Why does one entrepreneur succeed while another fails? What is the secret ingredient of successful entrepreneurs? Basically, how can one become a good entrepreneur, exactly? This obsessed many start-up entrepreneurs. While successful entrepreneurial models are currently plaguing, it remains tough to pinpoint the essence of entrepreneurial success.
Entrepreneurial success is the combination of several factors. While you have control over some of them, others are completely out of reach. Your personality, economic conditions or trends in your industry are just a few examples of the static elements you can not act on. You have to deal with them quite directly. Fortunately, there are many more success factors on which you can work directly.
How about 10 tips for becoming a better entrepreneur and propelling your business success? Difficult to refuse, right? For those who do not want it, I also have an excellent recipe for apple crumble. Write to me, and I will gladly send it to you. For all the others, follow me, let’s go!
10 Tips on How to Be a Better Entrepreneur
Tip 1: Expand your patience
Personally, I’m not a patient guy. But I have learned it. I have seen many times the negative consequences of a lack of patience. This is true both on a personal and a business level.
In my training and lectures, I often explain to entrepreneurs that business development has a delayed outcome over time. Try to explain, please! That means that the energy and money you invest in your marketing will bring absolutely nothing in the short term. Therefore, Patience is a key to success in starting a business. You have to accept from the outset that you have to give your business project time, put an enormous amount of energy in it and there is an extended period of time before business really takes off. It is important to be aware of this period of latency because it will avoid you regularly to question and disperse your energies. You just have to accept it, pick up your sleeves and continue your work.
Tip 2: Learn to fail
The worst enemy of the entrepreneur is pride. Successful entrepreneurs have experienced monumental failures beforehand. If you do not accept the failure at the beginning of the game, do not start your project. It is the failures that have built successful entrepreneurs, bringing them knowledge and skills that can not otherwise be acquired. This is called lived experience. Quite simply.
Think of it, who would you call if you lived a terrible pain of love? Your friend as a couple for 14 years or the one who got dropped 6 times? Here! Experience is a source of knowledge and wisdom, both in business and in your personal life.
Some entrepreneurs say to me: ” It’s impossible that it does not work, my project, it’s going to be big! “. When I hear this, it is often appalling sign, because the contractor did not admit the possibility of failing. In this case, I ask the contractor to write down anything that might go wrong in his project and explain how he would feel a bitter failure. Admitting the possibility of failing and experiencing failure are passages that are bound to success. In the end, knowing how to get up is all that matters!
Tip 3: Trust your employees
A business idea is not worth anything. A company, however, is worth something! What is the difference between both? While an idea sprouts in the mind of one person, a company is the result of the collaboration of several people.
For your business project to come alive and be successful, you will need to bring people together and get their cooperation. Whether you remunerate each of these collaborators or does not change anything. You have to let them integrate their own knowledge and their own ways of seeing your project.
As a promoter, you will achieve nothing without the expertise and experience of others. Your business is a complex system; It needs you to integrate a maximum of know-how to take its rise.
If you stick to your own designs and deny free expression to your collaborators, then you will deprive your company of the vital resources for its development. You need to develop your trust in your employees and open up to whatever they can bring to your business.
Tip 4: Speak to your competitors
Although it may seem counter- intuitive to flirt with the enemy, it’s essential! When I was little, my parents often took me to eat ice cream. I know, I was spoiled! They were friends with the owner of the local dairy. One hot day, I saw his competitor land to buy him stocks. He had sold his family and wanted to keep selling. Well, do you know what? The owner sold it to her. From the height of my six years, I was shocked. I ate my corner and tried to understand what had just happened.
You have to understand that your competitors are not your enemies. They should rather be your best friends. They work in your industry and want the same thing as you: to please the same customer like you. Your competitors have, like you, developed an industry knowledge and philosophy. This knowledge is one of the most significant resources in starting a business. So why not freely exchange on the subject.
Maintaining healthy business relationships with competitors not only helps to regularly take the pulse of the industry, but it can also lead to partnerships. This is called co-operation. Whether through a joint venture, a marketing alliance or investment in research and development, cooperation benefits both parties. So do not deprive your company of everything the competitors can bring it!
Tip 5: Learn how to make open innovation
Simplify our lives: why reinvent the wheel? This summarizes the essence of open innovation. It is simply a question of sharing existing knowledge instead of recreating it continuously from scratch. What knowledge would you like to integrate into your company? What knowledge would you like to share?
