entrepreneurship

3 Common Mistakes that First Time Entrepreneurs Make

September 28, 2017 No Comments

Entrepreneurship comes with a punch in the mouth. Can you take it? Entrepreneurship is not easy. Whatever you want to start that has value and can bring you value is hard to achieve. It is hard because nothing valuable comes easy. There will be many mistakes made, there will be many failures and you as an entrepreneur learn and grow from these failures and mistakes.

There are 3 common mistakes that I’d like to address here that almost all first time entrepreneurs make in their journey:

1) They put all their thoughts and efforts in their product and service

It is important to give value to what you are offering. But putting so much time in the product and service takes you away from putting time for yourself. You as an entrepreneur should come ahead of your product. The mind and soul behind your business determines the quality of it. If you want to have a high quality product or service you have to have high quality standards for yourself too.

Read as much as you can. Gain knowledge in the field you are working in. Get to know the customers. See how you can help them as a human. Work on the values you can offer through your product or service. Learn about leadership. Learn about persuasion. Learn how habits form and how you as an entrepreneur can form right habits that will push you through this rough path.

You have to make every cell of your body and mind work for you to achieve your goal. This is not achievable unless you work on it. Even if you have the best product or service and you don’t work on yourself as an entrepreneur, you will give up. You will get distracted. You will be pushed away and you will fall and you won’t be able to get up and continue.

You are the one forming your future’s success. Look at yourself and see if you have the characteristics of the successful person you are imagining in the next one, two, three, or 10 years time. See what is lacking and work on those. Instead of putting so much time refining and elaborating your idea, work on yourself first and do other things on the side. Learn as much as you can, grow as a human, be kind to people, always be ready to give a helping hand, listen to successful people, share your knowledge… If you want to become rich, you have to ask others for money. But first you have to make yourself care about them.

2) They give up

Giving up is another common mistake that first time entrepreneurs make. I mentioned that it is not easy to achieve your goal if it is something valuable. You have to give up many things to get what you want from life. This journey is hard but it is joyful as well. Don’t give up when you hear a no for an answer. Don’t give up when you see no sells. Don’t give up when you see no return on the time your are investing.

First of all there are and will be returns on every action you take towards your goal. It is just that we will choose to only see what we want to see. We don’t see the amount of experience we are gaining with each step. You will learn, refine, and act again accordingly. If you believe in your idea you have to be persistent and have patience.

Jack Ma founder of Alibaba says many times in his presentations that he didn’t have any sells on Alibaba for months when they started it. They had to put their own products online, they had to buy them themselves, and they repeated this until they found real sellers and buyers. It requires patience. As an entrepreneur we have to learn how to become patient no matter how hard it is. Especially these days with the existence of social media and instant feedback, likes and comments, that are making us impatient human beings who need to see quick responses or they will give up.

3) They want to make everyone happy

Steve jobs says it right. “If you want to make everyone happy don’t be a leader. Sell ice cream.” It is true. Your product or service should have a niche target market.

You have to make your target narrow to be able to get attention. Sometimes the people closest to you might say your idea is not good enough and you have to make changes to it. If you believe in it, if you see potentials in it, don’t change it. Don’t listen to those who are saying you have to make your market bigger. Stick to your idea, your market becomes big for you. People will find you for who you are. If you think there are people that their opinion would affect yours, don’t share your idea with them. Start your business, get some results and when it is performing to the level that you are confident about it, then you can tell them.

There are many other things I like to talk about from my experience. There are many things I want to tell all first time entrepreneurs. But I will bring this post to the end by just telling you this; you deserve to live your dream life. There is nothing more valuable in this world than trying to achieve what you want to become in this world.

If you are here reading this post it means you have realized you want to make a change. This is the first step and the most important one. I know what you are going through; all the questions, the excitements, and disappointments that come on your way. I totally understand it. There won’t be a stop to it. You will learn how to deal with your emotions as you grow in this journey.

