Thursday, March 13, 2008

The Entrepreneur Next Door

(Reprinted from

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 looks back 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, 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 those behavior.

"People's mindsets often determine how likely they are to succeed at making changes or how likely they are to fail. Some people believe that no matter what, they can win, whereas others resign themselves to losing before they even begin. 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 of these studies, and that there is always a small percentage of people with the wrong personality for a job who are successful. It appears that these individuals use a cognitive approach to determine the right behaviors for the job, take the corresponding actions, and therefore achieve the desired results."

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 aggressive and analytical than their 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 as to 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.;