Willingness to take entrepreneurial action is one of the essential characteristics of a successful entrepreneur because without actions you can’t be an entrepreneur.
In the previous post titled as entrepreneurial success factors one of the essential factors in the hierarchical structure of factors that make an entrepreneur be a successful entrepreneur is the willingness to take entrepreneurial action.
You will always need to take actions as an entrepreneur. Probably it will be on a daily basis. So, your job as an entrepreneur will require from you many entrepreneurial activities and actions that will need to be done on a regular basis.
Let’s Start With a Definition of Entrepreneurial Action
Simply, an action is something that a person can do and are doing to make changes happen in his close and broader environment.
For example, you walk, talk, eat, drink… Each of these actions will bring some changes in your body, but also they can have effects on your family, your kids or everything else that is related to you in a particular situation in which you take some actions.
On the other hand, entrepreneurial actions are actions that will have some entrepreneurial activities. For example, starting a business, investing in something, expanding the business, improving the business, marketing products or services… All of these are different types of entrepreneurial activities.
All entrepreneurial action taking processes are composed of two steps:
- First step: Deciding to take an entrepreneurial action.
- Second step: Implementation of the decision that you have made in a previous step related to the specific action.
Making Decisions About Entrepreneurial Action
If you as an entrepreneur, have decided to take an entrepreneurial action, you will be on half of the full action implementation.
This is the most important element in this process. Why is it important? Simply because if you, as an entrepreneur, don’t decide to take a particular action, the action will not happen. That’s the fact. You need to decide to do something and then do that. This is the logical process of taking action.
The faster is the process of decision-making, the faster the process of overall action-taking.
The better the process of decision-making, the better will be the implementation of a specific action related to that decision.
The speed of decision making and the quality of the decisions
However, on the other side, you need to be aware that the speed of the decision-making process will affect the quality of the decision. So, you must optimize the process if you want to achieve the best results for each entrepreneurial action you are doing.
Usually, you can implement the decision-making process in the following steps:
- First step: Problem discovery.
- Second step: Collection of information about the already discovered problem.
- Third step: Preparing different types of alternative solutions.
- Fourth step: Analyzing and evaluation of each of the alternative solutions.
- Fifth step: Selecting the optimum solution – which in our case will represent entrepreneurial action.
Implementation of the Decision Related to Entrepreneurial Action
When you already know what you need to do, you will also know all other necessary steps for particular entrepreneurial action.
However, this subprocess can quickly become a reason for the failure of the whole action taking process. If you don’t implement the decision, there will not be an entrepreneurial action.
Once you decided to take any action, you must implement that decision without additional thinking or hesitation. Thinking will finish the process of decision making. This is the end of the story.
What Will Impact You on Your Entrepreneurial Actions?
Several elements will affect an entrepreneur to take an entrepreneurial action. Some of these elements are reflected in our key factors of successful entrepreneurs (self-confidence, experience, knowledge, and risk).
1. Self-confidence
When your self-confidence regarding action you need to take is higher, then there is more probability that you will take that specific action. Otherwise, when self-confidence is low, the probability that you will take those actions will also be low.
2. Knowledge
Interestingly, your self-confidence is based on your knowledge. If you have more knowledge about the specific topic related to your action, the larger self-confidence you will have. On the other side, if the knowledge for the specific problem that needs to be solved with your entrepreneurial activities is larger, the solution will be much easier.
3. Experience
If you have enough experience with the specific entrepreneurial activities and actions related, you’ll be more able to take those actions. Otherwise, when you don’t have enough experience, you will feel like someone still unprepared for that type of actions. In such a way you will delay implementing the action.
4. Fear of Failure and Consequences If You Made a Mistake
The possibility of mistakes will always be around you, regardless of what type of entrepreneurial actions you will take. So, it is normal for you to have a fear of making a mistake. However, the biggest mistake can be if you don’t take anything as entrepreneurial action.
5. Risk
For each decision and any entrepreneurial action, there will always be possibilities for risk. The risk will occur when you go out of your comfort status quo situation. On the other side, each decision and entrepreneurial action will directly hit your comfortable position. Because of that, the risk will be a consistent ingredient in the whole process.
