Conclusion

Based on the research, every entrepreneur has their own entrepreneur traits to achieve their goals and solve their problems in their organizations. Every single entrepreneur traits like initiative, foresight, decisive and others traits shown at above are owned by every successful entrepreneur in the world. A good example for successful entrepreneur is Howard Schultz who is the CEO and Chairman of Starbucks. If entrepreneur do not have any entrepreneur traits, these means that they would not be success in the future. Because of this, entrepreneur traits are main element for an entrepreneur to become a successful entrepreneur in the world. So, an organization with an entrepreneur who has entrepreneur traits, this means that an organization will be successful organization compare to those organization which do not have an entrepreneur owns entrepreneur traits.

Foresight

Foresight can be define as an ability to predict or plan for the future, often termed “vision” in management or business context. The entrepreneurs have a good foresight to know about future business environment. In other words, they well visualize the likely changes to take place in market, consumer attitude and taste, technological developments, etc. and take necessary and timely actions accordingly.

Tan Sri Anthony Francis "Tony" Fernandes, popularly known as Tony Fernandes, presents an excellent example of business foresight. Tan Sri Anthony Francis "Tony" Fernandes, CBE (born 30 April 1964) is a Malaysian entrepreneur. He is the founder of Tune Air Sdn. Bhd., who introduced the first budget no-frills airline, AirAsia, to Malaysians with the tagline "Now everyone can fly". Fernandes managed to turn AirAsia, a failing government-linked commercial airline, into a highly successful budget airline public-listed company. He has since founded the Tune Group of companies.

It was through Datuk Pahamin A. Rejab, the former secretary-general of the Malaysian Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry that Fernandes came to meet with then Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in October 2001. Instead of starting from scratch, Mahathir advised Fernandes to buy an existing airline. AirAsia, the heavily indebted subsidiary of the Malaysian government-owned conglomerate, DRB-Hicom, was losing money. Fernandes mortgaged his home and used his personal savings to acquire the company, comprising two Boeing 737-300 jet aircraft and debts of US$11 million (RM40 million), for one ringgit (about 26 US cents), and transformed it into an industry player. One year after his takeover, AirAsia had broken even and cleared all its debts. Its initial public offering (IPO) in November 2004 was oversubscribed by 130 per cent. Fernandes says his timing was in fact perfect: after 11 September 2001, aircraft leasing costs fell 40%. Also, airline lay-offs meant experienced staffs were readily available. He believed Malaysian travellers would embrace a cut-rate air service that would save them time and money, especially in a tight economy. Fernandes estimates about 50 per cent of the travellers on Asia’s budget airlines are first-time flyers. Before the advent of AirAsia, he estimated that only six per cent of Malaysians had ever travelled by air.

As conclusion, all of these are already prove that Tony Fernandes consist of the entrepreneurial traits of foresight. This is because Tony Fernandes has an ability to predict or plan for the future, just like why he acquired the heavily indebted airline by only one ringgit. Hence, the result is the Forbes Asia valued Fernandes' net worth at $650 million, ranking him at number 28 on the Forbes list of Malaysia's Richest.

(Tan Sri Anthony Francis "Tony" Fernandes & logo of AirAsia.)

Ethical consciousness

The development of ethical consciousness is the responsibility of the entrepreneur because his or her vision created the venture. An entrepreneur practices good ethical standards require to engage their business venture in ethical behaviour. The entrepreneur also needs to ensure his or her ethical principles are wholly enforced throughout the business. 

The entrepreneur that practice ethical consciousness is John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Market that advocates in the movement for organic food. Mackey co-founded his first health food store, SaferWay with his girlfriend in Austin in 1978. After couple of years, Mackey built Whole Food into an international organization, with outlet in major markets across the country, as well as Canada and United Kingdom. 

In April 2007, Whole Foods Market launched the Whole Trade Guarantee, a purchasing initiative emphasizing ethics and social responsibility concerning products imported from the developing world. The criteria include fair prices for crops, environmentally sound practices, better wages and labor conditions for workers and premium product quality. One percent of proceeds from Whole Trade certified products will go to the Whole Planet Foundation to support micro-loan programs in developing countries. The company’s goal published in 2007 is to have at least half of its imported products from these countries fully certified by 2017.

