I believe that business is equal parts of inspiration, hard work and luck. There is a famous saying I find that the harder I work, the luckier I get!

To discover what makes a successful entrepreneur lets look at what you have to do to start a new company and make it successful. You will need:
* Inspiration: to find a product or service that will sell.
* Business Sense: to set up and keep your business running smoothly.
* Marketing Knowledge: to understand how to package everything together so that people recognize it and more importantly by it.
* Determination: to get through the bad times, the trying times and the times when you think that all is lost.
* Perseverance: to keep going at the beginning, to get your product in front of the people who will influence or guide your business and not least to sell the new product into a new market.
* Flexibility: in order to keep changing and reacting positively to changes that are imposed upon you.
* Survival Spirit: building a business is hard work, can risk all you hold dear but can also be the most rewarding thing you ever do.

Other ingredients for a good business are obviously a great product, good funding and legal security.

Of the above business sense and marketing knowledge can be purchased through consultancy and we indeed provide this for many small and medium sized companies or you can learn it. The other skills are character traits that you usually have are born with but of course you can still develop these and indeed being an entrepreneur will certainly hone these abilities.

Lee Lister

Lee Lister is Management Consultant and Program Manager with more than 25 year's management and consultancy experience and more than 20 year's program and project management experience in projects for Banking, Finance, Insurance, Leisure and Government bodies. She also have more than 10 years bid management experience ranging from bids for medium companies to large international and infrastructure bids.

British born, Lee received her BA(Hons) Financial Economics from the University of Essex. She went on to work in or for a considerable number of countries within Asia and Europe as well as Australia and the United States. While building a name for herself through helping company restructure, change management and project management consultancy, Lee became a well-known figure for her skills in analyzing, problem solving and trouble-shooting. She has consulted for many major industries, including banking, telecommunications, insurance, transportation, leisure and governments from many different countries. Some of the companies who have benefited from Lee’s expertise are Hewlett Packard, Siemans Nixdorf, Electrolux and the Philippines government.

Whilst working in the Far East she became a recognized expert on preparing and evaluating large World Bank Proposals (infrastructure projects within developing countries). These accomplishments called upon the skills of bid and project management, risk assessment, contract negotiation and supplier management and required dedicated work to very tight time scales. This expertise was acknowledged by an invitation to be the principle speaker at an International Business Development Conference in Washington, USA. She has also consulted at very senior level in several countries.

She owns and manages two companies, Biz Guru LLC in the USA and Biz Guru Services Ltd in the UK as well a considerable number of profitable web sites. She works almost entirely via the internet, visiting clients on site during major consultancies and training. Her Internet skills span from when major companies first started to consider obtaining their own web sites. During these years, she has kept up to date with the rapid changes on the internet, including the dot com boom and the resulting bust – which her own web based companies survived.

She regularly consults, writes and lectures on business, bid management and marketing and has published numerous courses and books.