There are a few entrepreneur characteristics that you find more often in the self-made wealthy than in other homo sapiens.

Most entrepreneurs have something to prove to the world, for instance, and the few who don’t usually want to change it. ¹

And they all want to be rich, too, whatever they say – if only in that we all secretly want to be rich (even if we’re aware that there are pros and cons to being wealthy).

What about creativity? Tenacity? A head for numbers? A nose for a deal?

These supposed key traits seem to be as randomly distributed amongst entrepreneurs as Mr Potato Head pieces stuck onto spuds in a blackout.

Loathe gritty Duncan Bannatyne and would rather make money like Warren Buffett? Pick your hero and go for it.

Prefer Bannatyne’s hands-on approach to ex-Dragon Richard Farleigh’s airy-fairy theory? The world’s your deep fried Mars bar.

Types of entrepreneurs: The Visionary

Examples: Steve Jobs, Anita Roddick

Visionaries are entrepreneurs driven by a desire to change the world – and the capacity to imagine how to do so.

Vision on its own is just daydreaming, so such an entrepreneur needs other skills to make the vision a reality. Steve Jobs boasted the attention to detail of a reigning monarch, as well as a genius for design and consumers’ desires.

But it was his vision that made transformative products like the iPhone and the iTunes store, and so turned Apple into the world’s largest company.

• Key strengths: Imagination, egotism, seeing the big picture, attracting brilliant followers.

The Adventurer

Examples: Richard Branson, Donald Trump

If Richard Branson had been born 600 years ago, he’d have been a tussle-haired knight with a winning smile, eager for his next campaign.

Branson is in it for the means, as much as the ends. Obviously he likes money, but it’s an enabler and a way of keeping score. It’s the excitement of execution that gets his blood going – and when that’s not enough, he puts his life in danger some other way, such as his balloon rides.

Adventurers may boast crossover traits with other entrepreneurial classes, but they’re primarily adrenalin junkies who you couldn’t pay to give up their ‘fix’.

• Key strengths: Bravery, energy, tenacity, ‘work hard / play hard’ culture.

The Opportunist

Examples: Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne

One reason the communists never stood a chance is that nothing moves as fast as money. From market traders to multinationals, plenty of business is inspired by seeing an opportunity – a gap in the market, a product that’s a hit in a distant land – and racing to profit from it.

Alan Sugar in the 1980s is a great example of an arch-opportunist. He only got into electronics by accident, and he no more dreamed Steve Jobs’ dreams of a PC revolution than he imagined he’d shave wannabe moguls calling him ‘Sir’ on the BBC. Yet for more than a decade nobody in Britain did a better job at spotting gaps in the market and making a killing.

Opportunism doesn’t mean thinking small. At one point Amstrad commanded 25% of the European PC market!

• Key strengths: Spotting gaps, speed of execution, cost to market.

The Asset Allocator

Examples: Warren Buffett

Some people wouldn’t call Warren Buffett an entrepreneur.

But I would.

Ultimately all successful entrepreneurs thrive because they put existing resources to a more productive use for profit, whether they’re selling a job lot of fancy duvets at an East End market or combining great design and a bunch of previously unconnected bits of technology to invent the iPhone.

Asset allocators are the purest example of this – they cut out the messy production lines and marketing campaigns.

When an asset stripper flogs apart a business to create something worth more in pieces – or when Warren Buffett sees a company’s true worth before the market and directs his capital towards it – I’d say they’re adding value.

• Key strengths: Valuation, number crunching, curious, thick-skinned.

The System-iser

Examples: Henry Ford, Akio Morita

Some people are brilliant at process. Henry Ford is an obvious example, having pretty much invented the modern production line.

I think you could put a lot of creative industry wealth creators into this class, too.  Such people often think they’re visionaries, but really they’re great at turning creativity into something that runs to a schedule, and therefore can be bottled and sold.

Process is what turns brilliant prototypes into consistent profits. Every penny you can shave off every stage of the production pipeline – or every feature you can pack in that increases value ahead of your cost – builds value.

