Speaking Part 2 · PeopleIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Successful Businessperson You Know
In short
“Describe a Successful Businessperson You Know” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Successful Businessperson You Know. You should say:
- •Who this person is
- •What their business is
- •How they became successful
- •And explain what you admire about them
Band 9 model answer
The person I'd like to describe is a woman called Reem who runs a bakery about ten minutes from my flat. I want to be clear about the scale — it's one shop with four staff, not an empire — but by any measure I care about, she's the most successful businessperson I know personally.
The business is a small bakery that opened about seven years ago in a unit that had been empty for two years before that. She sells bread, a small range of pastries, and coffee, and that's deliberately the whole list. There's no lunch menu, no cakes, no seating beyond two stools by the window.
How she got there is the interesting part. She'd worked in restaurant kitchens for about twelve years and had, by her own account, no business training whatsoever. What she did have was a very clear idea of what she wasn't going to do. She told me once that every failing food business she'd worked in had failed the same way — by adding things. Somebody asks for sandwiches, so you do sandwiches; that needs different suppliers and a different fridge and suddenly you're doing four jobs badly. So she decided at the start on a short list and has refused, for seven years, to extend it. People ask for cakes constantly. She sends them to the place down the road.
The other thing she did was start extremely small. She baked out of a rented commercial kitchen at night for two years before she took a lease, which meant that when she finally opened she already knew exactly how much she could sell and to whom. She wasn't guessing.
What I admire is the discipline, which I think is much rarer than ambition. Saying no to revenue that is being offered to you, week after week, on the grounds that it would make you worse at your actual job, requires a kind of nerve I'm not sure I have. Most people I know would have added the sandwiches in month three.
And she's straightforwardly good to work for, which I only know because two of her staff have been there since the beginning — in an industry where people usually last months. I think that tells you more about a business than its turnover does.
Make it your own: three angles
A small local business owner
Far stronger than a famous entrepreneur, because you can give real detail and a genuine reason for admiring them. Also avoids the "someone you know" trap in the prompt.
A family member who built something
Lets you use a long timeline and past perfect naturally, and the admiration is easy to make personal.
A former colleague or manager who started out on their own
Good if you witnessed the transition — you can describe what changed about them as well as what they built.
What the examiner is listening for
The prompt says a businessperson YOU KNOW, so a famous entrepreneur is a weak choice and examiners hear it constantly. A small, real business gives you specifics nobody else will have. On the final bullet, admire something precise: the model picks discipline and proves it with the refusal to sell cakes, which is far more convincing than 'she works very hard'.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Would you like to run your own business?
- Are there many small businesses where you live?
- Do you prefer shopping at small shops or large stores?
- Is starting a business common among young people in your country?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
What qualities do successful businesspeople have?
The obvious ones — persistence, a tolerance for risk, an ability to make decisions without complete information. But the quality I'd add, because it's less discussed, is the willingness to say no. A lot of businesses fail by taking every opportunity offered until they're doing several things badly, and resisting that is harder than it sounds when the money is in front of you.
Is it better to work for yourself or for a company?
It's a trade between freedom and security, and people tend to underweight the security. Working for yourself means controlling your time and keeping what you earn, but also carrying risk with no sick pay and no floor under a bad month. Employment buys stability at the price of autonomy. Which is better depends almost entirely on how much financial cushion someone has.
Do you think young people are more interested in starting businesses than before?
There's certainly more talk about it, and the barriers have genuinely dropped — you can start something online for very little. Whether more people actually do it is less clear; a lot of the enthusiasm is for the idea of it. What has changed is that a conventional career no longer looks as safe as it did, so the risk comparison is different from what our parents faced.
How do small businesses compete with large companies?
Not on price, which is a fight they lose. They compete on the things scale makes difficult: knowing customers by name, adapting quickly, quality that requires a person to care. A large chain optimises for consistency, and consistency and excellence are not the same thing. The businesses that struggle are the ones that try to be a smaller version of a supermarket.
Should governments support small businesses?
I'd say yes, largely because the playing field isn't level — large firms can absorb regulation, negotiate better terms and, frankly, arrange their taxes in ways a bakery cannot. Support doesn't have to mean money; simplifying administration and enforcing fair payment terms would help more than most grants do.
Is money the best measure of success in business?
It's the easiest to measure, which isn't the same thing. A business can be highly profitable while treating its staff badly and existing on borrowed time, and another can be modest and durable and support several families for decades. I'd look at whether it survives, whether people stay, and whether the owner still wants to do it — none of which appear on a balance sheet.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to start from scratch | to begin with nothing |
| a niche | a small, specialised part of a market |
| turnover | the total money a business takes in |
| to break even | to make neither profit nor loss |
| word of mouth | people recommending something personally |
| to take a risk | to do something that might fail |
| overheads | the regular costs of running a business |
| to scale up | to grow a business’s size |
| a loyal customer base | regular customers who keep returning |
| to stay afloat | to survive financially |
More cue cards
Describe a Leader You Respect
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