Entrepreneurship is sailing in the sea of emotions. There will be sunny sky and calm sea, there will be storms as well. You will learn how to deal and sail like an expert. But you have to step into the sea to be able to learn and become a successful sailor. Don’t worry about anything. I want to give you the courage to step in. Take a deep breathe and know that you will only face things that you can handle.

Start making changes to your life now. Tomorrow is too late. Decide today and use every second of your life, changing every cell of your body and mind towards achieving your goal. You should become the success you want to see in the future. When you, your mind, body, and beliefs become that success no matter what you do, it will be successful.

Cheers to all of the first time entrepreneurs who are wayyy ahead of many people in life by deciding to change their life for themselves and others.

Business

Change your Life with these 7 Morning Rituals

September 26, 2017 No Comments

Gratitude: it is not happy people who are thankful. It is Thankful people who are happy. List 3 things you are grateful for. One of them should be very simple. Like feeling the wind on your skin.
Write down your most important tasks for the day.
Affirm your goals in writing.
If you have a goal write it down. If you don’t write it down, you don’t have a goal – you have a wishSteve Maraboli
Exercise: even 10 minutes sprint helps your body wake up and gives you lots of energy for your day.
Hot water with lemon: you just have to try it. You will feel amazing throughout the day. It has many benefits for your health and body.
Rise earlier.
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy , wealthy and wise.Benjamin Franklin
Listen to uplifting music. Instead of checking social media or news, listen to an uplifting music. Try not to check your social media or emails first thing in the morning for one week. You will see the difference in your life. One way to do so, is to have your cellphone in another room when you wake up. Try to do these 7 things first in the morning, then you can check your phone :)

Business, Project Management

Are entrepreneurs great project managers?

September 22, 2017 No Comments

An entrepreneur is someone who starts a business from and idea in form of a start up or buys a running business and change it.

A project is something that has a start and end. While a business doesn’t end but it contains many projects within itself that are temporary and have start and end. Usually startups don’t have enough budget to hire project managers or other resources. So an entrepreneur is usually a multi talented person who is great at project management. You need to be able to set goals, do the planning, and execute, to deliver quality results that communicate with your target through the value it is offering.

These are what a good project manager does. So if you have started many things in life and you gave it up on the early stages without knowing why, one of the reasons might be because you didn’t have project management skills.

It is amazing to be born as a project manager and have all the skills in your DNA but not everything in life comes to us that easy. It is a good news to know that you don’t need to be gifted in project management in order to start your business and follow your passion, you can learn to manage projects.

Project management can be the solution for the problems you face while starting a new idea. It actually helps a lot to learn about managing a project while experimenting. It gives you the knowledge and experience at the same time.

As an entrepreneur you need to know how to set goals, how to set time and budget and do all the plannings. You also need to know how to efficiently test your idea. This prevent you from spending so much time and budget on something that would not bring any value. While testing, you can always measure and make changes in the process of shaping your business.

Even if you are not an entrepreneur and you don’t want to have your own business but would like to pursue your career in the field of project management I highly recommend starting something that would not require any monetary investment.

This gives you a great experience on how business owners, stakeholders, users and team members feel in a project that you are managing. Books and schools can give you knowledge of how you should think and process but only experience and being in the position of stakeholders can teach you how they feel and how they form their expectations.

A successful project manager not only understands the nuts and bolts of the field they are working in, she also understands the feelings, psychology, and thought process of people involved.

Starting your own business teaches you how to be a stakeholder, a developer, a project manager, and a user. And it also helps you appreciate the hard work it takes to have a successful business. This makes you appreciate things that stakeholders have done in the past and show them you know the value in their work and you care as much as they care.

So I would say entrepreneurs should be great at project management and should learn the science involved in it to be able to run small projects in their business to have a healthy running business.

And project managers should all have entrepreneurship experience to learn about the Art of project management. Learn about all the soft skills required to run a successful project that cares more than having a project done within a time, budget and scope; by bringing value to both stakeholders and end users.

Here is a book I highly recommend reading if you are an entrepreneur and you need to run your own projects:

The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management by Eric Verzuh