5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me before I Became an Entrepreneur

Posted by LegalWiz.in on March 4th, 2019

Entrepreneurship is a journey in itself. And just like any other journey, it has its own do’s and don’ts, pieces of advice from your near and dear ones, or at least from the ones who have taken this road. I too, started this journey a few years back only to realize that I should have known a few things beforehand to make it more manageable. But how I wish… it’s only that I had to learn it the hard way being an entrepreneur.

So here are 5 things that I wish I knew beforehand and have had it from someone before I plunged into the ocean of entrepreneurship.

1. Remain laser focused with Full-time dedication

From the day you register your business online for effortless journey, the journey towards focused work starts. Juggling jobs, personal works, and your social circles - you hardly have time to pursue your entrepreneurial dream on a full-time basis. But entrepreneurship isn’t something that you pursue with a part-time commitment. In fact, it requires much more dedication than a job per say. Therefore, when I headed for a journey of becoming an entrepreneur, I realized that I have to chase it on a full-time basis. Take the hard and harsh decisions, to follow the dream completely without any compromises.

Dedication and persistence is the key. I had to give up on my full-time job to start something on my own, from the scratch. So make sure that your journey starts with a full-time dedication or else, it may well be a waste of time and resources that is bound to fail you in current job as well as in your efforts to start your own business.

And once you are up with a full-time dedication you will need to remain focused. And when I speak of focusing, I mean the overall focus and not just the concentration towards the work. This includes;

  • Focus on your UVP–To start off, I realized my service should have some significant unique value proposition. Your prospective customers will have hundreds of other options. What is something so unique that my business can offer them?This question leads me to devote all my attention to offer something the same services as my competitors, but still be distinctive in my offerings.
  • Focusing on a market/product fit- I bumped on to an old article about the only things that matter to a startup. And this speaks of two things - The quality of your product/services and the size of your target market. Putting my focus on these elements helped me gauge my way ahead.
  • Focusing on a single metric for success measurement –So when you start a business, how would you define success? What mistake I did? I was focusing on way too many metrics as a yardstick for my business growth. Starting out with multiple metrics scattered me in different directions and I was simply unable to focus on anything specific. I’d highly recommend startup enthusiasts to pick only one metric to focus on. For me, it was conversion, initially. Sure, it changed over a period of time but focusing on one metric for a specific time gave me a definitive and persistent goal.

 2. Watch your data trends and Fail fast

Keep a vigilant eye on your data. Initially, I was not much into data. A small spike just after the inception made me happy to an extent that I thought this is how it will go. But I was so horribly wrong. To grow into a successful industry leader, you need to make data maturity a main focus from the beginning. So I started to evaluate where my startup stands.

The idea was to be data mature and realize if I am failing or succeeding. And well, if I am failing, I wanted to make sure that I fail fast. So I dived deep into a unique situation took a few steps:

  • Enabling my current data structure to provide me with holistic information.
  • I’ve got tools that help me with the data assistance.
  • I started investing in data applications tailored to my services and business model.

Then, I used that data to gauge whether I take my business decisions based on the data. And then I took a closer look at how others, especially my competitors utilize their data. And having got this sense of data changed my outlook as well.

I started with something called rapid prototyping. For every startup to sustain, the qualitative and quantitative ideas and experimentations should flourish. As Bernhard rightly outs “Embrace and learn from failure; along the edge of failure lies potential greatness,” Bernhard says. Sites like Etsy and Craig’s List, and even local trade shows for that matter is something wherein you can test-market early product prototypes or services and learn from mistakes. Failure is inevitable, it all boils down to how much can you learn and how fast can you pick yourself up

“If you are going to be an entrepreneur, you can’t fear failure. You have to develop a tolerance level of measured risk,”

- Bernhard Niesner.

3. Don’t shy away from seeking help: Co-founder, Employees and Consultants

Taking help doesn’t make you small. I wish I knew before that my business is bigger than my ego. I wish someone would have realized my concern without me speaking about it, but unfortunately life doesn’t work that way. So then I was there, looking for an inspiration from the people, my co-founders, my key employees, and even my consultants. The idea is to get feedback on every action that I take as an entrepreneur.

So when I started off, I was wondering where to get the right suggestions for business. One can get information on blogs, articles, YouTube videos, and even get inspired by other entrepreneurs. But then, having someone from your team to guide you through the thick and thin, matters the most. No one will come and approach you since it is implied that you know a lot better than the rest. But, that’s clearly not the case.

Having an organized approach helps the most when you need inputs from your own people. So after a certain point in time, I did the following to seek help from my key people

  • Getting out on a team lunch to break an ice. Such informal environment got my key employees involved and they would open up to me
  • Organizing a day out with games and outdoor activities. This is where I got friendly with my consultants and they would share their genuine inputs from where I learned so much
  • Sometimes, I’d go out of town and book a nice stay with my family and my co-founders’ family. We will have some great time chilling by the beach and all but then we also share genuine concerns. Here’s where my I go under the skin of my co-founders to identify actual problems (if any, well- there always is) and that helps me in making better business decisions.

