With more startup businesses closing every year in America, we ask ourselves, “What is the difference between a successful company and a failure?” Half of today’s private sector businesses go out of business within the first five years, and nearly 70 percent close within the first ten years. We must do better! More businesses are dying each year than are being born. Why? The answer to that question lies in the qualifications of the entrepreneur. Here are five essential traits of a Qualified Entrepreneur that can help change the success rate of startup businesses. Show 1. DisciplineThe first part of becoming a Qualified Entrepreneur is understanding what it takes to be a Disciplined Entrepreneur. It is important to be disciplined within yourself to help move your organization forward and to produce good leadership decisions within a managerial team. A Disciplined Entrepreneur is someone who becomes fully self-aware that they don’t know what they don’t know and that it’s better to achieve a status of “I know what I don’t know.” This self-knowledge makes it clear how the entrepreneur’s shortcomings may be affecting his or her company, and thus, helps the entrepreneur make better decisions for the long run. The Disciplined Entrepreneur understands that for the business to succeed in the long term, a transition must occur from the business being about “me” as its entrepreneur/CEO to being about the overall needs of the company. The Disciplined Entrepreneur commits to undertaking the preparation necessary for making “The Second Decision”. This is a conscious choice to acquire a more disciplined approach to management and leadership – or to bring that discipline to the company in another way. The Disciplined Entrepreneur knows that it’s less important how his or her role is shaped than that the company excels and succeeds. We need discipline to stick to a vision, work a plan and avoid the “heck, why not?” decisions that come from welcoming any and all opportunities, even great ships run aground. 2. LeadershipLeadership is a vital component of a Qualified Entrepreneur in a successful business. To help a business succeed, it is important that the entrepreneur understands that leadership within a company entails knowing your responsibilities and role and knowing when to share or even delegate responsibilities. As the leader, you could be the founder, the owner, the operator or even the captain of the ship, if you will. Regardless of the title, this is the Qualified Entrepreneur who, at any stage of the company’s growth, wants to self-qualify as CEO. He or she has the capabilities and is willing to commit to the work and learning necessary to lead the company. If the Qualified Entrepreneur feels that they are not CEO material, as a leader he or she understands how to put the right people in the right seats to support a vision. As the leader, the Qualified Entrepreneur, and/or the executive team, is charged with instilling discipline throughout the organization as well as making their own consistent and disciplined leadership decisions. 3. Self-awarenessTo become a Qualified Entrepreneur, you have to ask yourself, “Am I the right person to lead the organization to succeed or is there someone better than me?” This component of a Qualified Entrepreneur means you have to take into consideration your own needs and desires and the needs and desires of the company. It’s about the self-awareness journey through which you evaluate your skills and interests in each key aspect of managing a growth company. Self-help author Stephen R. Covey advocates for self-awareness and defines it as “the ability to reflect on one’s own life, grow in self-knowledge, and to use that knowledge to improve oneself and either overcome or compensate for weaknesses.” Self-awareness helps us understand if we are meeting the first two essential traits of a Qualified Entrepreneur: discipline and leadership. 4. Understanding of issues and challengesA Qualified Entrepreneur understands that issues and challenges will come up within the company’s life cycle. To lead a successful business, the entrepreneur fully understands and acknowledges the four issues that may pose a challenge to his or her efforts to become a Qualified Entrepreneur. These issues and challenges that entrepreneurs might face, include insistence on autonomy; unwillingness to build structure, cultivate expertise, or delegate; boredom; and failure to engage in self-examination. 5. Self-assessmentOne of the most important parts of becoming a Qualified Entrepreneur with a successful business is knowing how to do self-performance reviews. Isn’t it ironic that we entrepreneurs are so good at holding other people accountable as we grow, and demanding great performance from them to help us grow, yet we don’t do performance reviews on ourselves? I firmly believe that my book’s program of leadership and managerial self-assessment will help to reduce the failure rate of entrepreneurial companies in this nation. Borrowing from the US Navy’s “Qual Card” certification system, I’ve created an entrepreneur’s own certification system checklist to help entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial CEOs self-assess and develop skills to be ready for the demands of leading the larger, more complex companies that begin growing immediately post-startup. Part of this self-assessment includes taking note of the growth phase of a company based on the Greiner Curve, truly understanding what challenges go along with the current phase of the company life-cycle you are operating in, while gaining insight into what challenges the next phase will bring.. A Qualified Entrepreneur must ask himself/herself if they are indeed the right person to lead the company for the next 3-5 years? For more information on the Qual Card and “The Second Decision: the Qualified Entrepreneur,” visit https://randyhnelson.com/books/. -Randy H. Nelson
 Author and Serial Entrepreneur at The Decision Center Randy H. Nelson has a long history of entrepreneurial leadership, stemming from his educational, military, and business backgrounds. He has co-founded two successful businesses and served as CEO to both. He has written books on entrepreneurship and now seeks to help entrepreneurs and CEOs everywhere through coaching, consulting, workshops and public speaking. Related
Qualifications in entrepreneurship Suitable qualifications for an entrepreneur include:
