’s GPS coaching program and that dealt mainly with the theory of constraints.

I have blogged previously about some of the obstacles which were holding me back and also I have myself a major reality check of what my business consisted of at the time of writing – not much if you go back and read the post!

If you spare the time to run a cause and effect analysis on your business then your overall business intuition should improve. The biggest brains in business often rely on intuition, as you can see here:

“Often you have to rely on intutition.”
Bill Gates

You can improve your intution by looking at your business and identify the obstacles. When a problem area surfaces, ask yourself why? Then ask yourself why? again. As you keep asking why?, you are studying the cause and effect of these obstacles.

For example, WHY don’t you have credibility in the market? WHY don’t you have any customers? WHY don’t you have any articles published? WHY isn’t your offer attracting more sales?

Follow the chain of logic downwards and eventually you will find your answer. What you will also find is a lot of these problems are related, so you start off with 10 obstacles and find two answers which will eliminate all of them.

3. Highest and Best Use

You should also ask yourself whether what you are doing is the highest and best use of your time and effort. Is this the best thing you could be doing for your business right now?

If you are just starting out then of course you will be doing the majority of the work yourself but as your business grows and you become more successful, you should be prioritizing.

In my post about 10 secrets of online business I wrote about splitting your tasks into order of importance, with A being crucial, B being fairly important and C being not very important.

You should ensure your A tasks are completed every day and tick them off your daily task sheets. That will help to ensure you are using your time to best benefit of your business.

4. The Ability to Systemize

If you ultimately want a business which can flourish without your involvement, then you need to make it process dependent, rather than person dependent.

If your business is dependent on you, then you will never be free of it and it won’t be successful unless you are devoting your time and attention to it.

However, if you can map out the processes which make up your business, then you have three advantages:

1. You can better understand the way your business works
2. You can identify shortcuts and ways of improving your business
3. You can train someone else to perform the task.

With these four points you should now have a better idea of what it takes to be a better entrepreneur and be able to structure your business accordingly so it will not always be completely dependent on you.