There Are Five Basic Types of Entrepreneurs. Which One Are You?
Understanding how you operate gives you a better chance of success
--
It took me almost 20 years to understand what type of entrepreneur I was and how to make that work for me.
I’m not talking about mysticism and philosophy here. This isn’t Myers-Briggs personality tests and trust falls. This is about properly applying your skills to your craft.
Why it’s important to understand how you operate
I spent most of the beginning of my career thinking I wasn’t going to be good at entrepreneurism because I wasn’t like the entrepreneurs I read about or worked with. Then I spent a few years after that trying to be someone I wasn’t. All that did was make entrepreneurism, my work and my job, a lot harder than it needed to be.
Once you know how you identify with entrepreneurship, you’ll approach every problem, every decision and every initiative in a way you’re good at. In fact, you’ll approach the growth of your company in a new light.
It’s crucial for the founders and leaders of a startup to know how they operate, but it’s also just as important to identify every kind of entrepreneur you have at your company. Then you’ll understand what their motivation is and, more importantly, how they work.
Then you can get everybody working together toward the same goals.
Here are the basic five entrepreneurial types I’ve found over and over again. It’s not all of them, and of course each person is a little different, but it’s a good start.
Solution First Entrepreneurs
I’m a problem/solution entrepreneur. But more specifically, I’m a solution-first entrepreneur.
Yes, in some sense, every entrepreneur identifies a problem and invents a solution, but that doesn’t make every entrepreneur a solution-first entrepreneur.
I can identify, right now, about a hundred big problems with huge total addressable markets (TAMs) attached to them. I know. We all can. And I think I can pick out a dozen of those problems, and sketch out what I believe are viable, affordable, and attainable…
