A month ago in our list of the “Top 6 Colleges with Entrepreneurial Programs” we highlighted the opportunities for the forward thinkers at Babson College in Massachusetts. Babson also happens to be the professional home of Daniel Isenberg, a management practice professor, who recently contributed to the Harvard Business Review’s “The Conversation” blog with a post titled, “Should You Be an Entrepreneur? Take This Test.” In his post Isenberg provides twenty questions that any aspiring entrepreneur should ask themselves before quitting their day job to make sure they have what it takes to succeed.
“I’ve learned in my own years as an entrepreneur — and now an entrepreneurship professor — that there is a gut level “fit” for people who are potential entrepreneurs,” writes Isenberg. “There are strong internal drivers that compel people to create their own business.”
Isenberg’s self-examination includes true/false statements like, “I don’t like being told what to do by people who are less capable than I am,” and “I would rather fail at my own thing than succeed at someone else’s.” After completing the 20-part checklist, Isenberg gives you the entrepreneurial green light if you answered “yes” to 17 or more of the questions.
According to Isenberg’s checklist, the ideal entrepreneur likes to win, likes to “question conventional wisdom”, is “rarely satisfied” and gets so excited by their ideas that they “can’t sit still”. Of course, having some entrepreneurship in your blood can’t hurt either; one of Isenberg’s signs of an entrepreneur is having members of their family or close friends who run their own business. For his final question, he suggests that a worthy entrepreneur “could have written a better test” than his.
Isenberg warns that while answering “yes” to most of these questions could mean you’d make a good entrepreneur, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should quit your job right away. “Do you have debts to pay? Kids in college? Alimony? Want to take it easy? Maybe better to wait,” he writes. Finally, he adds that risk-takers and money-seekers do not make for good entrepreneurs.
“People don’t choose to be entrepreneurs by opting for a riskier lifestyle,” writes Isenberg. “Risk is ultimately a personal assessment: what is risky for me is not risky for you.”
Can a simple checklist weed-out the true entrepreneurs with potential from the wannabes looking to make quick cash? Or is there more to one’s potential for success as an entrepreneur than these twenty attributes? Let us know what you think makes for great entrepreneurs in the comments.
