What Type of Entrepreneur Are You? Lets Find Out!
Entrepreneurs are a rapidly growing breed in the digital age. These professionals turn ideas into reality, thanks to an extensive range of opportunities, technologies, and knowledge. Whether it’s sheer will and determination, a game-changing idea, or a particular approach to doing something, entrepreneurs play a huge role in fueling economic growth.
However, every entrepreneur is different in their capabilities, expertise, and personality. Hence, you must ensure your entrepreneurial personality matches your venture to reduce the risk of failure. You may still be successful in what you do, but won’t you rather unlock your full potential and fulfill your professional and personal desires more effectively?
If you do, then don’t go anywhere!
In this post, we’ll talk about the eight most popular entrepreneurial personality types. So, whether you’re an aspiring business owner or just curious, you can learn how to play with your strength and establish fruitful ventures.
8 Entrepreneurial Personality Types You Should Know About
1. The Utopian
Also regarded as idealists or visionaries, utopians fall under the category of entrepreneurs that aren’t motivated by power or money. Instead, their drive comes from their values. In the modern world, these entrepreneurs are typically professionals exiting the corporate world to do things better or in their way.
However, they generally don’t aim to establish counterparts of their existing organizations. Instead, most go down the non-profit or education route while others become freelancers in their fields of expertise.
Those who start new businesses value culture above everything and are more likely to hire employees that understand their vision and mission. This way, they can establish and maintain strong connections with their people. However, they’re not known to be enforcers, so they work well with more tough-minded partners to establish a sense of control and direction.
2. The Innovator
Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, etc. These are the type of people that usually come to mind when most people think of entrepreneurs. People with this personality type are behind some of the greatest inventions in the last two centuries, including the light bulb, automobiles, personal computers, and smartphones.
As a result, people with similar mindsets have dozens of ideas and are constantly thinking about large-scale revolutions. Moreover, innovators envision ways to help people or improve the world. However, unlike idealists, they don’t mind making piles of money, investing in multiple assets, and trading on the largest stock markets.
In most cases, cutting-edge technologies and solutions, research and development, and different sciences attract these professionals. However, just like Steve Jobs, they may not always be technically gifted, so they may need a Steve Wozniak to make things happen.
3. The Hustler
On the surface, hustlers are innovators who put the brains and the brawn together. These entrepreneurial personality types are hardworking and ambitious. In most cases, they work alone by starting small and growing gradually. As a result, they’re often conservative and likely to avoid any type of distraction in front of them.
A perfect example of a hustler is Oprah Winfrey. Today, she is one of the few African-American women billionaires worldwide. However, she wasn’t born rich. Instead, she was raised by a poor single mother in Mississippi. Following a tough childhood, she got a job in the radio business and later became an anchor.
Today, she owns several companies, including Harpo Inc, Waywire, Oxygen Media, and Apeel Sciences.
Hustlers have a mix of traits and attributes that make them more likely to succeed. For starters, they have an incredible work rate. Moreover, they’re more likely to overcome obstacles, rejection, and failure in one piece and start again.
However, these traits make them prone to fatigue and mental issues. Moreover, they struggle to work well with others, especially those that don’t have the same work ethic.
4. The Copycat
Also known as imitators, these entrepreneurs are perhaps the most clever entrepreneurial personalities among the ones we have listed. A great example of this personality is Raymond Croc, who turned McDonald’s into the world’s most successful fast food chain after building upon the McDonald brothers’ innovative setup.
They’re the perfect blend of hustlers and innovators who capitalize on existing business ideas or models and improve upon them with better products or services. Since they don’t start from scratch, they’re more likely to come up with new solutions fasters and benchmark their performance using the original solution.
Moreover, by refining the ideas or works of others, they can make strategic improvements, avoid mistakes, and maximize sales and revenue. However, depending on their execution, they can improve their chances of success, especially if there’s an existing market for their value offerings.
5. The Bookworm
Also known as the researcher, these entrepreneurs spend a lot of time perfecting their ideas or solutions by gathering as much information as possible. Bookworms are perfectionists in a way; they don’t believe in failure since they analyze everything they do from different angles.
Regarding sentiment, research entrepreneurs are more likely to invest in existing products or services to increase their chances of success. Therefore, they take more time to enter the market than other entrepreneurs. In most cases, time and capital aren’t issues since it’s about delivering the best value based on data and facts.
However, research entrepreneurs aren’t too big on risk-taking, intuition, or instinct. They rely heavily on data to learn about different markets and plan for several contingencies before making their moves.
6. The Traditionalist
Traditionalists are perhaps the most peculiar entrepreneurial breed. Often confused with copycats or hustlers, these entrepreneurs aren’t intrigued by innovative ideas. Instead, they believe in stability and security, which is why most stick to conventional jobs.
Most traditionalist entrepreneurs are likelier to opt for a proven product, service, or model when starting a business. For instance, instead of starting a new restaurant, they prefer buying a franchise like McDonald’s, Subway, 7-Eleven, or the UPS Store, to name a few.
Meanwhile, others are likely to start a business related to their organization or one of its key functions or departments. For instance, a Cybersecurity professional can start a managed IT security service for small businesses.
On the surface, traditionalists don’t appear creative or innovative. However, they’re incredibly disciplined, ethically sound, and hardworking. Moreover, they’re more likely to meet deadlines and plan in advance to compensate for their lack of creative skills.
Another factor that separates these entrepreneurs from others is their urge to start a business which often comes from dissatisfaction. Employees often put their hearts and souls into what they do but don’t often get the results they hope for. Therefore, they take the entrepreneurial route and gain more success from their ventures, even if they start small.
7. The Buyer
Most entrepreneurs start their ventures to improve their financial circumstances, among other things. However, some have already covered these needs. Buyers are the wealthiest types of entrepreneurs that invest in start-ups and small businesses with great potential.
In most cases, they don’t run the business themselves but hire someone with the required expertise and experience for the role. Since many of these ventures are already established, their investments are strategically less risky. Their job is to support the business in different ways to improve the products or services entering the market.
They can invest in R&D, marketing, sales, and other departments in the value chain to improve brand reputation, sales, and revenue. However, the upfront cost of this entrepreneurship type is significantly higher than starting a business from scratch.
Furthermore, a lack of expertise in a particular industry or niche could affect buyers’ decision-making, leading to conflict. As a result, many follow a stock trading approach and invest in businesses or markets they know about.
8. The Advisor
Finally, the last type of entrepreneurial personality on our list is the advisor. As the name suggests, these entrepreneurs are those looking to help others by offering their expertise or deeper knowledge in a specific area. They demonstrate their advisor role by providing consultation, public speaking, teaching, coaching, or training.
People with this personality type typically appear on TED talks, podcasts, business interviews, and other social events while running businesses or working in some of the best organizations in the market. Popular examples of advisors include Gary Vaynerchuk, Jeff Taylor, Tung Tran, and Melanie Duncan.
What Type of Entrepreneur Are You?
Becoming an entrepreneur in this post-pandemic digital age is an exciting endeavor. However, understanding your entrepreneurial personality type is crucial to reduce the chances of failure or make the journey easier.
From the above list, you can decide what type of entrepreneur you are or hope to become based on some of the traits or mindsets described. You can be more than one type as well. However, all these types have two things in common – First, none are guaranteed success, and two, they all have to work incredibly hard to gain success.
