Entrepreneurial Self-Assessment
The Business Development Bank of Canada(BDC) has a number of tools available to help entrepreneurs start or manage a business. Today I want to focus on their Entrepreneurial Self-Assessment tool.
The 50 question assessment has a range of questions including:
"Did your parents or grandparents ever own their own business? Are you often sick? Were you part of a group in high school? Are you the oldest child in your family? Are you between 25 and 40 years of age? Do you try to find the positive aspects of a bad situation?"
The answer to the questions scores you in three entrepreneurial areas 1) history, 2) attitudes and behaviors, and 3) objectives and lifestyle traits of entrepreneurs.
No questionaire is going to be able to predict your success as an entrepreneur but the BDC questionaire will give you a good sense of how well you are in or out of alignment with the traits of other business owners and entrepreneurs.
August 15th, 2006 at 11:57 am
It would be interesting to see if using one of these questionnaires as admissions criteria to graduate business programs would affect the success of graduates and ultimately boost the image of an MBA program. Do you think that questionnaires such as the BDC one would be effective screening mechanisms for graduate business programs?
It would also be interesting to see if the entrepreneurs featured on shows such as Dragons Den or The Apprentice would also exhibit these characteristics. Perhaps someone should mention it to the upcoming Dragon’s Den series to add it as an interesting side-note to their production blog updates. I know Sean, one of the Mentor Capitalists (who works with both the entrepreneurs and the VCs), keeps a nice blog on the production happenings (www.insidethedragonsden.com); it would be interesting if we could see this information on each of the entrepreneurs and watch them as they move forwards with their businesses.
August 15th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Hi Jon: Thanks for participating. I agree it would be intresting to see what the characteristics MBA, Dragons Den and others exhibit. I always approach these ‘tests’ with skepticism – too often I have seen entrepreneurs with a strong driving passion overcome all the other weaknesses. That is not to say that the BDC tool or any other are flawed – business and the economic enviroment is just not quite as predictable as we think. About a year ago I read two reports – one US and one Canadian – on the subject of business failure. I identified 13 Myths and Facts about Business Failure. You can read more about it at: http://www.sbishere.com/Community_Knowledge_Base/Business_Startup/13_Myths_and_Facts_About_Business_Failure.html