Who likes to do jobs depending on others? Well, none! No one likes to be managed by others and it’s a universal truth. Pressure from the bosses makes your life miserable. You got a handsome salary from your job but you have no time to spend that money on your own entertainment purposes. You can’t spend time with your friends and family or with your most beloved person nor can play games on your XBOX and play soccer outside.
Moreover, there’s always a risk of losing your job no matter how you are good at your work. Company is there to make their own profits. If anything goes wrong from your part, they will kick you out. In fact, they are not concerned a bit about you.
The truth is almost everyone likes to become a leader and leadership is one of the most important aspects of a successful leader. You think day and night, generate ideas in your mind palace and eventually leading others so that your dreams come to reality. Which means you become your own boss, creating something new from existing and people are going to love it.
In this article, I will try to cover how to be a successful business owner or entrepreneur. But before that…
Why You Should Consider Becoming an Entrepreneur
People who loves freedom are the ones who consider entrepreneurship rather than doing a traditional 9 to 5 job at an office.
According to a survey run by Drip, these factors help your mindset to business entrepreneurship propel forward:
Other encouraging factors include the followings:
- To maintain a healthy personal life: As an entrepreneur, you are not obliged to do your job from 9 to 5 pm. You can go for a mountain trek, biking or visit your countryside any time you want.
- To obtain extra time for doing what’s important to you: If you are a music bluff then aside from doing your business, you can also practice music or anything you are passionate about.
- To earn an unlimited amount of money: Working in a company or corporation means you are limiting your income. Being an Entrepreneur, on the flip side will enhance the possibility of making unlimited revenue from your business.
- To create a family legacy: Before death, you can bequeath your business to your heirs so that they can be self-dependent and be proud of your achievement.
- To locate your working place according to your own preferences: If you are the owner of your business, you can locate your office at your disposal and nothing can beat this.
Does Education & Experience Matter?
Education does not matter if you are to go to become an entrepreneur. Here is the truth:
And do you know the best way to learn about entrepreneurship? It is not reading books, nor the college degree, it’s to “Found a company”.
However, when it comes to experience, it does matter a lot. According to researchers Pierre Azoulay, Daniel Kim, and Benjamin Jones:
Company founders were 125 percent more successful if they had worked previous jobs, particularly in a similar industry.
The Washington Post
It happens because the entrepreneurs get armed with a host of experiences while working in a similar industry and are 30% more likely to be successful.
So, it is obviously recommended to work for someone else before venturing own company.
How to Become Entrepreneur
Owning your own business gives you a sense of freedom and empowerment. You can build things and watch them grow. It’s like you are planting a seed, watered them every day after some time it has become a big tree with delicious fruits.
Now without any fuss, take a look at the following infographic that shows the reasons why startups fail and you should not make these mistakes:
You can see the greatest mistake is no market need. That means you should not create a product that no one needs. For this purpose, you will have to conduct a product-market fit analysis.
Here are a few techniques that will help you to become a more successful business entrepreneur:
Don’t Work Hard, Work Smarter
You can see around there are many entrepreneurs who are too laborious, they work hard almost 16 hours a day – even without eating, sleeping and breathing but the outcome is nothing!
Of course, hard work is the key to the success as an entrepreneur but you have to learn how to work smarter, not harder, and it’s a mindset that will take some time to get used to.
For example, there is a story of two woodcutters. One woodcutter cuts wood all day while other woodcutter cuts wood and take rests several times. Surprisingly, the latter cuts wood more. How? That’s because the latter sharpened his axe while he took rest.
Hire Partners & People to Handle Tasks You Aren’t Good at
Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk aren’t successful with all alone. They all have a great team and support network behind them.
When I suggest you hire partners I don’t just mean to hire someone who will do the task for you successfully. Rather what I mean is, you have to have respect for them for their roles.
In the future you are going to work together and have to take many stressful decisions, many arguments among you will arrive. If you don’t respect one another from the beginning your team will not last long.
You can find talented and dedicated people with low cost from virtual marketplaces like freelancer.com, upwork.com, fiverr.com, go and hire them for you.
Save Money & Get More Done
The first problem that every entrepreneur has to face is collecting money. Many of the entrepreneurs use their savings, take a loan from family and friends for the startup of a business. They waste too much time looking for money and can’t act enough.
You have to spend your lot of money when you’re an early stage company. To this end, using freelancer outsourcing sites and the third-party contractor you can reduce the cost. This way is much more cost-friendly when compared to full-time employees.