• Key strengths: Strategy and logic, attention to detail, employee management.

The Specialist

Examples: Bill Gates, Felix Dennis

Some people have a calling – a field they were born to. Luckily for them, capitalism enables the business-savvy ones to make a bucket of loot, too.

Bill Gates is a good example. Whereas it’s relatively easy to imagine Steve Jobs running Pixar, the animation house he acquired in 1986, it’s pretty hard to imagine Bill Gates watching a Pixar movie.

Jobs rose to eminence in computing partly because the number of technology-literate people who wouldn’t wear socks in sandals is vanishingly small. In the 1980s, it was close to zero. Jobs was a designer who could have turned his hand to many other different fields, albeit it less mega-successfully. Gates would have been a patent lawyer or an engineer if born a couple of decades earlier. He needed personal computers to unlock his brilliance.

This sounds a bit mean-spirited, but I don’t mean it that way. The world is full of specialists who turn their love and aptitude for a certain field or product or service into something we all rely on, from scientists to architects to artists.

They are lucky that a few can make a lot of money at it – because they’d be doing it anyway, even if they couldn’t.

• Key strengths: Dedication, motivation, knowing themselves.

The Small Business Person

Example: At a corner shop near you

There’s something belittling about the label ‘small business’ that probably begins life in the boys’ changing room at school.

Happily, in the business world size matters but it’s all relative – and having your own modestly statured company is the number one outlet for those determined to be entrepreneurs.

Many entrepreneurs would rather be top dog at a tiny company they own than to be a ‘Senior Divisional Manager for EMEA and Innovation’ at some giant.

The best franchises offer a great take on this entrepreneurialism. Few are the children who dream of selling foot-long sandwiches, cleaning drains, or supplying offices with photocopying paper. Yet plenty of people who have a yen to make money have made fortunes by implementing other people’s systems with a tenacity to terrify the competition.

The average freelancer or contractor is a small businessman or woman, too. In fact, anybody who is not working for a monthly pay slip would do well to consider themselves Me PLC, rather than as a worker for hire. As well as potentially making you more money in the short-term, it might get your mind ready for when you want to expand.

• Key strengths: Flexibility, personal relationships, stamina.

The spare room / free time entrepreneur

Example: Everywhere!

Thanks to the Internet, it’s probably never been easier to start a side business while staying in your day job.

Making a decent side income, well that’s another matter.

Even the communists at The Guardian have been running a series on being a website mogul, but in truth it’s much harder to make money blogging than it seems. eBay is also increasingly the domain of the big winners.

But there are plenty of other avenues to explore – and the harder or more specialised the better, as there’s much less competition.

Think hard about what you can bring to market. The cost of starting a side business is usually low, and even a little extra income can be worth a lot.

You probably won’t make a million, but a successful part-time business could get you on your way!

• Key strengths: Desire, time management, and caution.

Don’t forget us when you make it

Before you get carried away, please review some of the reasons NOT to start a business.

I always get nasty comments when I point them out, but survivorship bias looms large when we forget that the few famous entrepreneurs – even the hundreds of relative unknowns in the Sunday Times’ Rich List – stand on the broken backs of uncountable also-rans.

So be sure to consider your own opportunity cost.

And then do it anyway.

If you’re really an entrepreneur, that is.

Have I missed out any particularly interesting types of entrepreneur? This is a very broad church, so let’s have your ideas in the comments below! Otherwise read Felix Dennis’ How to Get Rich, which is probably the best DIY guide ever written to grubbing about for treasure.

1. This and the rest of the article is based on my fairly numerous personal encounters with successful entrepreneurs as well as copious reading. Plus the movie Brewsters Millions.[↩]

The new iPhone will likely be Apple’s best-selling model yet, not least because all the operators are offering an iPhone 4S deal.

In contrast, the early days of the iPhone saw only one UK operator touting the phone, which at least kept life simple!

So which is the best iPhone 4S deal?

