The entrepreneurial journey comes with a lot of challenges, and today, I want to share with you eight lessons that you can take away that could help
you make your journey a lot smoother and a lot easier.
Let’s jump into these eight lessons that could make your entrepreneurial journey a lot easier.
The first lesson is to:
Protect Your Assets
When you are an entrepreneur, you open and expose yourself to a lot of dangers being the business owner and being the director of your company.
So, what you want to do is, you want to ensure that you are protecting your personal assets from anything that happens within your business.
So, that means using the correct structures for setting up your business, whether it be a PTY limited company or using trust structures or using a series of companies, holding companies, and other structures as well.
You also want to have insurance in place for your business and for
yourself. So, in the event of something happening to you, maybe due to sickness or illness, there is an insurance policy that could pay out, and
your family then could continue supporting you and themselves if anything was to happen as well. So, insurance is a big part of that.
Then, it comes to business insurance. If something happens to one of your key staff members, there’s key person insurance. And then also, there’s public liability, product liability, professional indemnity insurance, and so forth. So, those kinds of things protect you, protect your business
and protect your assets.
Lesson number two is:
Don’t Take Failure Personally
The entrepreneurial journey is filled with challenges. It’s filled with highs and lows, ups and downs, and there’s constant failures along the way.
You do not succeed without having some sort of failure along the way. There will always be failures. Some of them might be small. Some of them might be large, but an entrepreneur knows that failure is part of that journey to success. So, you can’t take it personally. It happens to the best of us.
Classic examples are some of the really rich and wealthy people that had first gone broke trying to build their wealth, and then, they found a better way to do things, and then, they succeeded.
So they’ve always failed along their journey to success.
Lesson number three is:
Take Care of Yourself
Being an entrepreneur, you are trying to go out and build a business,
build a brand, build an empire, and a lot of times, you tend to let your personal wellbeing go, so maybe, your health and your mental health or your physical wellbeing.
So, lesson number three is: Take Care of Yourself. Ensure that you’re getting plenty of rest. Rest is important because you need your brain to be able to take a break from what it’s doing, recharge and allow new and fresh ideas to come through.
You also need to be exercising your body. You can’t just be sitting,
let’s say, behind the desk or running around trying to be the
entrepreneur. You’ve got to exercise and take care of your body.
And then, as well, you’ve got to eat appropriately.
You’ve got to have a good diet, mixing that with fruit and vegetables and everything else. You can’t just be eating fast food and takeaway because you are on the go.
Lesson number four is:
Hire People Who Are Smarter Than You
This reminds me of a quote from Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple. He always said that we don’t just hire smart people, and then go and tell the smart people what to do. That just doesn’t work. You’ve got to hire the smart people and then get those smart people to tell you what needs to be done in the business. And that’s why you hire smarter people.
You need smart people to be able to drive you forward. You need people that have different perspectives. You need people that have different skillsets within your organisation or within your company.
So, an entrepreneur knows that they can’t succeed by themselves. They need to build a team. And obviously, if you’re building a team of smart people around you, that’s going to propel you, and it’s going to leverage your business. It’s going to allow you to move faster and reach your goals a lot faster.
Lesson number five is to:
Listen to Your Customers
This is a simple lesson. Your customers will tell you:
- exactly what they need
- what your product is doing
- what it’s not doing
- what they would like to achieve
- what their goals and aspirations are
And, if you listen to what those things are, you can go back and you can improve your products. You can introduce new products. You can find out what is working and what is not working. So, your customers are sort of your best market research.
Speaking to your customers, listening to your customers, and then taking that feedback on. If you just brainstorm with your team and come up with an idea for a product, but you’ve never actually tested that with your customers, your chances of success are not as good as if you took something that your customer is actually asking for.
Therefore, it’s critical and important to listen to your customers and
try and solve their problems. Find ways and means to make life better for
them. And, that’s obviously going to make life better for you and your business.
Lesson number six is:
Don’t Take Shortcuts
A common quote that we all know: There is no shortcut to success.
It’s important that you put in the time, you put in the effort, you do the work that needs to be done to ensure that on your entrepreneurial journey you get to where it is that you want to succeed.
So, if you take shortcuts, the quality of your service, the quality of your products are going to be affected. That’s then going to affect your customers. They’re not going to come back and be repeat customers. They’re not going to continuously support you because the quality of your service has gone down because you’ve taken shortcuts to try and deliver those products and services.
So, it’s important to focus on what needs to be done. Take the long-term view. Don’t take a quick shortcut. Ensure that you are focusing on quality because that obviously means that you’re not going to be cutting corners,
taking shortcuts, shortchanging your customers, and so forth.
Lesson number seven is:
Always Add Value
Adding value ensures that your customers will come back because they know that what they’re getting, what they’re paying for, they’re getting their money’s worth. So, adding value is critical and important.
It goes together with one of the other videos I shot. I spoke about creating an extraordinary experience for your customers.
If you create a better experience than your customer would have with a competitor, then chances are, they’re going to come back.
We’re now living in the experience age. People would pay more for an experience than they would just pay for a product. It’s important that you’re providing value so that they are happy to part with their money because they know that what they’re getting is more than what they’re expecting. So, it’s really important to always be adding value.
And it’s not always adding value to your customer. As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to be adding value back to your staff, you’ve got to be adding value back to investors that have invested in your business, you’ve got to be adding value to everyone around you. Your time as an entrepreneur needs to be managed so that you’re adding value to everyone around you.
Lesson number eight is:
Be Prepared For Challenges
As I mentioned, the entrepreneurial journey is filled with challenges, ups and downs and highs and lows. So, you need to be proactive when it comes to facing challenges. You can’t be reactive. You’ve got to be prepared. You’ve got to have a strategy and plan in place.
You have to know that challenges will always occur and it’s up to you to manage those challenges as the entrepreneur.
