Essential Traits: Taking the Blame

Are you cut out to be an entrepreneur? There’s a quick way to find out…

Do you blame others for what happens, or do you take extreme ownership?

The answer to this question will give you a good idea of whether or not you’ve got what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

In his book, Entrepreneurial Leap, Gino Wickman lays out the 6 essential traits of a true entrepreneur. One of them is responsibility.

Wickman says, “Responsibility is the ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization.” But what does responsibility actually look like for a real estate investor? To answer that question, meet Terry Burger.

Terry is a real estate investor, agent, entrepreneur, and the owner of Nice Guys Buying Houses in Atlanta, GA. Over the past 12 months, he’s brought in more than $1,000,000 in gross profit from just 24 deals!

You can learn more about Terry’s business at https://www.niceguysbuyingatlantahouses.com/.

Join Terry and the rest of the 7FF team at Flip Hacking LIVE, the #1 live event for impact-driven house flippers and wholesalers October 15-17, 2020, in Orlando, Florida.

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Creating A Culture of Responsibility

As the leader of a company, your team will reflect your own level of personal accountability. “If I were to shrink back from responsibility, all of my employees would act just like me,” Terry says. “We would all be pointing fingers.”

Bill agrees. “You lose so much credibility when you start blaming other people in a business, or in life. But you can gain so much by simply saying ‘It was my fault.’”

Ultimately it’s a leader’s responsibility to make sure that the right things happen. Even if a staff member makes a mistake, a responsible leader says, “I put them in that position. I set them up to fail or succeed.”

When an employee lets the team down, leaders should ask themselves a few questions…

1. Did I give this person all the resources he or she needed?
2. Did he or she understand the responsibilities?
3. Did he or she know what the outcome was supposed to be?
4. What could I have done better?

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A Responsibility to Learn

Being responsible doesn’t mean knowing it all. On the contrary, taking responsibility means being willing to learn and improve.  

“In a practical small business environment, people will hire a family member or someone who needs help, as a sympathy hire. I’ve never heard of a situation where a sympathy hire came back as a success. Most of the time it ends in complete disaster,” Terry says. “Is it not an entrepreneur’s responsibility to learn from all the other businesses who made this mistake before him or her?”

Learning from others with better mentorship, better education, and better training will speed up the success of a responsible entrepreneur.