The EntrepreneurApp – YOU are your business

Aobakwe K. Sentle Aobakwe Sentle is Founder and CEO of BluStreak Consulting, A StartUp Consulting Company. He is CoFounder of Newline Accounting Services and Also Co-Founder of DropSocial -A digital Marketing Company.

When we run businesses, we have to understand that the person that we are will influence how we operate. YOU are an integral part of your enterprise and your actions or lack thereof, will determine your outcomes directly.

Your personal practices will always reflect on the way you do things and it is critical that we know ourselves, our strengths and weaknesses. Doing a personal audit will help us focus on what we know best and hone it while paying attention to what we seem to be poor at and finding ways to deal with it. Psychologists have done a great job in their work with coming up with different classifications of personalities of which the most ubiquitous is the Big 5 personality traits.

The big 5 personality traits seek to describe what we are most excited by and what comes easy to us and what we dare never do. They reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings and behavior. Conscientious people tend to behave careful in their behavior and thought. They are always on time and tend to follow rules more closely. When you fall in this class of personality traits, you will do well in planning and organizing functions of your business such as budgeting and you ought to be happy about this. However, you will not do very well in activities that require an openness to experiences, tasks that require the ability to welcome new ideas more freely as you tend to be more rigid in nature. Openness on the other hand will make the person display attributes opposite to conscientiousness where you will have low scores in analytical skills which are integral parts of your business but be very strong in creative thinking accepting news ways of doing things and welcoming other people’s ideas.

Furthermore, we have extraversion, a personality trait that includes people who are talkative and possess a ‘life of the party’ character in them. While these people can be good at making new connections doing business pitches to customers, they have within them the low point of being calm and quiet which means they will not fare well in tasks that need focus and attention to detail. They might not like to participate in a strategy session that requires them to sit and listen. They might unable to make analytical emotionless judgements, which are needed in most business cases.

In addition to the above traits, we can have a personality commonly known as agreeableness and one called neuroticism. An agreeable person gets along with other people easily and are good natured people but not quite excellent with leading and leadership roles as they require a firmness to them. Neurotic people are the ones constantly worried about the small details and feeling nothing is ever enough.

In conclusion, knowing who you are as a person is crucial for your business because the information clearly spells what you struggle with and what will be easy for you. Equipped with this knowledge with this knowledge from self-assessment we can make decisions to train our minds and selves or get partners who complement who will complement us thereby leading our enterprise to success.