Do You Think Like an Entrepreneur?

An entrepreneur is someone who has decided to take control of his future and starts his own business. Entrepreneurs often start with nothing more than a good idea and a lot of determination. Entrepreneurs are all around you, in fact, thereís a good chance that you're a budding entrepreneur.

As a business and marketing trainer to hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs and someone who has a proven track record of growing successful businesses from scratch since the 1980s, including Six Elements (a home staging & interior redesign firm), I developed the following simple quiz to help others gauge their ability to think like an entrepreneur.

1. You get a business referral for a project in your area. You know the potential client has your contact information.

Do you:

a) Wait to hear from the potential client and assume they hired someone else if they don't contact you?
b) Wait a week to contact the client so they won't think you're too desperate?
c) Contact them immediately to introduce yourself and express your interest in learning more about their project and how you can help them?

2. You discover there are other competing companies in your area.

Do you:

a) Assume the market is saturated and give up your dreams?
b) Decide to go into business anyway and charge less than the competition because you're just starting out?
c) Research the size of the market and evaluate whether that sounds like enough potential work for you and your competitors? (If you're an aspiring home stager, for example, this would mean researching how many homes are for sale in your area over a year and dividing that by the number of home stagers you can find.)

3. You invest in your own web site. After less than two months, you've only had one project.

Do you:

a) Decide the Internet is a bad way to promote your business and take down your website?
b) Decide to run a newspaper ad or send flyers door-to-door instead?
c) Evaluate whether you web site has had any traffic. If it has, you try to determine whether there is anything you can do to encourage more of the visitors to actually contact you?

4. You've been in business for several months but you don't have as much business as you'd like.

Do you:

a) Sit at home and wait for the phone to ring?
b) Spend hours discussing your lack of projects and hoping someone will give you the "quick and easy" solution to building your business?
c) Research marketing tactics, business building ideas and strategies for dealing with the "slow times" and take action to change your situation?

I listened to a very interesting teleclass this week. The topic was the shared characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. One of the characteristics was a "sense of urgency around achievement". In other words, entrepreneurs don't wait for success to happen. They take action to make it happen, and they treat their business as a main priority not something to get around to sooner or later.

As you might have guessed, you are thinking like an entrepreneur if you answered "yes" to all the questions above. Could you identify with these choices? If so, congratulations . . . You just might be a future entrepreneur.

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Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements and creator of The Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. Debra has staged hundreds of homes and uses her expertise to train others worldwide. Visit her at http://www.stagingdiva.com and http://www.sixelements.com