Entrepreneurship – Are you ready to roll?

What I have learned in my career as an entrepreneur are two things:
First, there is no such thing as perfection.
Second: you have to have the courage to believe in yourself and your projects.
Here is my checklist to successful entrepreneurship:

 

1. Commitment

Starting a new business means investing much more than just time. You probably have to work 80 to 90 hours a week. If you are not ready to take this step, stop complaining about your current job.

 

 2. Stress Management

It’s easy to be enthusiastic at the start. With time though the challenge becomes about organizing an increasing number of problems. You just win this battle by staying focused AND at the same time quickly adapting to change.

 

3. Networking Abilities, Marketing and Sales

Communication is key. The often quoted short elevator pitch: who are you, what’s your product, how will this make customers’ lives better, all this is in the DNA of a successful entrepreneur. The key to marketing success is a good sense of recent trends. Stay your own course.

 

 4. Finance

 Money is a point that is very often neglected. Even with the biggest business plan you are running the risk of having gaps that have to be covered. A key point is to secure financing at the earliest possible stage.

 

 5. Believe  in your own success

If you don’t believe in yourself, who will?
So don’t think about what others think about you.
It’s a simple fact that not everybody likes you.
You can’t control what people project onto you as a leader.
For me it has been a very interesting process of understanding that I can’t fix that.

 

6. The right team!

I realized over the past years that hiring the right people is not the whole story. It is more important to assign everyone the right task. Do this even if your potential team member doesn’t know about that. There are just a few people who really know what they are best at.

Allocating the right people to the right task saves a lot of headaches!