6 Traits Of Profitable Entrepreneurs (Shared By Actual Founders)

[ad_1] by BLACK ENTERPRISE Editors December 7, 2025

Entrepreneurs face their share of challenges, and whereas not each enterprise succeeds, understanding what drives success can assist you.

Small companies are a vital a part of the economic system, creating jobs, disrupting industries, and offering modern items and companies to the general public. That stated, small enterprise growth comes with inherent threat for entrepreneurs. It takes greater than a good suggestion and a marketing strategy to succeed.

Entrepreneurship comes with its share of challenges, and whereas not each enterprise succeeds, understanding what drives success can assist you flip a enterprise thought into a longtime firm. Shopify talked with profitable founders about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Some expertise, like drawback fixing, you possibly can develop; others, like ardour, come from inside.

1. Imaginative and prescient Having a transparent imaginative and prescient of what you wish to obtain helps you lay the muse for what you are promoting thought, your product, the issue you’re fixing, and your total model identification.

“Readability of imaginative and prescient, to me, is determinative of which manufacturers will succeed and which don’t resonate with individuals,” says Becca Millstein, cofounder and CEO of premium tinned seafood firm Fishwife. “In the event you can’t articulate your imaginative and prescient, it is going to be actually laborious creating one thing that individuals join with and perceive.”

Placing collectively a imaginative and prescient assertion can assist you articulate why you’re doing what you’re doing, each to your self and to your workforce, prospects, and buyers.

Preserving your model imaginative and prescient high of thoughts can also be equally vital as you scale what you are promoting. As helmet model Thousand grew, founder Gloria Hwang delegated components of the enterprise, together with the product roadmap. However when she began seeing merchandise that strayed from her preliminary imaginative and prescient, she knew she needed to belief her intestine and realign expectations.

“We weren’t placing out issues that I used to be tremendous pleased with. We had been making iterations on merchandise,” Hwang says. “What was actually fascinating about taking again over the product roadmap is I actually oriented our workforce round how Thousand began.”

2. Resilience Failure is part of success. That is very true in entrepreneurship. Each new enterprise includes some threat, irrespective of your funding and prior expertise. Sudden challenges can and can come up. Suppliers might allow you to down; a brand new product could also be a flop; prospects might complain; a rent might not work out; a enterprise relationship might crumble.

“Whether or not you compartmentalize or just develop a thick pores and skin, you must discover a technique to recover from issues actually shortly,” says Millstein. “Enterprise house owners must take care of extra battle than most individuals do. The laborious instances and laborious conversations are inevitable, so you must get comfy with them and never allow them to affect you too deeply or too personally.”

Ben Amanna, the founding father of boxing attire model Boxraw, recounts how his personal firm overcame a failed partnership take care of a well-known boxer. “That ordeal broke my coronary heart,” Amanna says on “Shopify Masters.” “I actually thought-about this man a good friend, nearly like household. It was a troublesome capsule to swallow, nevertheless it toughened me up a hell of lots. [I think of] the saying that enterprise is enterprise and to not take issues personally.”

Boxraw needed to get inventive, however the firm recovered—and in the long run, the failed deal was, as Amanna says, “the very best factor to ever occur to us. Off the again of that, we then bought one other collaboration with somebody who's his rival, and all of it labored out. Nevertheless it was positively laborious in these moments.”

3. Ardour What helps entrepreneurs keep targeted and resilient via all of the challenges? Ardour. When you could have a deep love on your firm and the work you’re doing, it helps drive your stamina for coping with laborious work, lengthy hours, and setbacks in day-to-day operations.

“I can’t think about working this difficult and staying this pushed about one thing I wasn’t completely keen about,” Millstein says. “In my view, you must be fully obsessed together with your thought and together with your firm.”

For Raquel Acosta, casually taking night lessons in ceramics impressed a ardour so robust that she finally left her job as a knowledge scientist. Her love for the craft drove her to make what she describes as a “midlife, fairly radical profession change” and begin her ceramics model Glaze Me Fairly.

“I felt the urge to do one thing with my palms,” Acosta says. “I discovered it fascinating that you might make a professional-looking product out of a bowl of mud. And the chances had been infinite. I really like the medium.”

