How to Make It as an Entrepreneur

Ideas can always be improved upon and knowledge can always be gained. Having business sense does not ensure the entrepreneur will see the project through to the end.

For Steve Replin, professor, lawyer and author, who has been funding and advising start-ups and growing businesses for over 30 years, passion is at the heart of what it means to have an entrepreneurial spirit:

“There is nothing more important than good old passion, focus and commitment. If there is nothing that you would rather be doing than what you are doing, then it will not be work but rather following your dream. I’ve seen those who have this passion succeed regardless of education and obstacles, and those who don’t have it, struggle to find themselves continually. Anything else is merely ancillary that can help, but only if you are ‘all in.’”

Anecdotal accounts tend to highlight passion and perseverance over business sense. Take, for example, an enterprising university student looking to make some extra cash tutoring who ends up starting a business that is later sold when she graduates, or a teenager with a love for programming who writes a million dollar smartphone app, or a single mother who develops an innovative solution to childcare needs and decides to turn it into a business.

Simply put, entrepreneurs pursue options that allow them to turn their ideas into action. The tricks of the trade are picked up on a learn-as-you-go basis. It’s not business sense, but passion and perseverance as the largest driving forces to be a successful entrepreneur.

Surviving the Learning Curve

Aspiring entrepreneurs come with a variety of backgrounds and skillsets that do not always match what is required to be successful in the market. This is where business sense plays its greatest role. Without proper knowledge of how to commercialize an idea or concept, the venture will fail to get off the ground. But while business sense is a valuable asset for an entrepreneur to have, such a deficiency can be overcome by choosing the right advisors.

Think about the underlying premise of shows like Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank: people who have dedicated many years of their lives to making their dreams a reality seek financial resources and strategic help from entrepreneurial leaders; they team up precisely to have access to insight and opportunities they didn’t have on their own.

Yet seeking out such help isn`t necessary. What is important is being aware of opportunity and being able to act on it when such opportunity arises.

That is why the focus of institutions and consulting firms dedicated to advising entrepreneurs is to provide an understanding of what is involved in being an entrepreneur, how they might acquire and protect the resources that will allow them to pursue their venture, and how to turn their concept into a marketable product or service.

According to Dr. Philip Walsh, director of the Ryerson Entrepreneur Institute, the main goal is to teach the entrepreneurial process of “idea generation and development, market assessment, idea valuation, intellectual property protection and idea deployment strategies.” Entrepreneurs are given the tools to enable them to pursue their projects.

While these skills are helpful, he pinpoints that the most common essential indicator of entrepreneurial success “is the passion required to work hard over long periods of time with the possibility of failure hounding you. In some cases failure becomes inevitable but the entrepreneur’s passion for their idea allows them to treat the failure as a contribution to their learning curve and they innovate further and move on… This passion contributes to a positive approach and a willingness to take risk.