4. Take care of legal formalities and protecting IPRs

The time today is a blessing as well as a curse for startups. Blessed to have such a dynamic environment to start a business but then it’s not less than a curse since you have to be on the edge, every time, due to high level of competition. For a startup to stand out amongst the rest, Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) protetction becomes important. IP can be anything that helps create a sustainable and defensible differentiator in a highly competitive market. 

Basically, there are three ways through which a startup can protect its IPR. This could be anything – an idea, concept, product, symbols, process, logos, etc. that can define a brand.

1) Patents
2) Trademarks
3) Copyrights 

Considering IP as an asset is the best perspective I have developed. For any startup, it is an asset since it has a commercial value attached to it. And like every other asset, protection of Intellectual property is also important. Protecting your IP should be an essential component of your business plan and budget. By gaining this fresh perspective on IPR I realized

  • Startup Valuation Can be Made on the Basis of IP Rights

Startups don’t necessarily have massive goods’ stocks or workforce to start with. Hence, most of the value of a startup usually derives from their IP rights. It has been estimated that on the average, over 80% of the value of a startup company is based on their IP portfolio.

  • No Over-Stretching  the Finances

Even at the risk of sounding like the biggest cliché ever, it has to be stated that unless your startup offers something that has zero production costs, you’re going to have to loosen the purse strings at times to make money. What most startups don’t consider, are the expenses that may derive from not taking proper care of IP rights.

  • ImposeControl on What You Have

Countless times I’ve heard the phrase “we do not care if someone copies us, it’s just free advertising!”, and countless times I’ve cringed. Sure, it is nice to have someone else promote your services or goods for free but what are you going to do when the quality of the copies does not satisfy your standards anymore? In many cases the answer is a simple “nothing” if you haven’t taken care of your IP rights.

5. Entrepreneurship is an emotional journey with practical decisions been made at each stage 

Being an entrepreneur is not a destination, but a journey of constant improvement, evolution and perseverance. I started off with tad cluelessness as to what to prioritize and how. But gradually in the journey I understood that it is a roller-coaster, emotional ride filled with excitement, failures and hard lessons. But above all, it is important to take practical decisions out of the emotional experiences.

I don’t feel shy to admit that I was gullible while starting a business. But gradually, things started to happen and I soaked in every bit of experience that my startup exposed me to. It was later that I implied my learning by taking practical decisions that benefitted my company. 

What I left behind in all these years as an entrepreneur is:

Fear:I feared to make the wrong decision, the vagueness of pursuing the right strategy, getting the wrong person on board, losing out on a big client, or worst fear of not having enough to raise the next financing round. But then collective decisions I took were progressive enough to overcome fear. This resulted in adopting a few decision tools also following the decision wheel strategy. 

Doubt: Most of the time, doubt arises due to lack of information. Though, I learned this the harder way, try pushing for more precise and crisp information to avoid any sort of doubts. Once you learn to embrace and overcome doubt, better decisions are bound to follow and this certainly made me a better entrepreneur. 

Regrets:

Regret is nothing but a sort of closure on decisionstaken in past. Regrets are alright as this made me chase my hunger for thoughtful decisions. I firmly believe now that for a closure (of regrets) learning alone is not visceral enough. It is highly unlikely to become part of my intuition. As entrepreneurs, if we want to learn throughout our journey, we need to ponder and embrace regret so we can drive continuous improvements. 

And once I was done with these, I moved towards taking highly rewarding, practical decisions of my life as an entrepreneur. This includes basing my decisions on

  • Market Research
  • Decision Matrix
  • Cost-Benefit Analysis
  • SWOT Analysis
  • Pareto Analysis

Endnote:

Few of the other things I wish someone told me before were to have a heart of a lover and a brain of a genius. Taking care of the employees and people who take care of your business is the ultimate key to grow. There are no shortcuts to valuing people. Be it giving them the necessary break when needed, a consistent pay hike, and even understanding their problems. A compassionate entrepreneur sails the farthest. And then it also comes to understanding your customers. What I was missing out in the beginning was to run behind as many clients as possible. But instead, my experience led me to focus on creating a large value for each customer over gaining a lot of customers. And this, in turn, helped me tailor services for their requirement and getting the positive word of mouth out in the market. Catering to a few clienteles in the best possible manner will work in your favour as a snowball effect and more quality clients will follow.

Like it? Share it!


LegalWiz.in

About the Author

LegalWiz.in
Joined: November 5th, 2018
Articles Posted: 1