An entrepreneur is an individual who creates a new business, bears the lion’s share of the risks and enjoys most of the rewards. The process he/she goes through before setting up a business is known as entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs play a key role in any economy, using the necessary skills and initiatives to anticipate consumer (and industry) needs and bring new ideas to market. Entrepreneurship that proves to be successful in taking on the risks of creating a business is often rewarded with profits and growth opportunities.
However, taking risks and learning lessons from the episodes is another. Every entrepreneur will take his/her path to run a business, and will learn their lessons in different ways. Also, sometimes they will learn lessons from the failures and setbacks of their industry peers too. However, it is not necessary that a wannabe entrepreneur needs to learn from others’ failures at all times. He/she can gain knowledge from success stories as well.
However, this article will talk about some of the offbeat lessons that entrepreneurs also need to be mindful about.
Be Flexible With Your Thoughts
Often business owners face the dilemma about what to do with their ventures, after they begin and end up becoming success stories. If the entrepreneurs don’t have a concrete long-term roadmap in their hands, they will just end up running the business without vision, facing market headwinds and the resultant burnout, since they haven’t seen these things coming and neither they have action plans to ride through the tough times.
There’s no hard rule that once you start a business, you need to continue with it for your lifetime. If you feel that you might be unprepared for the headwinds in the long term and you don’t have plans to deal with them, feel free to close or sell the business. This is not failure, since you have created a thriving business and now, you’re deciding to take on a completely new endeavour.
If you want to continue with the business, then be prepared to have a long-term vision and most necessarily, an action plan, that will help you to fulfil your goals, while keeping factors like market volatility in mind.
It’s important to keep your ego aside. At the end of the day, either closing/selling your business or taking those painstaking moments to draw up your long-term goals and action plans won’t belittle your personality.
Smart Work: Need Of The Hour
Being a workaholic is fine, but unless it starts affecting our health and makes us look unproductive in the long run. While some people may justify work alcoholism as something where the more we work, the more we work, the more virtuous we will be, the smart thing here will be to stick with fixed work hours and get the maximum output in those times.
If we remove the cultural expectations around the “Deadline Culture” and instead focus on working just as much as we need to keep our businesses chugging along and move it in the direction of our goals, we won’t be overstressing with the workload even on our weekends, thereby maintaining the work-life balance, which in the long run, will only keep us productive.
As entrepreneurs, we need to create systems and processes, which will cut down on the time we spend on menial tasks. While work delegation becomes important here to make ourselves free from repetitive tasks and focus on the bigger picture: concentrating on activities we need to perform as business owners, one also needs to remember that the 21st century economy is also about the perfect man-machine combo, where technologies like AI will eventually take over the roles of performing such menial tasks, thereby letting human professionals focus on bigger and meaningful professional activities.
It’s Okay To Fire Clients
New entrepreneurs may be horrified at the idea of firing a client, but those who have been running their companies for a while will instantly be able to think of that troubling client who they would love to fire. Such clients are known for ruining entrepreneurs’ days by sending 20 emails a day and even calling them on the weekend, apart from not having a clear vision of the project, while paying little.
“You don’t have to put up with bad clients. Yes, you will lose revenue if you let one go, but think of the time you’ll free up. With that time, you can look for new, better clients to replace that revenue. You can also devote more time to the clients you have, which will make them so happy, they’ll refer others to you,” says Su Guillory, an expat coach and business content creator.
“Just be careful in how you fire a client. If emotions get in the way, you risk burning bridges. On the other hand, if you can tactfully tell a client that you’re no longer able to provide services for them, you may leave the relationship secure. If you don’t want to be honest about how crazy it makes you receive dozens of texts about a project from the client, just tell them your workload doesn’t allow you to fully dedicate yourself to their project,” she stated further in her message towards the entrepreneurs.
Keep On Learning Stuff
Neither entrepreneurs nor industries remain stagnant. Both change, learn and evolve. For example, think about the finance industry and the impact of fintechs on the sector. Now the technology (AI) is ruling the roost into the sector, when it comes to conducting timely market surveys and offering personalised products as per the customers’ financial needs. The same legacy banks, whose maximum investment into the technology some 20 years back used to be in the form of new computers, are now spending big time on things like AI and data analytics.
“Even after 20 years of entrepreneurship, I’m still changing and learning. You will, too. As your industry changes, as you’re influenced by books, blogs, documentaries, conferences, and peers, you will get new ideas about how to run your business and the products or services you offer,” Guillory said.
In business, there is no place for stagnation. Entrepreneurs need to constantly improve themselves and be in touch with the technological and other changes occurring in their industries. There is nothing called “Oh! I am an industry veteran and I don’t need to learn anything new.” There is no fixed age to learn and grow.
Listen To Others, But Filter The Tips
One great way for entrepreneurs to learn and help their businesses grow is to turn to others for advice. The much-required tip might come from their business partners and employees, or in a crude manner from friends, spouses, or mentors. Be open to the advice coming from anywhere, and humble yourself enough to hear it rather than deciding that you always know best what your business needs.
However, even though people have the best intentions, they don’t always know what your business needs. You need to know to distinguish those tips when you’ve got things covered and when you’re in too deep and need to see your business from an outside perspective. Sometimes you need a combination of advice from others and your intuition.
“If you pay attention, your business is teaching you things every day. But sometimes it requires you to pull your head out of the muck to hear it, and set aside self-pride to heed it,” Guillory noted.