Entrepreneurship: Traits, Characteristics and Competitive Advantage

This report analyses the traits and characteristics of successful entrepreneurs like Mike Cannon Brookes, co-founder of Atlassian. It also covers the opportunity recognition and idea development process, and the competitive advantage of Atlassian. The report recommends that entrepreneurs should have the potential to take risks, strong leadership skills, and self-motivation.

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Enterprenuership

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Table of Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................1
Background of Entrepreneur.................................................................................................................1
Entrepreneurial traits and characteristics.............................................................................................2
Opportunity recognition and idea development process......................................................................3
Competitive advantage..........................................................................................................................4
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................6
Recommendation..................................................................................................................................7
References.............................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
Entrepreneurship is termed as a capacity of a person to develop, organize and manage
a new business idea by taking risk in order to fulfil customers demand. The trait of
entrepreneurship is high risk taking and innovating new ideas to enhance the competitive
marketplace. Entrepreneurs are the one who come up with new business venture. They adapt
to new business strategies so that clients could be benefited. In this report, one of the
Australian entrepreneur Mike cannon brookes is considered. The characteristics and traits he
followed in his career are analysed and listed. The competitive advantage of the organisation
is discussed that helped in understanding the drawbacks of the company and how it can be
improved. Mike Cannon Brookes has designed various platforms and software’s so that they
can support various business operations. The success is unpredictable in their life but they are
ready to take high risks. Every entrepreneur is unique in their own way and they use
dissimilar approaches to become recognised by the people and work towards goals by
offering new opportunities.
Background of Entrepreneur
The Australian entrepreneur that is considered in this report is Mike Cannon Brokes,
co-founder of Atlassian. He started up his venture just after completing his graduation in
engineering. He started his company by his credit card funding. In the year 2017, he started to
work with Elon Musk and many other southern Australian companies. He came up with an
innovated software idea that offering flexibility among customers (Klotz and Neubaum,
2016). He is born in 1979 and completed his education from Cranbrook school in Sydney. He
completed his bachelor degree in information system by the means of scholarship. His

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parents are Helen Cannon Brookes and Mike Cannon Brookes who was a support system
behind his success story.
The traits that helped him to develop entrepreneurship characteristics were his passion
and interest towards software’s. He used to identify the bugs that are faced by the customers
thus he developed various strategies by offering legendary services to customers
(Shopify, 2018). The reason behind his success was his strong determination and will power
to make his business idea successful (Abdallah, et. al, 2015). He was expert in many IT
technologies thus he offered customers various software’s and platforms to work on. He
nailed his business idea and earned the profit margin of around $US250 millions. This was
possible because he identified the market and analysed the success story of other companies
so that he can capture larger audience (Shopify, 2018). He worked on various strategies so
that large number of audience could be targeted. Apart from that, Mike Cannon Brookes
became successful as he expanded his business in various other sectors. Along with
software’s he invested in many finance start-ups and various safety start-ups.
Entrepreneurial traits and characteristics
The key traits due to which mike cannon broke were successful is the ability of taking
high risks. He borrowed money from many stakeholders and then started up his business
venture (Conner, et. al, 2015). The characteristics that made him successful were his ability
to overcome from the failure situation. The motive of Mike Cannon Brookes was not to earn
money but to accomplish the idea he has though. The strong and stiff determination helped
him to achieve success in his career and the high level of confidence was one of the reasons
that boosted him to work towards his idea (Zaheer, Breyer, Dumay and Enjeti, 2018). The
Entrepreneurial traits and characteristics that were used by Mike Cannon Brookes were
constant learning capabilities. Even he faced many failures and downfall in the entire journey

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but he took these failures as a part of journey. He was quiet passionate about developing new
software’s and bringing up the business so that benefits could be offered to the clients. Mike
Cannon Brokes has the ability to see all the loopholes and making the life of people easier
and making the situations adaptable (Wisse, Barelds and Rietzschel, 2015). The success
behind Mike canon brookes was detail study about the market and then planning strategies to
overcome all the difficult situations. He perused good leadership skills and thus guided his
colleagues so that they can overcome from all the difficult situations (Wisse, Barelds and
Rietzschel, 2015). As it is said that, entrepreneurs do not work for profit margin similarly in
case of Mike cannon Brookes he did not work for earning money but he donated certain
amount of money in the charity centres.
Opportunity recognition and idea development process
The strategy that was undertaken by Mike cannon brookes was to deliver products to
the customer with the aim of delivering better service for the country (Baum, Frese and
Baron, 2014). The idea was to build software that can make the lifestyle of people easy by
making all the operations automatic and fast. Initially, he integrated the idea he generated
with the market demand. He had a clear direction of the objective which was needed to
mould the business. Thus, he delivered services and products accordingly (Hmieleski and
Lerner, 2016). It was his passion from childhood that made him achieve success as he being a
person from engineering background; he had knowledge about software and other tools.
In the first phase, Mike cannon brookes recognized the opportunities that could be
gained from the market by bring up the venture. He found all the loopholes in the existing
software then designed the new business plan. The recognition of opportunity covered three
basic steps that are perception, discovery and creation (Hmieleski and Lerner, 2016). Thus,