Hwang’s ardour for helmets was born out of a private tragedy. When a good friend and mentor died in a biking accident the place he wasn’t carrying a helmet, Hwang knew she wanted to create a helmet individuals would wish to put on. The model’s identify is a reference to its mission to avoid wasting 1,000 lives by encouraging helmet use. “You'll be able to actually save lives by getting individuals to put on helmets for the primary time,” Hwang says. “And for me, that’s one of the crucial impactful issues I see in our enterprise.”

4. Confidence Dialogue concerning the confidence of entrepreneurs usually focuses on a perception in oneself, Millstein says, however she believes it’s much more important to consider in your organization’s must exist.

“I believe that is the place quite a lot of founders cease engaged on their firms and startups fail: They've an thought and so they get pleasure from it, however of their coronary heart of hearts they’re not completely satisfied that this firm must exist,” Millstein says.

In the event you actually consider in your organization as a enterprise, as entrepreneurs it’s far simpler to get prospects, staff, buyers, and different stakeholders on board.

“I knew {that a} premium, sustainable tinned fish firm completely wanted to exist,” Millstein says. “Like, there’s no query that’s going to occur, and I suppose I believed, why not be the one to make it occur? After which I simply adopted that thread.”

When searching for buyers for Suri, a sustainable electrical toothbrush model, founders Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore acquired quite a lot of no’s. Their confidence of their thought saved them going.

“I don’t assume I’ve ever believed in something as a lot as I consider on this,” Rushmore says. “I've zero doubt it’s the precise factor to do. It’s the precise factor to do for the patron. It’s the precise factor to do for the planet.” The model went on to make over $30 million in gross sales inside two years of launching.

5. Inventive problem-solving Many entrepreneurs do their homework earlier than beginning their firms. Entrepreneurs might join with different entrepreneurs and founders for recommendation, search mentors and buyers to information them, or return to highschool to acquire an MBA or different graduate diploma. However no recommendation is one-size-fits-all, and each startup will face distinctive challenges not present in a textbook. Distinctive issues require inventive options, typically on the fly.

“Nothing can actually put together you for what it's to run a enterprise enterprise till you do it,” Millstein says. “You construct your personal instructional curriculum as a founder.”

Millstein recollects an early problem when she wanted to be each inventive and resourceful to unravel issues at Fishwife. Within the firm’s first yr, she waited for a large cargo of smoked trout. However on the day slated for supply, the cannery referred to as with dangerous information associated to COVID provide delays: Not solely would the pallets of fish not be delivered that day, however they really wouldn’t be delivered for 4 months.

“I noticed this problem was really a development alternative to attach with our prospects and produce them into our journey as a small enterprise surviving via COVID,” Millstein says. “I bought on the cellphone with our illustrator and we put collectively a graphic explaining the seasonality of the fishing season within the Pacific Northwest, how the cannery was brief on employees due to the pandemic, and the way that affected us as a brand new enterprise. The response was extremely optimistic.”

6. Self-awareness You’ll juggle a number of duties as a founder. To delegate successfully as you develop, you want a clear-eyed view of your strengths and weaknesses. Some founders are glorious engineers who can construct the product, however their interpersonal talent set isn’t as robust; others could also be inventive and passionate with many modern concepts, however want a companion who’s higher at logistics and execution.

As entrepreneurs, understanding and embracing your entrepreneurial expertise will assist you to lean into your strengths as a frontrunner, determine areas the place you possibly can develop, and rent individuals who possess the complementary attributes you want.

Sisters and cofounders Sadie and Abby Bowler have grown their cruelty-free private care model SadieB with this ethos in thoughts. “To construct a enterprise, you want so many various talent units,” says Abby. “It’s so uncommon that anyone individual would have all of these talent units. And so having the precise enterprise companions and the precise workforce members who share your imaginative and prescient and share your ardour for what you’re creating, however can even convey these complementary expertise—that's when the magic occurs and you may actually construct one thing collectively.”

When Laura Thompson had the concept for Three Ships, a pure skincare model with an accessible value level, she knew she wished to construct the enterprise with a cofounder. “I beloved group initiatives,” she says. After being launched to Connie Lo via a mutual good friend, the pair immediately hit it off—due to their variations.

“I’m an introvert; she’s an extrovert. I’m a numbers individual; she’s a individuals individual,” Thompson says. “We steadiness one another out actually, rather well. And we had been additionally involved in polar reverse ends of the enterprise.”

The pair grew to become cofounders and have grown Three Ships from a bootstrapped startup to a multimillion-dollar enterprise. “I don’t assume both of us would have the ability to run this enterprise alone,” says Thompson.