What Is a Serial Entrepreneur?

Ever wondered what it takes to launch multiple successful businesses? This guide will take you through all the steps to understand what serial entrepreneur is, how they manage their businesses, their character traits, and the pros and cons of serial entrepreneurship.

What is a serial entrepreneur?

Most people have great business ideas, but few ever muster the courage to follow through and try to actualize them into successful business ventures. These individuals are referred to as wantrepreneurs.

There’s a small percentage of individuals that will go ahead to assemble the resources necessary to start their businesses. These people are entrepreneurs, and they have distinct characteristics that distinguish them from wantrepreneurs. The most significant difference being their resolve and passion for wanting to see their ideas come to fruition.

It is an arduous journey, from the conception of an idea to the establishment of a thriving business. Some of the handful that tries it end up wiped out emotionally, physically, and financially due to their efforts. Ultimately, it is part of the risk involved in pursuing a dream.

It takes a different set of qualities to want to go over the whole process of launching a successful business over and over. That is where serial entrepreneurs differentiate themselves from entrepreneurs. While most business owners are content with a single idea, sticking with it over the long term, serial entrepreneurs never settle for one or two businesses.

In the next section, we’ll go through the characteristics that these types of entrepreneurs possess that enable them to establish many profitable businesses. Including how they manage to run several organizations – sometimes concurrently – and, most importantly, how you may develop these traits to launch those business ideas you’ve been sitting on for so long.

Who is a Serial Entrepreneur?

Definition

As defined by the Oxford Dictionary, an entrepreneur is someone who “makes money by starting and running a business,” while the meaning of the word “serial” is “doing the same thing, in the same way, several times.” In combination (Serial Entrepreneur), these words mean someone who makes money by establishing and operating many successful businesses. The term ‘successful’ is important in this definition since establishing many businesses that fail does not constitute someone a serial entrepreneur.

The businesses don’t need to be started and run concurrently. Sometimes, the business owner might come up with a money-making idea, launch the business, scale it, and exit before moving on to the next venture. Either way, as long as someone has more than a couple of successful ventures to their name, they qualify to be referred to as serial entrepreneurs.

In addition, serial entrepreneurs are highly innovative people with special skills crucial to assembling all the ingredients necessary to start a business, implementing them, and scaling the venture to profitability. It may seem like a simple task to outsiders, but the mere fact that only a handful of these multiple-business founders are successful suggests that it may not be as easy as it looks.

How Do Serial Entrepreneurs Manage Multiple Businesses?

Two ways in which anyone can launch multiple businesses are individually or through a strategic partnership. For a serial entrepreneur, the latter often makes more sense since it’s improbable that one person can be well versed enough in multiple fields to identify opportunities.

Partners bring the necessary intimate knowledge and skills to thrive in a new field while also acting as co-managers for the enterprise, an arrangement that is advantageous to both parties. The serial entrepreneur would leverage the venture partners’ knowledge and experience in the new industry while they (partners) leverage the founder’s experience in launching businesses. Together, they can also manage the business and, optionally, serve the company as employees.

For the partners, combining efforts with the entrepreneur gives them access, not just to vast business connections and financial resources, they also get to tap into the entrepreneur’s skills of turning ideas into successful ventures. It is a symbiotic relationship.

For a small enterprise, a few partners may be enough to supply the required manpower to run the business. However, for medium to large companies, serial entrepreneurs have to employ people to which they will delegate their responsibilities. This way, they can get as much work done across their multiple businesses without sacrificing their efficiency.

Sometimes, business owners take a complete back seat to managing their ventures and delegating the daily management duties to the executive team members. A serial entrepreneur could retreat and take up only the role of a director, which is a less active role compared with managing the business, which frees up more of their time to dedicate to other ventures.

Characteristics of Serial Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs can be described using a particular set of qualities to which their success can be attributed. It takes a special kind of person to become a serial entrepreneur, and some of their characteristics are shared with single-business founders. These qualities include the

following:

• Passion – it takes a lot of zeal and zest to attempt to overcome most of the challenges that an entrepreneur faces when launching and running a business. To want to do it over and over again, serial entrepreneurs need to be passionate about what they do, and this can be easily seen in how they talk about their ideas. Additionally, these individuals need to be passionate enough that it becomes infectious to everyone they engage with, which will help when seeking financial support and hiring a management team to run the business.
• Curiosity – there are several business opportunities around us all the time, but few people take an interest in exploring them. Serial entrepreneurs have a knack for asking questions and understanding why things are the way they are. Asking and exploring ideas leads to business opportunities. Their curiosity isn’t just limited to ideas but also people, which helps them identify the right people for the right roles.
• Charisma – serial entrepreneurs have a way of attracting the right people and getting them interested in their ideas. They are often radiating with confidence, ideas and are generally great people with which to associate. Given that they are curious and interested in other people and their environment, they get to discover ideas that they can share with those around them. People are always attracted to industrious people.
• Intelligence – it takes a certain kind of above-par intelligence to be able to handle all the tasks that a serial entrepreneur has to handle. We don’t mean genius levels of intelligence, but to be able to coordinate functions, manage people, raise funds, maintain social lives outside business is mentally challenging and can easily overwhelm the average business person.
• Emotional agility – Dr. Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School describes emotional agility as someone’s ability to “experience their thoughts and emotions and events in a way that doesn’t drive them in negative ways, but instead encourages them to reveal the best of themselves.” Serial entrepreneurs have to manage potentially negative emotional situations such as business failures, tough competition, rejections, not achieving goals, etc. They have to do this and maintain a positive attitude.
• Innovative – coupled with their curiosity, serial entrepreneurs are all about solving problems within their environments. Sometimes they come up with innovative solutions that lead to business ventures that are so unique that they lack direct competitors.
• Excellent time management – we’ve mentioned some of the tasks a typical multiple-business owner has to get done every single day. It will be nearly impossible to do these things without a disciplined mindset which includes effective time management skills.

These characteristics of a serial entrepreneur are not conclusive. As we mentioned before, they also share a lot of qualities with single-business entrepreneurs, including risk-taking, persistence, and being visionaries.