Advice for Enterpreneurs

Plan, protect and grow your wealth. It is easy to believe that the concept or innovation of your company is perfect. You’ve thought about it, after all. However, it is important for your success as an entrepreneur to decide if your product or service is really something your audience wants and needs.

Starting, running and developing your own company is a huge goal for many people, but the process also requires a lot of trial and error.

Here are 5 key advices for enterpreneurs in other to achieve success

1. Don’t Fool Yourself

According to John Osher, a serial entrepreneur behind the SpinBrush toothbrush and many other popular consumer goods, highlights that entrepreneurs need to discover the truth about their ideas aggressively. Osher points out that deliberate ignorance to customers’ negative reviews can lead to expensive errors.

Osher states that as an entrepreneur, discovering and listening to the facts is the most important thing, no matter how hard it might be. You may think a product is a success before you put it on the shelves and you are told otherwise by customers. Before you have a complete emotional interest in the product or service and you are out of financial capital, it is much easier to recognise the reality in the early stages.

“We will always find a way to solve the issue if an entrepreneur puts the facts first,” Osher says. “A recipe for failure is to put your personal feelings and enthusiasm for the product ahead of the facts.”

2. Savor Surprises

Openness to consumer input will not only discourage entrepreneurs from misleading their projects, but also direct them to unexpected possibilities.

Scott Cook, Intuit ‘s co-founder and chairman, describes this lesson from a crucial moment when his business was in the Quicken bookkeeping software development stage of the company. A central theme in Entrepreneurship Basics is also illustrated by Cook: “the strength of organised experimentation to direct new projects.”

Cook states that for personal finance, Quicken was designed as a consumer product. What they didn’t know was that it was primarily used by their clients rather than their personal finances for their company. Intuit found a far bigger market by listening to its clients.

We said, “Wait a minute, there’s a big business market that needs the kind of thing we’ve created, but we’ve just never developed it for business,” said Cook. So that’s why we’re running tests and running them early, so we can get the surprises early and see things you can only see when you’re running an experiment to learn. “Listening when the market wants to talk to you is important.”

3. Use “No” as a Springboard for Conversation

Jenn Hyman, Rent the Runway’s co-founder and CEO, built a service for clients to rent high-fashion garments and accessories at a price point that is far more affordable than buying them outright. The business model of the venture questioned the status quo for designers. Some said “no” to partnering with Rent the Runway. “For Hyman, the beginning of helpful conversations became” no.

“The word ‘no,’ I don’t believe in,” says Hyman. “To me, ‘no’ does not mean no; for now it means no.” You might only turn the no into a yes by seeing ‘no’ as an invitation to a discussion. But if you never get a ‘Yes,’ at least you always hear why they said no, which can be just as important.

It takes time to obtain broad acceptance for a new idea, and the business model of Rent the Runway is no exception. The notion of renting vs. purchasing dresses had not yet been implemented, so initial scepticism was met. However, they saw the potential until designers took a gamble on the concept. Hyman was able to sell her concept and achieve widespread adoption by being open to understanding why designers were apprehensive and then modifying the model to meet the requirements of a designer.

4. Challenge Yourself to Be Challenged

Jennifer Fonstad, founding partner of Aspect Ventures, a venture capital company, supports the early-stage ventures in which she works to apply an open attitude to internal recruiting as well.

You encourage fresh ways of thinking that can benefit the company by recruiting colleagues with diverse perspectives. Those who support being challenged and those who accept multiple viewpoints tend to be more successful and make better decisions over time, as Fonstad describes. So we urge teams to think about how to get these various voices in, whether it’s through your staff and co-founders, or whether it’s through your financial partners or other members of the board.

5. Hire Builders, Not Joiners

Abe Ankumah, co-founder and CEO of IT operations company Nyansa, emphasises the value of a builder mindset in recruiting for a startup team member, in addition to hiring for skills and experiences that complement an established team.

You’re trying to find old classmates with whom you’ve served and trusted and who know how to work. You will run out of these personal connections at some stage and you will need to search for others who can join your team. For your squad, you must find the right culture.

Those who roll up their sleeves ready to build, versus those who want to join an existing organisation, need to search for a certain form of personality, as Ankumah explains: “You want to find people who want to build the next Google to make it Google, versus people who want to join Google because it’s already Google.”