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before staring Atlassian is discovered the opportunities and challenges in the market and then
matched up his resources with the market demand.
Thus, it is one of the major steps that should be considered by an entrepreneur. Mike
Cannon Brookes recognized the commercial values of the products and services and then
translated the business plan into reality (Espíritu-Olmos and Sastre-Castillo, 2015). After
successful recognizing the market plan he came up with new ideas so that new opportunities
can be opened for people He came up with new innovative ideas and looking at the strategies
that are followed by the competitors.
Competitive advantage
It is true that the demand of software driven companies are increasing tremendously.
The success rate of Atlassian is increasing due to the need to high technologies that would
address all the challenges and development process. There are many other competitors
company that have largely driven the market. Some of the competitors company include
general motors, comcast and HSBC. The competitors of atlassian are divided into three
segments that are IT and service team, software and technical team and business team. The
major competitors of Atlassian that are offering better opportunities are Microsoft, IBM,
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Google, ServiceNow, salesforce.com, Zendesk and several
smaller software vendors like Slack and GitHub. Tough theses are small companies but still
they have actively captured the audience by offering one time solution. The top most
competitors are Rally software that is an application based software industry that generated
relatively less revenue but still have affected the profit margin of Atlassian. The other
competitor is #slack it is a system software field that have affected the cultural work of an
organisation (Jauk, Neubauer, Mairunteregger, Pemp, Sieber and Rauthmann, 2016).
Considering the case of competitive advantage of Atlassian it was found that all the products

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are delivered in a manner so that they can offer better versatility and adaptability (Hudson,
2017). The distribution model is one such case as it makes use of data driven approach. The
basic traits of this model include innovation-driven, simple and affordable, organic and
expansive and scale-oriented.

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Conclusion
From this report, an Australian entrepreneur Mike cannon Brokes is considered who
is the co-founder of Atlassian. He was successful in his business venture because he offered
flexibility to the customers. The various characteristics and traits that need to be followed by
every entrepreneur are listed above. Some of the traits are having high risk taking potential,
analysing the market strategies and the designing their own plan so that benefits could be
offered to customers. Mike cannon Brookes didn’t work to earn profits but he has the motive
to implement his idea and offer advantage to the customers. This report analysed its
competitors and hoe it has affected the target audience of Atlassian.

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Recommendation
It is recommended that, for every entrepreneur to be successful they should have the
potential to take risk. It is recommended that like Mike Cannon Brookes every entrepreneur
should have strong leadership skills and should be self-motivated. The success story of
entrepreneur holds a challenging that is difficult to accomplish. Entrepreneurs are the one
who are not afraid of failures by have the willingness to accept to the failure. Entrepreneurs
are the one who enjoy taking challenges and overcoming it by delivering something.

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References
Abdallah, F.W., Abdullah, H.R., Ahmad, M., Akinci, S.B., Alam, A., Allen, G.C., Allen, S.,
Amar, D., Angle, P., Ansermino, M. and Ansley, D., 2015. On behalf of the Editorial Board,
the Editor-in-Chief acknowledges, with special thanks, the expertise of the following
individuals who served as Guest Reviewers from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015. Can J
Anesth/J Can Anesth, 62, pp.1361-1362.
Baum, J.R., Frese, M. and Baron, R.A., 2014. Entrepreneurship as an area of psychology
study: An introduction. In The psychology of entrepreneurship (pp. 33-50). Psychology Press.
Businessinsider, (2018). For Atlassian's founders, a big factor in their success is how alike
they are Read more at https://www.businessinsider.com.au/atlassian-founders-scott-
farquhar-mike-cannon-brookes-partnership-2016-10#esfEd3wTLH0jmhdw.99. Available
from https://www.businessinsider.com.au/atlassian-founders-scott-farquhar-mike-cannon-
brookes-partnership-2016-10Accessed on 30 aug 2018
Conner, M.F., Forsberg, M., Garbacz, M., Gravely, J., Greenlee, J., Hastings, L., Loizzo, J.,
Luethke, T., Knoll, E., Matkin, G. and McElravy, L.J., 2015. ALEC Faculty Meeting Minutes
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Espíritu-Olmos, R. and Sastre-Castillo, M.A., 2015. Personality traits versus work values:
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Hmieleski, K.M. and Lerner, D.A., 2016. The dark triad and nascent entrepreneurship: An
examination of unproductive versus productive entrepreneurial motives. Journal of Small
Business Management, 54, pp.7-32.

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Hudson, M., 2017. A year since the SA blackout, who's winning the high-wattage power
play?. Chain Reaction, (131), p.26.
Jauk, E., Neubauer, A.C., Mairunteregger, T., Pemp, S., Sieber, K.P. and Rauthmann, J.F.,
2016. How alluring are dark personalities? The Dark Triad and attractiveness in speed
dating. European Journal of Personality, 30(2), pp.125-138.
Klotz, A.C. and Neubaum, D.O., 2016. Article Commentary: Research on the Dark Side of
Personality Traits in Entrepreneurship: Observations from an Organizational Behavior
Perspective. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 40(1), pp.7-17.
Shopify, (2018). Entrepreneurship. Available from
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Wisse, B., Barelds, D.P. and Rietzschel, E.F., 2015. How innovative is your employee? The
role of employee and supervisor Dark Triad personality traits in supervisor perceptions of
employee innovative behavior. Personality and Individual Differences, 82, pp.158-162.
Zaheer, H., Breyer, Y., Dumay, J. and Enjeti, M., 2018. Straight from the horse's mouth:
Founders' perspectives on achieving ‘traction’in digital start-ups. Computers in Human
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