Entrepreneurship seems like a very romantic idea. After all, who wouldn’t want to be an owner of their own business? But the path to entrepreneurship is far from a rosy dream. It’s filled with hard work, dedication, and planning.
So here are 5 tips for all the entrepreneurs who are aiming it big.
1. Practicality
When you are an entrepreneur it becomes very easy to fall in love with an idea. Unique ideas that you think will work. But you also need to learn from the mistakes that people before have made.
It seems like a very rosy picture to start your own business, but unfortunately, the world doesn’t work like that. There are a lot of practical decisions that you have to make. Realize the reasonability of the situation. Don’t just go with your gut feeling that ‘it’s just going to work because I believe in it’. Don’t fall in love with your idea so much, that you fail to see the practicality of the situation cause that might become the one thing that leads to your failure.
2. Patience
Nothing happens overnight. It takes days and months and years before something works and you can scale it up. So don’t believe that in your first meeting you are going to get the funding or crack your biggest client. The idea you had for three months might actually take a whole year to scale it up.
Shift your goals. Shift your guns. But don’t get demotivated. Everything takes time. You need to keep putting in the hard work every day. Only with that, the result will start showing.
3. People
It’s very important to understand that you can’t do everything on your own. You might start out as an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, as a one-man army trying to cover up all the goals. But it’s not going to be possible.
At some time you are going to need to build a team and give them responsibility. They might not necessarily be able to do what you can. But you need to believe that this what they can do and they are trying their best. And work with that situation. Because as an entrepreneur the most valuable asset you have is your time. Where you dedicate your time is very important. If you are giving time to the small things which actually can be done by someone else. You are wasting your time. Having the right people on board helps you to get more work done and achieve more goals.
4. Believe
There are a lot of times when other people, your client, your team members say that this may not just work. Market changes, competitors changes and might make you think that maybe they are right. It is important that more than anyone else, you believe in yourself and your idea. Believe that it will work. Because it’s your belief that’s going to keep your passion and hard work alive. And it’s your passion that can touch your team members as well and fuel their hard work. If you don’t believe in yourself no one else can.
5. Adapt
Market changes, competitor changes, team changes. The idea you started out with might not be a very practical one. But the thing that matters is whether you can adapt and address the market with your current setup. This is something that you need to learn to do. Many businesses are going to fail because of their lack of ability to adapt. Nokia, which was a leading mobile company which simply faded away because it could not adapt to the smartphone landscape.
History has repeatedly taught us that no matter the scale of the company if they fail to adapt they will fail. So remember whether it is three months into the business, six months or ten years or sixty years.
Never fail to adapt.
