Youth Month Entrepreneurship Tips!
1. Dream
All businesses start with a dream. How can I make the world a better place?
Successful businesses come from solving a problem. What do people need and what are they prepared to pay for? A sure way to build a successful venture is to focus on an opportunity that already exists, and people pay for but there is a much smarter or cheaper way of providing the solution. They talk about the 10 times rule – do it 10 times better than the current model and people will switch.
2. Plan
There are steps to building a strong business and it takes planning to work out those steps. What skills do you need, how are you going to find customers, what systems need to be developed to create a great experience. You can plan to a point, but at some stage you need to pull the trigger and launch. Not everything can be planned.
3. Commit
When you decide to take on the world – commit and make it everything. The strongest instinct you have is survival mode. Once you make the decision, anything that gets thrown at you, you can solve. Only 80% of the plan is necessary, the rest you make up along the way, keeping the dream in mind.
4. Network
You will never have all the answers. Create a network of experienced people around you. Find the wise retired people or the industry executives who would like to contribute to new innovations. Use them to bounce ideas off, share experiences – good and bad. There are very few new problems – most of them are just versions of what people have encountered before. The coffee chats with your network provide incredible perspective and many new ideas and approaches.
5. Capitalise
Businesses aren’t successful in 12 months – most take 5 years to be established, three if you’re lucky. Ensure you have enough runway to deal with challenges along the way. Plan for the worst and aim for the best. A good idea with incredible passion and big commitment will always be funded – whether through friends and family, equity shareholders or lenders.
6. Tenacity
Most good business executed every single day will be successful. It doesn’t take an extraordinary person to build a business but rather a good person who applies an extraordinary amount of commitment.
Article by Karl Westvig, Retail Capital CEO.
