The traits of business founders

What makes a successful founder? It’s a difficult question to answer, but with the help of various guests from the Best Work podcast, cord has collected some ideas and insights as to which traits and abilities shape successful business leaders.

To begin with, as Juan discovered when he attended a start-up incubator, one aspect that shouldn’t be viewed as consequential is personality type.

Instead, we’ll look here at three cultivable traits, which can be aspects of anyone’s character, that do seem to provide significant advantages to business founders that nurture them.

Resilience

Running a business successfully is an enormous challenge. It poses constant challenges to be overcome, and frequently consumes the whole of a founder’s energy and attention.

As such, resilience is required in order to weather the storms, and to ensure that a start-up can survive through tough periods. Rami’s investors compare this ability to survive in all sorts of challenging environments to that of a cockroach:

Always learning

Because the challenges a business founder faces are constantly changing, founders themselves have to be able to adapt rapidly. It is no surprise, therefore, that many successful founders are avid learners, always looking to increase the range of tasks and subjects they’re familiar with.

Following a distinguished academic career, Sasha’s primary driver was to continue learning. However, so great and varied are the demands of running a start-up, that she maximised her learning potential by founding her own business, rather than staying in research.

Chen had already started one reasonably successful business, but felt he needed to learn more about how to scale a company beyond a certain size - so he took a position as an employee of a scaling company to experience this growth in action.

Clear-minded

Tackling a business problem requires clear focus. Especially in the early days, a fledgling start-up will demand enormous energy and time inputs from its founders. If any of this energy is wasted, the consequences for the business can be critical. Additionally, the most successful start-ups set out to solve a specific problem for its users. In a crowded field with no established brand, clarity of focus is essential to convey the value proposition to potential customers.

Megan found that her own business benefitted greatly from narrowing the field she was attempting to address.

It benefits founders for this problem space to be a field that they are particularly passionate about themselves; all the more readily will they be able to summon the energy and perseverance that running a start-up will require.

No one-size

Some of the character traits that can help founders be successful are resilience, a desire to learn, and clarity of thought and judgement. Despite our inclination to think otherwise, all of these are cultivable traits: see, for example, The art of resilience.

What this means is that no-one is precluded from being an entrepreneur. There is no one-size-fits-all definition of a successful founder. Different personality types and experiences can all lend themselves to founding and running a business, as long as the person is willing to invest the time needed to develop resilience, a love of learning, and clarity of thinking.