Qualifications in your own vocational field There are more than 350 different basic-, vocational and special vocational qualifications to choose from in different fields. They are aimed at the development and updating of skills in your own vocational field. Other shorter additional training Non-qualification-based training is shorter in duration (4-12 months), deepens and expands vocational skill and allows the student to acquire special expertise. You can find out more about apprenticeship training in your own area by looking at the website of your local apprenticeship office. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Guest op-ed contributor Scott Shane is a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western Reserve University. He writes about entrepreneurship and innovation management, among other things. How many entrepreneurs are there in the U.S.? The statistics show that the number is somewhere between 50 and 84 million. Before you think this is the beginning of a joke about economists, permit me to explain. The number of U.S. entrepreneurs depends a great deal how you define "entrepreneur." At the broadest end of the spectrum, some people call anyone who would prefer to be in business for themselves an "entrepreneur." Extrapolating to the U.S. labor force from a recent Gallup survey of a representative sample of U.S. adults about their preference for self-employment, I estimate that more than 84 million Americans would prefer to work for themselves than for someone else. Related: Seven Ways Solopreneurs Can Grow a Home Business Of course, most of them haven't done anything to achieve this goal. And a pretty portion of the labor force has other desires they haven't yet achieved, like becoming a multimillionaire. So maybe we want to go with something a little more than what Americans would prefer. What about actually having a business? There were more than 27 million small businesses in the U.S., according to a Census Bureau estimate from 2008, the latest year that data are available. But many of those businesses don't employ anyone. And some people say that you can't be an entrepreneur if you've never met a payroll. So maybe we need to limit our numbers to businesses that have employees. The Census Bureau reports that there were just shy of 6 million small businesses with employees in 2008. Related: How to Make Employee Training a Winning Investment Of course some might ask: How old can a company be before it's no longer a start-up, and its founder is no longer an entrepreneur? Some small businesses are 100 years old and their founders are long dead. So perhaps we want to put a limit on how old a small business can be before we have to give up counting its founder as an entrepreneur. Census data show that around 1.9 million small businesses are less than five years old. Okay, but some people say that continuing to run a business that has already been started isn't entrepreneurship. Starting a business is really what should count here. If we limit entrepreneurship to new businesses with employees started the last year, we are down to a little over 400,000 companies. Now it's true that anyone can start a business. What many people think makes a person an entrepreneur is running a start-up successfully. Since Census data show that only about 230,000 new businesses with employees that are started every year survive to age five, perhaps we want to limit the term "entrepreneur" to those people who manage to keep their businesses going that long. But some people think just keeping a business alive isn't enough to earn the label "entrepreneur." The company has to have some healthy revenue after five years for the founder to earn the right to use the term. If we limit ourselves to only those new employer businesses that have $500,000 or more in annual sales five years after starting we are down to about 86,000 companies. Of course, generating $500,000 in annual sales five years after starting won't get you on the cover of many magazines with the caption "this is a true entrepreneur." That honor is usually reserved for people who really grow their businesses. Maybe we should limit the label to those founders whose businesses achieve the level of sales that many accredited business angels think is attractive -- $10 million in five years. That brings us down to less than 4,000 new companies started every year. Related: A Lesson in Growing Your Brand from the 'Pawn Stars' But many of our VC friends don't think much of the angels' target of $10 million in sales in five years. They are looking for companies that can reach $50 million in sales in five years. If we limit the term "entrepreneur" to the people who reach that goal, we are down to less than 500 new companies started every year. And then there's going public. A lot of people would agree that a person who can take a start-up public really is an entrepreneur. But there aren't too many of them around. Last year 94 companies went public in the U.S. last year, excluding American Depository Receipts, according to finance professor Jay Ritter of the University of Florida, who maintains initial public offering records. We should also knock this number down a little. Some of these IPOs were old companies. Others were buyouts. Still others were founded by people outside the country. Do that and we can safely conclude that last year about 50 under-20-year-old-non-buyouts founded by Americans went public. Clearly people define "entrepreneur" differently, which leads to the wildly varied estimates of the number of entrepreneurs in the country. This is a problem for several reasons, but let me just give you one. Suppose you want to design a policy to help "entrepreneurs." What kind of program you design depends on your definition of the term -- a program to help the 84 million people who would prefer to be self-employed is going to look very different from one to help the founders of young companies that just went public. Identifying the "correct" definition matters a lot less than simply getting agreement on what the term "entrepreneur" means. We can't have a meaningful discussion of how to help entrepreneurs, how successful entrepreneurs are, the contribution entrepreneurs make to the economy, or a host of other topics if we all define the word differently.
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Who qualifies as an entrepreneur?
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