What makes a successful entrepreneur

I'm actually sick of the word "entrepreneur" and I prefer something like businessman.

The media's conconction of dotCom "entrepreneur" is basically someone founding / running an IT startup.

I guess raising money from investors is a legitamite revenue stream, though I dislike it. Most entrepreneurs waste my time and everyone elses with their bankrupt ideas and even worse IT skills.

A real entrepeneur in my opinion has worked out how to generate money from the product or service. Almost from day 1. Earning money. With a long term outlook.

Something that most startups utterly fail to do.

It's not sexy sending invoices. Checking your bank statement on bank's shitty timeout-ing Web application. Manually marking off invoices as paid since there is no way of automating this.

But this is where you need to be in order to have a real business and real credibility in my book.