All knowledge is expensive to develop. You can avoid your company many costs and many unsuccessful attempts by acquiring innovations already in place in other companies, organizations or communities. Conversely, you can take advantage of innovation that you have developed and that remains underused or unused.
For example, why not use an existing procurement platform instead of building a new supplier network? Why not share your Excel file costing? Although there is an abundant literature on open innovation, the concept remains simple: it is about sharing. Whether it’s free or paid, just, share.
Tip 6: Redefine your offer continually
That’s it, you got your first contract. Congratulations! Although it may make you think that you have an offer that pleases the customer, it is false! It is possible that your offer will make the happiness of a client, or even to individual clients, but is it optimal? Most likely not! Successful entrepreneurs are constantly redefining their offer, whether it is a product or a service.
In e-commerce, A / B testing refers to the constant refinement of the offer, content or publications according to the preferences of the public. This principle of e-commerce must be applied to your business, whatever its nature! Your offer must never become static, it must remain dynamic and responsive to the market and trends in the industry.
Successful entrepreneurs are in tune with their clientele. They are able to adjust the smallest details of their offer and communication methods to obtain an optimal response from their customers.
Tip 7: Work less
Start-up contractors do not count their hours of work. They work tirelessly and sometimes it’s just too much! Few people will tell you to work less. I do it without embarrassment, without shame.
It is important to strike a balance between the project and its personal life. If you do not get enough vitality in the different spheres of your life, your project will eventually take up all the space, and you will no longer be effective.
It is important to take a step back and make stock assessments regularly. Adjust the firing if necessary. If the project takes up too much space in your life, then you indirectly harm the success of that same project.
Tip 8: Remember why you are doing it all
Successful entrepreneurs find their motivation in making their own decisions and accomplishing a goal that truly resembles them. These are the strongest and most effective entrepreneurial motivations. They are directly associated with the success of entrepreneurs.
However, everyday life can sometimes keep you away from the deep reasons why you have embarked on this entrepreneurial adventure. Yet these motivations are your fuel. They give you the energy to move forward when times are hard. So take a moment, once a day, to stop. Just ask yourself: why am I doing all this? What drives me? What is vitalizing me? So simple!
Tip 9: Do what you like
It is evident that as an entrepreneur, you will not only do what you are passionate about. Certainly not! You will have to learn to perform a whole range of tasks that will take you out of your comfort zone.
Having said that, you need to begin to understand that your business will require knowledge and skills that you will not be able to develop. You have a personality of your own, and you do not have the profile of all trades and professions! Although I continually marvel at seeing entrepreneurs push their limits and get out of their comfort zone, it remains that no one can be entirely versatile.
You will need to learn to delegate and focus on your strengths. The good news is that your strengths are necessarily where you have fun. Your natural strengths are those that make you vibrate, make your tasks easy and enjoyable, and vitalize you.
Tip 10: Be stubborn
Frequently, contractors accept mandates that go beyond the mission of their company. Why? Just because they have to pay their accounts and feed themselves, like everyone else! It makes sense, is not it? This is called food contracts.
Although it is sometimes necessary to deviate from the mission and the orientations of the company, this represents a danger of change for your business. Let me explain. By dint of accepting mandates that do not correspond to what you really want to do, it’s likely that you will gradually become the expert in this field despite yourself. You will be given mandates that come out of your area of interest and strength. You will run out of steam and, without realizing it, you will develop a business that is nothing like the plan of activities you had hoped for.
We do not always have the luxury of refusing contracts, I agree. However, you will need to learn to develop some firmness with regards to your business vision. The more you derogate from it, the more you will disperse your energies and the resources of the company and the less you will feel motivated about your project. Imagine that you accept a food contract and that you are obliged to refuse a deal that leads you the following week because you are overcapacity. It would be incredible sadness! The same logic applies to collaborations, marketing alliances or projects parallel to your company. There are three rules for starting a business: consistency, uniformity and consistency.
Be stubborn and put forward the project that drives you and stays focused on your ultimate goal. Which brand would you like to create? In which area would you like to be recognized? Who would you like to serve? In what way? What are the colors of your business?
A small bonus
Among the hundreds of tips that I could give you, there is one that takes precedence over all the others: learn to learn. Gradually become your own business advisor. Take small notes on your industry, your customers, your own attitudes, and behaviors. What do you need most to succeed? What is blocking you? What animates you and helps you to overcome all obstacles? Learn to take a critical and systemic look at your company, your employees and most importantly, yourselves. The success of a business start-up being entirely linked to its promoter (s), this local capacity is crucial. So the best advice I can give you is: develop your ability to advise yourself!