What Makes an Entrepreneur? Two Essential Characteristics

Mike Kappel
Wed, 09 Jul 2025 12:10:00 +0000
Communication-skills, Entrepreneur-characteristics, Entrepreneur-lifestyle, Entrepreneurial-success, Entrepreneurial-traits, Entrepreneurship, Passion, Starting-a-business, Starting-a-microbusiness, Startup, Startup-advice, Characteristics-of-an-entreprene

I’ve been an entrepreneur for decades and have successfully started five companies. I have also attempted to start other businesses that didn’t make it off the ground.

Most people brag about their successes, but I’ve found that failure is the best teacher. What have my previous failures taught me? That if you took all the business know-how in the world and boiled it down, you’d end up with two essential traits that all successful entrepreneurs have.

Essential Entrepreneurial Characteristic #1: Passion

Getting up and going into your business before any of your employees have arrived. Working long after everyone's all left. Going in on weekends. Losing track of what day of the week it is. Mortgaging a house to raise small business capital, then remortgaging it when you want to expand.

What possesses a person to take these kinds of risks and put in these types of hours? Passion.

Passion is an intense emotion that causes desire and enthusiasm, and it’s the most important entrepreneurial trait needed to start a business. Passion is what drove me in my earliest startups. I passionately wanted to have my own business and be my own boss. It didn’t even matter what kind of business it was, or the type of problems that came with it. I worked my corporate job during the day, but I researched all kinds of businesses at night, and tried many business ventures in the evenings and weekends. I wanted to be in business for myself so badly that I would have done almost anything—cleaned sewers, painted lines on parking lots, anything ... it didn’t matter.

But the planning and dreaming phase is only one area where passion is important. Once you take your leap of faith, passion is what will keep you working hard when the going gets tough.

Once I quit my day job, it was my passion that caused me to keep working when I was freezing cold, blurry-eyed tired, broke, alone, and without direction. It was my passion to succeed that caused me to keep going and push myself when others probably would have quit.

Unlike many entrepreneurs, I wasn’t initially passionate about the product and service that I was offering. I was, however, passionate about not failing, about staying in business, and about someday succeeding. And, my passion to succeed was so intense, that it eventually spilled over into my actual work, and I eventually became passionate about the product and service that I was offering.

©Gorodenkoff- Adobe Stock

My passion has never been about money. I’ve always had it, knew how to get it, and I almost always gave it away or spent it on others. My passion has always been about succeeding, living life on my terms, and doing something that’s worthwhile.

In fact, after I spent a few years in business for myself, I realized that the product and service I was genuinely passionate about was helping other small business owners become successful themselves. After all, the customer segment I knew best was the small business owner who passionately wanted to succeed, and so I developed products, like full-service payroll to help them realize their ambitions.

So passion is the most important characteristic an entrepreneur needs to get through the startup stages. But, once your startup business begins to pick up steam, it’s your communication skills that will take your business to great heights!

Essential Entrepreneurial Characteristic #2: Communication Skills

Good communication skills are possibly the most important skill needed for growing a business. Passion will make you work hard, but if you want to infect others with your passion, inspire them to march behind you, or convince them your product is a cut above the rest, you need to be able to communicate.

Do people like listening to you, or do you put them to sleep when you talk? Do you ramble on and on? Are you super quiet, shy, and don’t say anything? Can you speak well enough that people can understand you? Could you speak in front of an audience if necessary?

The good news is, you don’t have to be TV talk-show-host material. The bad news is, you can’t be a mouse in the corner. You need to be somewhere in the middle, unafraid to speak up, not so arrogant you can’t or won’t listen, ready to offer a pleasant smile, and above all, genuine.

If you are a good communicator, your odds of successfully organizing your business will greatly increase. And mind you, there are lots of ways you’ll have to communicate.

As for me, I’m a little more of an introvert than I am extrovert, but I can “put myself out there” in front of people when I need to. In my startup days, I was deathly afraid of public speaking. But my passion forced me to conquer those fears by speaking at 60 to 70 business conventions. Now, public speaking is much easier for me. So if you are ever asked to do any public speaking, say “yes” to the invitation. It may be painful for you, but the long-term benefits significantly outweigh the pain.

How are your writing skills? Can you write a letter? Can you spell (or at least use spell-check on a computer)? Could you write a newsletter to your customers? Is your writing interesting and engaging? Do you have the acumen necessary to sound like an authority in your field? Could you talk about accounting problems and car parts in the same paragraph, if needed?

Even if you’re not a skilled writer, remember that you can practice your writing over time. In my case, my twelfth-grade English teacher asked me, “Mike, what are you going to take in college?” When I told her “Engineering,” she said, “That’s a great choice, because you won’t have to do very much writing.” What she was really telling me was, you’re a crummy writer!

She was right. So I went to engineering school, and I only had to take one technical writing class in all four years. But, even though I hated writing, my professor, Kaye Horr, taught me how to write. And eight or nine years later, in my startup, I forced myself to write a 20-page weekly newsletter for my customers every single week for eight years!

Summing It Up

So, as long as you are verbally engaging, the writing can follow. In fact, blogging is the perfect opportunity and place to practice your writing. Blog about your business and your experiences. Besides improving your writing skills, blogging will help you market your business, as Google loves authoritative content written by an expert in their field.