The life of an entrepreneur can never be fully engrafted into one single box. It is a perfect blend of the art of creating products and services and the science of calculating risks and profits.
To yearn for an entrepreneur’s life is to make peace with the complications and hurdles your business will throw at you. And it starts from the very beginning. When you have to convert a thought into a tangible or digital piece of work—you are on the steps to becoming an entrepreneur.
With every obstacle coming your way, you become more of an entrepreneur each day. And, by crossing many such hoops and hurdles, your business grows multifold too.
To start a business from scratch is the first step towards becoming a successful entrepreneur. And, before learning how to grow your business, let’s briskly pace through the hatched insights behind a successful entrepreneur.
How To Become A Successful Entrepreneur?
Being a budding entrepreneur is not an easy job.
And if you are a budding-millennial-entrepreneur, then there are some unsaid decisions and opportunities you should know about before the anticipated career graph.
To think about it, becoming a successful entrepreneur is easier for Millennials because:
- You have an edge to technology
- Every Millenial is a Social Media Mogul today
- You are living in the premium age of innovation
Some of the many eminent Social Media Entrepreneurs are successful in their subsequent businesses today were privy to technology in its finest way. Hence, before commencing on their business offline, they became extremely popular online. The best example being—Facebook.
So, here are ten of the most significant determinants on how to become a successful entrepreneur. These factors will make you aware of the ebb and flow of a start-up business plan before starting a business from scratch.
1. Make Your Plan, The Solution
Although an idea is the base of a start-up structure, a business plan is a solution to the market. Many newbies tend to interpret their ideas as their target market’s solutions. And, it is considered a rookie mistake to confuse your ideas as the market solution. Instead, make your strategic start-up Business plan the market solution.
You need to solve the problem with a systematic and practical plan and not merely a pompous idea. Evidently, companies survive not because of the initial business idea but the concrete business plan.
Before even believing in your idea—try to analyze the pros and cons of your product or service. Make sure that it is contributing to the solution as we already have “solutions” adding to the line of pseudo-solutions.
2. Intense Market Research
Every entrepreneur seeds the idea of his business module as a solution to a particular market. And it is axiomatic to research the market before stepping into the sea of solutions already present in it.
It is pertinent to understand the importance of age group, gender, presence of competitors, cost analysis and comparison, supply and demand ratio, market potential, and, basically, everything around the census of your target demographic.
A factual and robust market research will only solidify your start-up business plan. It works as a strong foundation for your business, and the suitable niche it is penetrating.
3. Pen Down Your Start-up Business Plan
There is no such thing as verbal evidence in a business. And, being an entrepreneur and starting a business with no money, you must understand that translating your business into paper can be the most crucial thing in your entrepreneurship.
By making it inscribed in the paper, your business plan can be analyzed swiftly to make sense of the risks and advances of your product.
Your start-up business plan is your vision board which needs to determine roadmap. It shall include everything from incubating the business to the process while the different series of funding your product will foresee. Only a written business will take your business model to the pinnacle it is meant to reach.
4. Make It Legal
Starting a business with no money comes will loads of official duties than just working on your idea, creatively. You have to keep in-line with all the legal documents related to your business, finances, patents, copyrights, and licenses.
And there is no better and suitable example than the root cause of rivalry between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The only reason Steve lost the copyright battle in the court of law is due to one minor technical issue. Absence of which could have ended Microsoft’s business reach that it sustains today, and we’d only be using Mac!
So, keep your legal documents in order, if you don’t want anyone to be your Bill Gates or Steve Jobs for that matter. Only the world knows how one visit to the Xerox PARC labs inspired Jobs to transform the world of technology with Macintosh.
5. Brace Yourself To Brand Your Business
Social Media has taken personal branding to a whole new level of promotion. People brand themselves as influencers, innovators, content creators, and whatnot. Brand your business systematically with enough digital space to work in and surmount, if possible.
So, working on your brand will help you gain more traction for your business and for yourself too. Create as many qualitative Social Media appearances as you can and try to make it impressionable for the viewers to act upon and reminisce.
This will enhance your efforts by myriad if you want to gain more friction before springing your business from scratch.
Your brand, both organizational and personal, shall be in sync with the latest trends of the world your business is impacting.
6. Overcome the Fear of Financial Management
The only way to backup your business plan is to make it financially protected. How? There are various roadmaps to gain financial backup for your product through the means of Angel Investors, crowdfunding, VC investors, trade equities and a lot more.
You must understand the importance of consistent cash flow, cost analysis, and tax return, along with making each end meet simultaneously. While starting a business with no money—only strategic financial management will take you through the ride.
7. Keep Your Competitors Closer
To be distinguished a successful entrepreneur, one must know the percentage of uniqueness of their product or service. The amount of competition in the market will make you understand the estimated demand and success of your product.
So, keep your competitors closer than anyone else. Know their start-up’s business plan, their drawback (and work on it if you can), learn from their mistakes to avoid yours. Most importantly, see how you can create a separate space in the marketing instead of comfortably clutching theirs.
8. Mentors Are Everything
Starting a business is pretty daunting, and it is easy to get submerged under the sea of paperwork and rumbling ideas. And it highly recommended seeking guidance from an industry specialist before learning how to grow your business in the industry.
Along with approaching a familiar mentor, you can also reach mentors through various business platforms like SCORE and Micromentor.
It is way more accessible these days to reach an expert and ask for the guidance you require.
9. Worry About the Risks, Not Profit
An entrepreneur is one who works against the risks before working for the profits, although this notion comes from negative entrepreneurial bias—where the mind tends to give more importance to the shortcomings than benefits.
It is most likely to save you from the mishappenings of losing against risks in the longer run. To grow a business with profit will only be possible if you are able to look out for the risks and work against them beforehand.
And it balances your decision-making abilities before taking a critical step during the event of a judgment.
10. Only Stick to Your Core Business Idea
Everything changes when you start getting through the various rounds of funding and sales pitches. Your business module might begin to vary. The target market will also expand, and the process and means of reaching out to the customers are already going through its own metamorphosis.
So, with all the imperative alterations and developments going around—try to stick to your core idea solely.
In conclusion, steps to becoming an entrepreneur and creating your own space in the market is a tough cookie to crack. But, with a sorted business plan and endurance, it all becomes a tad bit achievable.
Perceive it this way—the world is full of problems to be solved by a future entrepreneur to create a feasible solution for the world and a billion-dollar market by himself. And, as far as we have seen, entrepreneurs are predominantly a part of the solution.