Whole Foods was placed third on the U.S Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the ‘‘Top 25 Green Power Partners’’. The company also received the EPA Green Power Award in 2004 and 2005 and Partner of the Year award in 2006 and 2007. The company plans on purchasing 458 gigawatt hours of wind energy credits. This will keep about 700 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions out of the atmosphere. This is equivalent to taking 60,000 cars off the road or planting 90,000 acres of trees.

(John Mackey and the logo of Whole Foods Market.)

Ability to learn from mistakes

To become a successful entrepreneur, a person must equip themselves with the ability to learn from mistake and go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Instead of giving up, an entrepreneur will question themselves regarding their mistakes, what went wrong? How can they succeed next time? And so on. They will not give up easily but learn how to improve themselves from the mistakes they did. For them, the mistakes they made is an experience and a learning process in their life. 

Ford Henry was the founder of the Ford Motor Company. He developed and manufactured the first automobile that affordable by many middle class Americans. Henry Ford stands tall as a pioneer of modern business, yet this founder of the Ford Motor Company failed many times on his route to success, His first business attempt at building a motor car was shuttered after just a year and a half when stockholders lost confidence in his ability to succeed. He gathered more cash and restarted his effort, but a year later he was forced out of his own company yet again. The entire motor industry had lost faith in Henry Ford but he was not deterred. He found another investor to start the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford’s famous quotes such as ‘‘Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement’’ and ‘‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently’’ shows that Henry Ford was inspired to keep learning from mistakes he made.

(Logo of Ford and Ford Henry, Founder of Ford)

Perceptiveness

A successful entrepreneur always sees opportunity everywhere. They are always on the lookout to either develop a new idea or improve an existing product or service. At some point in their lives they noticed something that could be better and they will take the opportunity to expend their business. In other words, entrepreneurs have the ability to see the future before it happen. 

An example of entrepreneur that have the perceptiveness is the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos. He was the youngest-ever senior vice president at Wall Street investment banker D.E Shaw & Co. Jeff had plan to expand the business of electronic retailing while he was making six-figure salary. He wanted to create his own company on internet. In four year time, the Amazon.com (virtual bookstore) created by Jeff became the template for how e-commerce businesses should be run. Jeff Bezos first got the idea to run an internet enterprise in 1994. While surfing the Internet in search of new venture for D.E Shaw & Co to invest in, he came across the statistic that Internet usage was growing wider and wider day by day. Bezos immediately recognized the fast growing of internet user can develop a huge market for his online business at the same time.

Bezos drew up a list of potential products that might be sold well online including CDs, computer software and books. After reviewing the list, he choose books as the product he going to put in his online business because he realized that even the largest bookstore only could stock less than hundred thousand books however a virtual bookstore could offer millions of titles. 

Bezoc and his family moved to Seattle and started his new business. In nearly a year, Bezoc and his another five employees learning how to source books and setting up a computer system that would make Amazon.com user-friendly. In 1995, Amazon.com opened to public and calling itself ‘‘Earth’s Biggest Book Store’’ with more than 1 million titles to choose from. 

Amazon.com had grown into a company of 100 employees and had racked up more than 15.7 million dollar in sales by September 1996.

(Logo of amazon.com and Jeff Bezos)

Time Competence

Time, can be said as the most precious commodity of all. Especially, to the entrepreneur, who is holding an important role and always looking to do more in the time he or she has. An entrepreneur carries heavy and a lot of responsibility. He or she must do more research to make improvement, planning to ensure the efficient of the process, more building and testing to make correction and provides solutions, more thinking, more selling and other more important role to ensure that his or her company or firm achieves every goals and objectives that determined. Besides, time management is the creation of tools and processes that allow individuals and organizations to accomplish more in a set time period. While time management is critical to success for all individuals, it is more critically important to entrepreneurs. This is because entrepreneurs are typically faced with tons of challenges each day and quickly compile massive "To Do" lists. “The most important thing is to make the most important thing the most important thing”. Thus, entrepreneurs are always competing with “Time”. They must have a good time management, then know how to appreciate and uses all the time that they had usefully and carefully.

For example the entrepreneur that had this characteristic is Jack Ma. Jack Ma was born in September 10, 1964, and he is a Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, a family of highly successful Internet-based businesses. Besides, he is the first Chinese entrepreneur to appear on the cover of Forbes. In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet. 

In the early year of 1995, Jack Ma went to the United States occasionally, and with his friend's help, he got introduced to the Internet. Then in April 1995, Jack Ma’s wife and a friend collected twenty thousand dollars and started an Internet company. Their company was dedicated to creating website for companies. Jack Ma then named their company as "China Yellow Pages." Thus, within three years, his company had made ¥5,000,000 Chinese Yuan which was equivalent to $800,000 US dollars at the time. 