I don’t plan on replacing my 3GS model – it seems like only yesterday I justified buying an iPhone, and it’s been brilliant for basic email and web access on the move. The camera is terrible, but that can wait.

However my friend A. is mad for the new iPhone 4S. He’s a tech developers’ dream. He says he’s bored to tears with his current iPhone. He likes learning all the fresh capabilities of new hardware (that I resent having to think about) and he likes his web browser to load 0.013 seconds faster.

The good news is he’s a deal hound, and he’s compared all the two-year iPhone 4S deals out there. And as he’s also a Monevator reader, he’s agreed to share his data with you!

Here are his best deals, for the 16GB followed by the 32GB model.

• All deals are for 24 months, which cuts costs compared to the 18 month deals and hopefully keeps you in sequence with Apple’s product release cycle.

• All costs are on a monthly basis. For the handset cost, the initial purchase price has therefore been divided by 24. This is the most effective way of seeing which deal is the best.

iPhone 4S deals: 16GB

	O2	Orange	Vodafone	T-Mobile	3
Model	16GB	16GB	16GB	16GB	16GB
Mins	100	100	100	100	500
Texts	500	Unlimited	500	Unlimited	5,000
Data	1GB	1GB	250+500MB*	3GB	1GB
——-
Plan	£15.50	£31.00	£26.00	£25.54	£35.00
Data	£10.00	Inc.	£5.00	£5.10	Inc.
Handset	£12.50	£7.08	£14.96	£10.00	£2.04
——-
Monthly	£38.00	£38.08	£45.96	£40.64	£37.04
Shop	O2	Orange	Vodafone	T-Mobile	3

*Vodafone 500MB bolt-on is an unadvertised option that A. had confirmed over the phone.

iPhone 4S deals: 32GB

	O2	Orange	Vodafone	T-Mobile	3
Model	32GB	32GB	32GB	32GB	32GB
Mins	100	100	100	100	500
Texts	500	Unlimited	500	Unlimited	5,000
Data	1GB	1GB	250+500MB	3GB	1GB
——-
Plan	£15.50	£31.00	£26.00	£25.54	£35.00
Data	£10.00	Inc.	£5.00	£5.10	Inc.
Handset	£16.67	£11.25	£18.29	£15.83	£5.79
——-
Monthly	£42.17	£42.25	£49.29	£46.47	£40.79
Shop	O2	Orange	Vodafone	T-Mobile	3

*Vodafone 500MB bolt-on is an unadvertised option that A. had confirmed over the phone.

Conclusion

The difference between the cheapest and most expensive 16GB iPhone 4S deal is £214 over the two years.

That’s a fair bit of money to save towards your iPhone 5G!

For the 32GB deals, the difference is £204.

Those outliers aside, I am surprised by how superficially similar all the iPhone 4S deals are once you break the costs down on a monthly basis. I suppose that is a gold star for increased competition (and a black mark against holding shares in mobile operators for the long term).

Many people won’t do too badly choosing on the basis of their preferred or existing operator. Some people may be swayed by unlimited texts or extra data.

My friend A. isn’t a fan of the cheapest option, 3, so it’ll likely be O2 for him.

If you’ve already got an iPhone or a relationship with one of these companies, then it may be worth trying to wangle a deal by calling them. Apple is pretty inflexible with its carriers, though, so I don’t know how much room for negotiation they’d have.

Negotiated a great iPhone 4S deal? Let us know below!

More Steve Jobs, then a slew of investing and money articles from around the Web.

I regret not writing a gushing post about Steve Jobs earlier this week. Instead I prevaricated and made the point that Steve Jobs’ legacy could be to put off would-be entrepreneurs who didn’t happen to be a once-in-a-generation genius.

That seems mean-spirited, considering barely a week has passed in the last ten years when I haven’t name checked the man or his products.

But really, Steve Jobs spoke for himself. So no apologies for embedding the following video of Jobs’ amazing speech to graduating Stanford students in full:

The full text of the speech from Stanford University:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

[continue reading…]