19 Winning Habits of a Successful Entrepreneur (2024)

To be successful as an entrepreneur, there are unique attributes you must exhibit consistently. While the entrepreneurship journey isn’t an easy or straightforward one, there are unique habits that set successful business owners apart and keep them going all the time.

Beyond being a disciplined and hardworking set of individuals, they are persistent, dedicated, result-oriented and positive-minded.

In this post, we explained the 19 winning habits of a successful entrepreneur you should know.

1. Build a circle of highly motivated people

Successful entrepreneurs are usually highly motivated individuals. However, beyond that, you need to build a circle of motivated individuals, too. These are, most times, the people who would gear you up and help you achieve growth in your worst moments.

While they could be individuals or business owners within your industry, they could also be people from a different field. Preferably, they should be intelligent, proactive, positive and result-oriented. Consider people who are doing well in business and be ready to build a long-term healthy relationship with them.

2. Develop money management skills

Before starting a business, one of the important skills to learn is money management. And even when your business starts thriving, you have to adequately manage your business funds to stay ahead in the industry. Inability to manage finance could lead to a business failure.

With that, you should endeavour to track all business expenses and revenue, allocate business funds only when needed, manage bank statements and records effectively, hire an accountant when necessary, and so on.

3. Be Ready to Face Competition

Whether you like it or not, there are many other business owners out there who are ready to compete with your business. With that, they provide amazing and juicy offers to attract customers.

They do all they can to improve their business strategy, stay ahead in the industry and satisfy their customers. These are the forms of healthy competition you should naturally incorporate into your business. Know who your competitors are and be ready to stay relevant and competitive in the market.

4. Be an active listener

To be successful as an entrepreneur, you must be open to suggestions, ideas, and opinions from others. When you actively listen to people, there are chances of gaining an idea from them. Rather than being the one doing all the talking, allow others to talk and objectively ruminate over their opinion.

While this is a habit everyone should emulate, you should endeavour to bring this into your business practice, especially if you already have a team or employees. By doing this, you would be able to analyse other people's perspectives, gain more experience, attract new friends and so on.

5. Create daily routine

You need to dedicate some minutes of your morning to plan out every activity that will be carried out each day. You should allocate time to everything that will be done every hour of your day and week. This way, you would be able to achieve your daily goals, which would later translate to your big goals.

You would also be able to avoid all forms of distraction, like watching TV shows or social media reels at the wrong time. While you don’t have to work all day, creating a dedicated time for every activity is key.

6. Stay healthy

One of the important habits of a successful entrepreneur is taking physical and mental health as a priority. Because entrepreneurs put in a lot of effort to achieve business goals, it is therefore necessary for them to take care of themselves and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

As such, you'd want to ensure you receive adequate feeding, sleep, exercise, fun activities, etc, as necessary. This way, you would be able to maintain a smooth and healthy work-life balance without burnout.

7. Take Calculated Risk

Making progress and being able to thrive as a business owner involves the ability to take some calculated risks. At many points in your business enterprise, you would need to make decisions that will benefit your business.

Inability to take calculated risk and decide could inhibit your business growth. While there is no 100% guarantee that a business strategy will generate results, you should be able to identify opportunities and take some reasonable risks at some points.

8. Keep track of your progress

Keeping track of your progress lets you know how far you’ve gone and what’s left to be done. Beyond setting goals and objectives, you should create a medium that helps you measure how much you have achieved, what other steps to be taken, and so on. By keeping track of your progress, you would be able to determine the little wins you’ve made in a period and celebrate them.

9. Stay Current and Relevant in your Industry

No matter the kind of industry you are in, you need to stay current, explore new things within your field, and remain relevant. With the era of tech, so many industries are experiencing a lot of changes in the way they do things. As such, you must keep ahead, identify the trends in your industry, learn the latest strategy for carrying out business operations within your industry, build your team, attend conferences, seminars, workshops and a lot more.

10. Be persistent

Persistency is a habit you cannot overlook as an entrepreneur. To be successful in your niche, you must be persistent. Entrepreneurship isn’t an easy path to take, and as such, you need all forms of motivation and encouragement to get going.

