In today’s turbulent corporate world, there’s no guarantee of business success for start-ups.

Indeed, generally speaking, they have a high failure rate.

In the UK, according to research by Fundsquire, a global start-up funding network, 20% of small businesses fail in their first year – and around 60% within the first three years.

To understand this negative trend, you could do worse than examine the key traits and personality types required of business owners.

Being a small business owner isn’t for the faint hearted - it takes a lot of passion, determination, motivation, and the ability to learn.

Starting a business requires a certain set of skills, talent, knowledge, and business acumen.

But beyond this, small business owners also need to develop other

traits — and often very quickly.

They must be willing to take risks and learn to adapt to changing priorities quickly. Sometimes that means taking three steps forward and two steps back.

In a key speech, famed civil rights activist Martin Luther King Junior once said: “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” 

Making mistakes is inevitable.

But the wisdom of some of the greatest entrepreneurs has shown that mistakes are just as important as the things you get right. Moreover, mistakes can actually present some of the best opportunities for growth.

This is where one key business trait comes in – resilience.

But whilst you might have heard this word ‘resilience’ banded about in business, what exactly does it mean?

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) - a worldwide federation of national standards bodies – defines resilience as: 'The ability of a business to absorb and adapt in a changing environment to enable it to deliver its objectives and to survive and prosper.'

Quite simply, resilience is the ability to learn from your setbacks and mistakes.

Resilient small business owners learn how to turn mistakes into opportunities. They learn to look past the immediate setbacks and keep their eyes firmly on the long-term goal.

The details of the setback or the finer points of the mistake don’t matter. Instead, what matters is how business owners deal with those setbacks and keep moving forward.

In conclusion, successful small business owners understand the true meaning of resilience.

They work hard every day to keep the forward momentum going - all the while keeping their eyes firmly on the prize.

Look out for my next blog in this series – “Why is resilience important in today’s business world.”

If you’d like to explore the subject of resilience more deeply, please contact me via Email: russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk