Joe Abraham, the author of ‘Entrepreneurial DNA’ and the Founder of BOSI Global, seems to believe there are different types of entrepreneurs. After studying over 1000 entrepreneurs in his research Joe has concluded that entrepreneurs are different.
In his book, Joe has suggested that entrepreneurs by and large fall under four different types of entrepreneurial DNA. These in turn leverage their different and unique strengths, define their weakness and also indicate the tendencies they have. The four types of entrepreneurs are:
Builder
As the name suggests, this entrepreneur is all about building. For him or her, the type of business they are doing isn’t as important as the fact that it can be built into something scalable and strong. They tend to measure success through infrastructure. They like control over day-to-day activities and are most likely to have experience in different sectors.
They, in fact, live and breathe strategy and are brilliant in expressing their vision for the company. They also are master recruiters of talent, customers and even investors. They are experts in raising money, launching successful business and getting systems in places. However, they are extremely temperamental and driven towards high output and maybe too controlling.
Opportunist
The risk-taker, highly optimistic master promoters. A classic example would be someone who is a manager today and jumps up to intern in a digital marketing department. They generally know the right place and the right time to be there, and end up making money fast and quick. Opportunists are extremely positive people, those very few natural born sales people, and tend to take loss in their stride. However, this also makes them impulsive, and not exactly focused.
Specialist
Again the name is the key here. Specialists usual build and develop a business around a skill. This DNA generally drives them to more risk averse against selling and extremely analytical. Their businesses will be based on strong expertise and the ability to deliver will be on the basis of that expertise. Generally, they can be likened to surgeons. For specialists they like the idea that they are their own boss. They tend to be focused, methodical and obviously skilled. They generally are the ones who start a business with the vision and plan of at least 10 to 20 years. However, they are slow at taking risks and averse to taking too much risk. So expansion, diversification and growth in the space too are slow.
Innovators
Have you thought of all those businesses that started out in a garage? Well those were started out by innovators. These entrepreneurs do not plan their entrepreneurial journey, it just happens. For them it is all about the idea and what that idea can do or change. They generally are the ones to do something that they love doing and the business opportunity just pops up. Whether it was doing a basic program or working on a concept or just tinkering around.
They are the ones who want to build the next cool thing, and this is stronger than building the next cool company. They will be the creative thinkers, the one in the lab and shop, for them the operation bits of the business might be a chore. Innovators are extremely creative, find unique solutions to a problem and have the ability to get breakthroughs and even build memorable products. However, they are operationally weak, know little about management, finance and other harsher aspects of business, and they don’t really want to know either.
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