Willingness to Take Entrepreneurial Action

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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.

Making quality entrepreneurial decision will require using different information sources. Here are some of the most important 27 information sources for your business decisions.

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.

You can read more about the need for quick decision and the speed of the decision-making process on the quality of the decisions you will make in Importance of quick decision making.

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.

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 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.

The decision-making process should bring you as much as possible self-confidence in you. Analysing the problems, and collecting and analyzing data regarding the problem will need to increase your self-confidence related to the action you need to take to solve the problem. Read more about how you can use the cause and effect diagram to solve business problems.

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.

So, you will need to increase your knowledge through appropriate learning and study of the problem in the decision-making process. Here are 5 strategies you can use to increase your business knowledge fast.

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 who is still unprepared for that type of actions. In such a way you will delay implementing the action.

The decision-making process must eliminate the lack of experience to implement the decision. So it will need to enable including the right people in the right places. Here is how you can start a business with no experience.

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.

If in the process of decision making, the decision is supported by quality information, then the possibilities of mistakes will be much smaller. Here are 10 mistakes that every entrepreneur is quite likely to make.

5. Risk

There will always be possibilities for risk for each decision and any entrepreneurial action. 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.

If the decision-making process was supported by quality information, you will keep the risks to a minimal level. First, you need to know how much risk you can tolerate and use the following risk management guide.