Assessing your entrepreneurial skills is important before starting your journey as an entrepreneur. These are the questions to ask yourself:

• What is motivating me to start this business?
• Am I prepared to live up to the demands of the business?

To achieve self-motivation, your entrepreneurial journey has to suit your personality and temperament. It is essential that you have a solid grounding and a basic sense of why you are investing your time and energy in this venture. Take a minute to clarify your goals for your business? Wealth? Legacy? Social impact? Work-life balance?

Everybody is not cut out to be an entrepreneur. Therefore before launching into business, assessing your entrepreneurial skills is necessary to see if you have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. These are what we call the personality characteristics of entrepreneurs.

Dr. McClelland describes an entrepreneur as having a “dominant psychological drive to achieve”. The entrepreneur must be result-oriented and emphasise output rather than input. The output or result is the goods or services, which get exchanged for money. Input must lead to output/service offered to customers because there is nothing like something (money) for nothing in business. The following are the characteristics of entrepreneurs:

1. A burning desire to be in charge of whatever they find themselves doing: They desire to be in charge, control available resources, and achieve self-determined goals. They create and use the resources and opportunities available to them.

2. They have an appetite for moderate risks: They take calculated risks. They do not take all available risks that present an opportunity for making money. Entrepreneurs hardly gamble. They work for their money or make their money work for them. They can think through projects and only embark on them if they are convinced that the goal is achievable.

3. Belief in personal success: Entrepreneurs believe in themselves and their ability to make informed decisions. They have staying power and keep on with their decision despite criticism and discouragement until they succeed.

4. Entrepreneurs are not discouraged by failure: They pick up the pieces when they fail. They get up and move on. They know that you can go up unbelievably fast as an entrepreneur, but you can also go down equally fast. This is because they have a high level of energy relative to the average person.

5. Entrepreneurs are adventurous: They are always looking for business opportunities that will materialise with minimum delay or in the near future. They are more concerned with what might happen tomorrow than what happened yesterday.

6. Entrepreneurs have organisational skills: They can identify the right people for the right job. They know that the effective deployment of people to the job they are best suited to will lead to accomplishing set objectives. In this regard, entrepreneurs know their own individual strengths and weaknesses and thus, hire people with qualities they lack, be it skills or knowledge.

7. Entrepreneurs are driven by the desire to make and multiply money: Accumulating money is important because it is a symbol of power and achievement. However, the way to make money is to render services. When you render service or provide the need of customers, money will be earned.

It’s never too late to assess your entrepreneurial skills, acquire relevant knowledge and/or skills and create indelible impact.