There would usually be failure, mistakes, distractions and lots more. However, the ability to persist would help you reach a favourable result in the long run. While many entrepreneurs have backed out due to one reason or the other, the successful ones are those who persist even in the face of all odds.

11. Build purposeful network

You should also be able to build purposeful networks within and outside your industry. Consider networking with other entrepreneurs within your industry. Attend events, seminars, classes, and conferences that will help you meet new people. Build your social media handles and be ready to meet individuals and businesses from there. By networking with people, you could gain more opportunities, resources and knowledge within your market.

12. Be consistent with learning new things

Successful entrepreneurs are those who are in search of more knowledge. They tend to learn new things now and then. In fact, most successful entrepreneurs dedicate some hours of their time daily to reading. As such, you must be persistent about consuming new information every day.

This could be information that is directly relevant to your business or to you as an individual. It could be about personal development, healthy living lifestyle, business strategy, growth and development, industry trends or business economy or the nation at large.

13. Develop the act of questioning

Curiosity brings about new adventures and innovations. As an entrepreneur, you should be curious and be able to question the status quo. Asking relevant questions where necessary helps understand many concepts and brings about new ideas and new ways of doing things.

The desire to learn about things makes you prepared for opportunities when you least expect them. Entrepreneurs are people who can take on new challenges, experiment with things, ask relevant questions, stay ahead in the field and lots more.

14. Time management

Effective time management is another habit to keep in mind as an entrepreneur. You would have a lot to do while growing your business. Moreover, you would also want to ensure a work-life balance. Management of your time is therefore important if you want to achieve success within a short time. You would want to allocate time for your activities daily while also creating time for leisure.

While there might also be many distractions, you would want to put off all forms of social media notifications while working. The more you can manage your time, the chances of you meeting up with your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals. As such, you could invest in software that helps you keep track of all the necessary activities to be carried out within a timeframe.

15. Set Clear and realistic goals

To be successful as an entrepreneur, you have to set concise and realistic goals to be achieved within a period of time. This way, you would make plans and create a list of things to be achieved, the steps to take to achieve them and the timeframe you’d spend. Making plans and setting goals makes it easier for you to achieve them, as you can easily track your progress and determine how far you’ve gone.

16. Do not be afraid to fail

Many entrepreneurs out there fail at some point or the other. To be successful, you must be ready to do the necessary things and take the necessary steps without having to worry so much about failure. You must, therefore, be ready to learn from every mistake made and learn from them. By identifying your mistakes and making adjustments, you will be able to achieve better results.

17. Prioritise extensive work

Successful entrepreneurs are keen to identify areas in their businesses that need rapt attention and are ready to dedicate enough time to work things out. The more effectively we are able to carry out in-depth research and cogent business activities, the higher the chances of achieving business goals.

As such, you need to recognise the aspect of your business that requires deep work and concentration and dedicate more time to it. You should always start your day with activities that need thorough concentration and are crucial to your business success. This way, you would be able to achieve a lot when the brain is still fresh and energised.

18. Grow your team

When starting a business, you might want to begin as a solopreneur; however, in the long run, when the business expands, there might be the need to employ other talents.

One common winning habit of successful entrepreneurs is the ability to identify their strengths and capacities and the courage to introduce resourceful employees when needed.

You should, therefore, value teamwork, be ready to work with others, guide and lead them when necessary, and provide an avenue for them to put their best in your business. While successful entrepreneurs are usually individuals with high accomplishments, they do not look down on the team; rather, they are open to exploring members' opinions and creativity.

19. Stay disciplined

As an entrepreneur, you are your boss and so do not have anyone to lead you around. The most you’d usually get is a mentor to guide your journey. As such, you have to be intentional about carrying out your business activities and attaining success.

Being disciplined involves doing the right thing at the right time and staying up all the time, even in the face of many obstacles. Successful entrepreneurs are those who are keyed to achieving success and show up all the time to work towards it. You might want to set reminders for all activities to be done every day, regularly review goals to see how far you’ve gone and so on.

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Conclusion

Being a successful entrepreneur involves making a conscious effort to live an impactful, highly motivated and result-oriented lifestyle. While you would usually find many failed business owners around, successful are the ones who are persistent, positive-minded, hardworking and so on. To achieve success, you should endeavour to put the 19 winning habits explained into practice.