In addition, from year 1998 to 1999, Jack Ma competed with the time. He headed to an information technology company established by the China International Electronic Commerce Center, which also is a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In year 1999, he decided to quit his job and went back to Hangzhou with his team in order that they founded “Alibaba.com” in his apartment with a group of 17 friends. He started a new round of venture development with 500,000 Yuan (which equal to Malaysian Ringgit of 293377.10). Moreover, Alibaba is a China-based business-to-business marketplace site which currently serves more than 79 million members from more than 240 countries and territories. 

In October 1999 and January 2000, with the great effort of Jack Ma in compete against the time, "Alibaba" won twice total of a $25 million international venture capital investment. The program was expected to improve the domestic e-commerce market, and build a perfect e-commerce platform for those Chinese enterprises especially SMEs, which is determined to meet the "WTO" challenge. Besides, Jack ma still wanted to make improvement. Due to the intension to do so, Jack ma improved the entire e-commerce system, and since 2003, he founded Taobao, Alipay, Ali Mama, and lynx etc. 

In a nutshell, “from zero to hero”, Jack Ma had competed with the time and giving great efforts since year 1998 to year 2000 until all his hard work gain success.

(Logo of Alibaba Group and Jack Ma as an Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group)

Decisive

A decisive person will show the ability to make decisions quickly but effectively. An entrepreneur needs to have this characteristic in order to become a good leader. In addition, uncertainty in making a decision exist in any organization can be called as a “killer” of the organization. Therefore, when an entrepreneur takes too long to make a decision, either due to lack of knowledge or fear of making mistakes, it creates a period of anxiety in the employees toward the entrepreneur. It can also be stated as an act of procrastination, which means that the entrepreneur puts off or delaying, especially something requiring immediate attention or decision. This is not an admirable virtue for great leaders. An entrepreneur needs to consider all pertinent facts in making a decision. Hence, entrepreneurs need to lead by some examples and being decisive will instil the same level of rapid response in the rest of the organization.

The characteristic of decisive can be seen in the Malaysian’s entrepreneur, Dato’ Azman Hashim. Nowadays, he is the heads of AmBank Group, which he started in 1976 as the Arab-Malaysian Merchant Bank. In October 2014, a statement was released that saying he was not negotiating to sell his stake after rumors that he was looking to cash out. He also holds stakes in investment bank ECM Libra; RCE Capital, which he chairs; and Amcorp Properties, which younger brother Azmi chairs.

There are examples that can be seen that he have the characteristic of decisive. In March 1988, when a number of banks forcing Dato’ Syed Mohamed Syed Kechik to sell Temerloh Rubber Estates Bhd as a way to settle his debt, Dato’ Azman Hashim save the situation by take the firm and the parent company. By making a strong bid and reasonable decision, he applied for a period of one week prior to the Committee on Foreign Investment and won the bid for the firm.

Then, he was easily agitated after four years working in the Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and then resigned to establish accounting firm Azman and Co. In 1964, accounting is a very new field and does not have a lot of practitioners. Over the past 10 years with Maybank, he successfully opened the largest bank network in Southeast Asia to introduce computing system and eventually founded the largest bank in Malaysia. In the early 1970s, he sits on the board of directors of many companies and has been involved with the establishment of Pernas International Bhd. In 1980, he took the opportunity to give a block of shares of Kwong Yik Bank Bhd but then quit because it would be a minority shareholder of the bank.

Besides that, following with the acquisition and expansion of Taiping Textiles and Arab Malaysian Development Bank at the time, he was carrying a huge debt. At that time, analysts expect the debt to reach between RM350 and RM400 million. He had to make a decision which is to offer as low as RM1.50 per square feet rent than RM5 to attract tenants along with three months free rent to solve the debt problem.

In a nutshell, Tan Sri Dato' Azman Hashim has the ability to identify things and make decision quickly. Due to the banks and business entails a lot of agreement on paper, he will often overlooks piles of paper which may lead him fall into stressful situation, but he was able to overcome it in the end. This characteristic is a need for entrepreneur or even managers in the review of all documents, from corporate loans until the money for charity purposes. Therefore, having a characteristic of decisive is very important for any entrepreneur to ensure the success of its hard work.

(Logo of AmBank Group and Dato’ Azman Hashim)