Learn from the Best & Read Case Studies
Many people want to become an entrepreneur but due to the lack of experience and fear they aren’t able to kick off.
You can work with other experts in their industry before going it alone. You can learn from their success and mistakes. Finding a good mentor will help you to gain your experience.
But learning from this process is pretty much slow. You have to spend years to gain that experience and knowledge.
What I prefer you to read case studies. In your pastimes, instead of reading novels, fiction and watching movies I encourage you to read case studies like how NOKIA failed, why JAPAN is a most powerful country, read biographies of successful entrepreneurs, read everything you can get your hands on about the people who are already a successful entrepreneur.
The more you learn from their mistakes and successes, the faster you can grow your business and become a successful entrepreneur.
Stay Hungry to Learn & Create
As an entrepreneur, you always have a mindset of learning and creating. This mindset might be tiring but without this, you are not able to create anything.
The moment an entrepreneur stops wanting to learn new things, is the moment that you are allowing others to overtake you and leave you behind.
To stay hungry in learning and creating the mindset you have to stay away from the TV, social media, and movies (Except the inspiring ones). These activities are time-wasters for entrepreneurs.
Instead, you should read case studies and do physical activities for relaxing your body and mind. Do whatever it takes to relax.
Listen to complaints
Gone are the days, when company founders did not pay any heed to their customers’ complaints. Now, customers are considered the determiner of your business’ success.
Customers contribute to your business with complaints. Customer complaints are the weaknesses of your business and so you need to take necessary steps to mitigate them.
Here is a huge delivery gap:
Always keep in mind that if you are not delivering the products as per your customer needs then your business is going to go downhill. Never underestimate your customer’s complaints wondering based on your gut feeling that you are delivering the right things.
Take Calculated Risks
You may be wondering why I said you to take risks. Yes, you should take risks. In human nature we don’t like to take risks – it’s in our DNA. On the flip side, a successful entrepreneur takes risks. It’s an essential part of the job.
If you want to become a successful entrepreneur you should take risks. But don’t take every risk. Learn to recognize which risks are worth taking and which you should not take and walk away from. Identify when to take the risk.
Taking risk is a dangerous thing. Learn to calculate your risk and you’ll be a much more successful entrepreneur.
Motivate Yourself
Don’t afraid of failure because today or tomorrow you will obviously fail. And this failure will be your lesson.
Not always will you be able to work smarter, hire the great people, make a foolproof business model and establish error-free management. There is no guarantee! You have to be realistic. Not every business succeeds.
After failing you should not pack up. Trust yourself. Learn from that mistake and go for the next step with more care. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will?
Without trust in yourself and perseverance, you’re not going anywhere in the entrepreneurial world.
When you are stressed and tired you need to motivate yourself.
Spy on Your Competitors
You can have eyes on your competitors. By spying on your most successful competitors, you can learn from their successful tactics as well as mistakes and apply their best practices to your business. Consider doing these stuff:
- Find out their weaknesses, if you have those weaknesses to solve them.
- Copy their techniques apply it to your business. You might be thinking of copying others is a sin. Come on, this is not high school and you are not in your exam hall, researches show that after fixing some issues and with a good marketing strategy the best copycats are most successful.
Use Bullet Points in Your Plan
The best business plan I have ever seen is based on bullet points. It’s because the bullet points are the simplest form that ensures implementation of the plan itself.
Don’t make your plan too complex. Try to describe your plan in just one page.
Work with a Team
If you want to be a one-man show, you need to understand that you will decrease your possibilities to become an entrepreneur. Here are the benefits of working in a team:
You should help others. When you help someone, they will likely find a way to help you in return. It might not be today or tomorrow, but someday in the future, they will be there to help you when you will need it.
You can also use free team management tools to streamline the management of your team members.
Bonus Tips (Hire Digital Marketers)
In this digital era, you can not become a successful entrepreneur unless you build a strong network on social media, send email newsletters to your leads or promote your business through the digital media.
This is why you will have hire digital marketers who are the game changer of your business now-a-days.
Back to You
If you do follow the above-mentioned tricks thoroughly there is no reason that you will not be able to be successful when it comes to your long cherished entrepreneurship. Have in mind that if you succeed this time, more odds are coming on your way and you have to keep overcoming those incessantly. Here is another fact for you:
You should be concentrating on the skills you are good at and take help from the other skills you are not good at. Needless to say – do more with less. To conclude, if you once become successful you will feel like being born in this world is nothing but a blessing.