19 Dec Successful Entrepreneurs and the Personality Trait They Tend to Share

This month, we are sharing another blog post from Eric Knam with ActionCOACH Tulsa. Eric is a certified business coach providing business help, advice, and mentoring services to small and medium-sized businesses. We’ve watched many of our business colleagues move from working IN their business to working ON their business, enjoying the perks of being the boss as a result of partnering with Eric.

Keep reading to learn more about the personality trait most successful entrepreneurs share!

What Personality Trait Leads to Success?

Ask any group of successful entrepreneurs to define the personality traits that lead to their achievements, and you’ll get several responses. They will quickly throw out words like determination, sacrifice, and hard work. Others may show a little more humility and chalk their success up to personality traits like curiosity. Still others will credit dumb luck.

However, there is one additional personality trait that many of the most successful entrepreneurs share: discipline.

They have the discipline to follow their original vision, even when they are tempted to change course. The discipline to stay true to their original product or service, even when clients start asking for different things.

The discipline to ignore the bright, shiny objects that constantly pop up and tempt them to shift their focus rather than staying true to what they originally set out to do.

Steve Jobs, the legendary co-founder of Apple, said it best: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to one thousand things.”

How the Discipline of Saying “No” Led to a 7-Figure Exit

Andy Cabasso graduated with a law degree, but never really practiced law. Instead, he co-founded JurisPage, a company that specialized in helping law firms with their marketing.

Cabasso understood the marketing services lawyers needed, and his partner, Sam Brodie, knew how to build websites that ranked on Google. Their service was extremely popular among lawyers. As a result, they also attracted the attention of other service businesses that wanted to improve their marketing and website presence.

Cabasso and Brodie considered expanding their services beyond their niche but ultimately turned down the opportunity to work with clients outside of the legal profession. They knew they had something unique to offer lawyers.

They also knew the importance of recurring revenue. They insisted that their clients use JurisPage for website hosting, creating a strong base of recurring revenue for the company.

Prospects offered JurisPage thousands of dollars to build them a website that another company could host, but Cabasso turned them down. He knew that the recurring website hosting revenue was a fundamental component of building a valuable business.

In the end, Cabasso and Brodie’s discipline paid off. They ultimately attracted the attention of Uptime Legal, an Inc. 5000 business specializing in technology and practice management software for law firms.

The two companies were a perfect fit, leading to Uptime Legal acquiring JurisPage in a seven-figure deal just three years after it was founded by Cabasso and Brodie.

So remember, while curiosity and grit are important personality traits for any would-be entrepreneur, the ability to remain disciplined in the face of opportunity may be the most important attribute of all.