Entrepreneurial Lessons

Many seasoned business owners lived through what is commonly known as “start-up screw-ups,” or common mistakes made in early business ownership. However, business owners of all maturity levels fall victim to several common business problems. The one common issue the IEC sees through business owners is a desire for easy solutions to business troubles. Unfortunately, easy solutions are often a dream. If owning and running a business were easy, more people would leap into ownership. In an effort to take charge of your business, Guy Kawasaki suggests the following five tips:

1.       Focus on cash flow. Cash is what keeps the doors open and pays the bills, so knowing how cash works along with your profitability is critical. You need to get your costs under control, understand how much it takes to break even and how much you need financially to keep the business alive.

2.       Make a little progress every day. Don’t believe in the big-bang theory of marketing: a fantastic launch that created such inertia that you flew to “infinity and beyond.” No more. Instead, focus on making a little bit of progress every day – whether that’s making your product slightly better, increasing your skill in one small way, or closing one more business deal. The reason the press writes about “overnight successes” is that they seldom happen -not because that’s how all businesses work.

3.       Try stuff. If you are relying on luck alone, you better re-evaluate that mindset. While luck is a big part of many successes, don’t get too upset when you see less qualified businesses succeed. Secondly, luck favors the people who try new things and take analyzed risks. Be patient, talk with customers and try different products or solutions.

4.       Ignore schmexperts. According to Guy Kawasaki, “Schmexperts are the bad combination of schmucks who are experts – or experts who are schmucks. When you first launch a product or service, they’ll tell you it isn’t necessary, can’t really work, or faces too much competition. If you succeed, then they’ll say they knew you would succeed.” If you believe in your products or services, try it.

5.       Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do. This goes for customers (“fill out these twenty-five fields of personal information to get an account for our website”) to employees (“fly coach to Mumbai, meet all day the day you arrive, and fly back that night”). If you follow this principle, you’ll almost always have a good customer service reputation and happy employees.