Tips for a Successful Entrepreneur

Stay motivated
The best way to get motivated is to read success stories. The more you see people succeeding, the more you feel you have higher chances to succeed. Of course, if you read stories about people failing, that’s not going to motivate you! As an entrepreneur, you’ll pass through really hard times but if you are motivated enough they will not affect you at all.

Get inspired but do not copy

Don’t be ashamed to get inspired from others’ work, keep doing it every minute but do not copy anything, keep your stuff original. Inspiration is a very good way to make you sense better, learn from others’ experience and you will have a clearer vision of what’s already there and where you need to add your innovative substance.

Invest your own money

There are two very important reasons for you to invest your own cash in your business. At the very early phase, no one may be fascinated by your thoughts unless you have crazy links with investors. You need to deposit a good budget to facilitate your growth; otherwise the big brothers will suck you up. The other very vital reason to invest your money is to make you more devoted. When you put some liquid in your business, that’s going to help you not give up easily. I’d say US$3000 is a good amount to begin with for entrepreneurs on the web, but don’t take my words on that, businesses vary a lot from one to another.


Don’t be greedy

Grant ownership when required. If you feel that someone can be an added value to your company, you ought to give away a portion of what you possess because 100% of nothing is nothing and 1% of a decamillion dollars company is something. So if you believe that by giving away ownership to some experts, they will give the company a superior assessment, just do it!

Find a partner

Two thinking together is equivalent to a hundred times one thinking alone. This has been proven with time! Most millionaires and top founders of companies started their project with a team of 2 or 3. Finding a partner is not easy. Do you think you need someone who thinks just like you? how would that help you add value to the company? You need someone different, clever who argues with you about ideas, they might be seeing things that you are not enlightened to and vice versa.

Think big

If you are serious about your business you should think at the forefront about things. You should visualize your company successful and agonize about the scalability for example. Some companies, who implemented brilliant ideas, have failed because their architecture was not scalable enough to lever the amount of clients and ended up small businesses forever. It’s always a good time to reorganize your business and make it bullet proof from an early stage.

Failure is not an option

“Man does not attain all his heart’s desires for the winds do not blow as the vessels wish”. As an entrepreneur, do not anticipate things to occur as you always expect. At some point, your implementation will fail! That should not be the end of your business but just a selection that you need to reconsider. People dissipate so much time on a milestone that fails, most of them give up! but only wise entrepreneurs continue embracing the fact that this failure is not going to take place another time.

Create something you need

A business is more likely to become successful when there is a need for the services it provides. Why would you create something you don’t really need or find useful? Some people want to create just anything to make money. If you are in that category, I advise you to practice a hobby or do anything you love and with time you will experience a need for several services that are not yet implemented and that would be a great inspiration to work on. Bottom line, don’t waste your time trying to find the idea that will make of you a millionaire, the idea will come to you with time. I would love to talk more about this subject so I will write later on a detailed post on how to come up with a great idea to implement if you have the will.

Enjoy failures

As I said previously, failure is not an option. That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to fail! What i meant was that you should not allow a failure to stop you. I’m personally a very fortunate person as I learned to enjoy failure. Every time I failed, I tried to uncover the cause of it and get around it. You want to become an experienced person in your field? The more you fail, the more experienced you become. Benefit from failures!

Learn from others’ mistakes

Everyone commits mistakes! All mistakes are avoidable. It’s very imperative to watch other people’s mistakes; do not mock them, but learn from them and try to avoid it. A competitor can fail at some time because there is a mistake in their business plan, they couldn’t prevent it because it wasn’t tested. It’s your opportunity to use their experiment not to commit their mistake.

Listen to others’ advices

Entrepreneurs tend to think they are smarter than other people. They are definitely smart but not the smartest. What makes of you a smarter person is your experience. There are people more experienced than you are, listen to their advices. Same thing with young people; they think they know everything but after a while they discover that their parents were right. It’s not a coincidence, the parents had more years to acquire experience in life. Never overvalue your level and listen to what more experienced people say. It may make sense to find some good mentors from your MBA program or if you earn an MBA online there are surely good ones out there.

Do not hack your work, redo it

While working on your task, you will realize some architectural errors. What most people do is tweaking or tuning! That would lead to another major problem. Never say: “I wish I’ve done it the other way”, just do it all over again the other way. That will save you so much time later on. Many people do not consider modularity when they initiate their projects, but when they reach a certain milestone, they wish they’ve done it modular. Would you start again or keep hacking it? I’d say rebuild it the right way. I’ve personally thrown away thousands of lines of code every few months because I was always learning how to do things better and faster.

Give it the time it needs

If you expect to start generating revenue in few days, go find a real job! Entrepreneurs who own today big companies have had a very long vision. They didn’t expect to start generating income the next day. They knew that it might take them months or years. Ok! This is not motivating I know. You want to make money very early but, unfortunately, you are not an employee to get paid weekly or monthly. If you are not willing to sacrifice and give it some time, I advise you to get employed. By the way, do not expect to build a competitor project to Google in few weeks.

Don’t give up

Entrepreneurs can give up very easily for many obvious reasons:
- They are not supervised
- They are not making income
- They are doing tough work
- They lack management
- Mistakes are most likely to occur

Commitment is a must. To be committed you must:
- Enjoy what you are doing. Millionaires say they have never worked a day in their lives; they were enjoying what they were doing.
- Consume your own money. As I said earlier, when you spend your money on your project, you will think twice before giving up because you will loose.
- Do anything to stay motivated.

Commit to perfection

You are a tiny fish in a huge ocean full of sharks. If your project is not bullet proof, the big companies will easily crash you! You are the only employee in your company. If you believe you cannot handle all the tasks by yourself (management, design, development, architecture, business…), consider finding a partner that can relieve you with that. A company cannot survive if one of its departments is malfunctioning.