Have you recently struck out on your own and decided to further your entrepreneurial pursuits? If so, read on to learn some tips and tricks that can aid and guide your future life in business.
Embrace Failure
This may be a hard concept for many new entrepreneurs to swallow, but it needs to be stated clearly:
You will fail. Often.
The idea is that failure shouldn’t be a debilitating circumstance or “proof” of your inability to foresee obstacles. Instead, embracing failure makes you more capable of dealing with bigger problems and the capacity of your business to handle missteps in the future. IBM’s highly-successful 2nd president, Thomas Watson Jr., took this concept even further with his quote: “If you want to increase your success rate, you need to double your failure rate.”
In fact, you should be worried if everything is going too well. The reason is that there may be an error on the horizon that may be in your entrepreneurial blind-spots.
Use Fear as a Directional
If you’re an entrepreneur, there will always be a slight mixture of fear in your efforts. After all, a disastrous business decision can mean losing money, time, resources — you name it. However, if you’re completely honest with your entrepreneurial efforts, you’ll realize that understanding fear comes from the anxiety of the unknown.
Take an assessment of what you fear in your business and 9 times out of 10, you’ll realize that these fear-inducing areas are the next necessary steps. For instance, one common fear is trusting other workers to handle your business tasks. However, without delegating tasks and trusting others, your business efforts will be stymied. By encountering fear and using it in a positive sense, it provides you with valuable insight.
Find Out Your Strengths (and Delegate the Rest)
The more you know about your skills and talents, the more you may realize how much you don’t know. Entrepreneurs are usually suited for looking at things from a macro sense but come from a particular skill set that suits the industry they’re involved with.
Perhaps you’re talented at programming, but don’t have an eye for web design. You may waste valuable hours trying to pick up the slack and come up with an amateurish effort that actually inhibits your business. So, what’s an entrepreneur to do? Delegate.
The truth is that many online platforms, like Upwork and Fiverr, allow you to hire contractors that specialize in skills to build your business. Remember: you only have so many hours in the day. In fact, many novice entrepreneurs overwork themselves in the beginning, especially when bootstrapping a business. This can be counterproductive when your time is better spent on allocating your hours on your expertise — and giving work to others who specialize in things that you cannot do in a cost-effective manner.
Manage Risk
Understand that every business interaction comes with a fair share of risk. The idea for entrepreneurs to embrace is that they should do what is known in game-theory as “mini-max” — You want to minimize your maximum worst-case scenario. This mini-max concept should be applied to your entire business model; whether you’re deciding on how often you should backup your documents, which staff members you should give administrative privileges to, how many clients can you handle without sinking your business, and so forth.
That’s your baseline, and from there, you can assess whether an effort is worth the results. The risk may push you outside of your comfort zone, which can be a good thing for eradicating stagnation in your entrepreneurial efforts. After all, “no risk, no reward.”
Leverage the Newest Tech
The tech revolution of the 21st century presents significant obstacles for those that don’t want to embrace emerging tech to beat out global competitors. One particular innovation in recent years has been virtual phone numbers, a product of cloud computing and VoIP (“Voice over Internet Protocol”) that allows calls to be instantly routed to any location in the world. Virtual phone numbers are available from trusted service providers like United World Telecom, and come with a number of add-ons and features that can add new dimensions to your entrepreneurship. This allows your business to gain a virtual presence in any country or region of your choice. In comparison to older methods of business expansion (i.e. leasing property, hiring foreign staff, etc.), you not only save on overheads but add up new levels of efficiency that can put you ahead of other businesses.
Author’s Bio: As an entrepreneur and writer, Tom Senkus shares his knowledge of navigating the modern global marketplace. His work has been published in over 50 publications. For more information on his list of services, visit www.tomsenkuswriter.com
