10habitsofhighlysuccessfulentrepreneurs

TheThe EightEight HabitsHabits OfOf ExtremelyExtremely SuccessfulSuccessful EntrepreneursEntrepreneurs Great entrepreneurs don t write great books In fact they don t write many books at all Neither fact is surprising Successful entrepreneurs are typically too busy innovating to write down much of anything And on those rare occasions when they attempt to create a book it s filled with what they did and not what led to their idea in the first place As a rule they are not particularly introspective So if we want to know what makes them successful in order to improve our own companies whether we work for a huge one or our own start up we need to study them And that is exactly what I have been doing professionally for the last 30 years 1 Look at How They Think Not at What They Do If you just observed the actions entrepreneurs take you would conclude there isn t that much to be gained from studying them Each entrepreneur s behavior is as idiosyncratic as they are You would have to be Larry Page and Sergey Brin to start Google Oprah Winfrey to found Harpo Productions But and it is a huge but if you look at how they reason you see remarkable similarities The process just about all of them follows in creating their companies looks like this They A Figure out what they really want to do B Take a small step toward that goal C Pause after taking that small step to see what they have learned D Build off that learning and take another small step E Pause after taking that step F Build off what they learned in step two And then take another small step If we were to reduce it to a formula it would be Act Learn Build Repeat Put simply in the face of an unknown future entrepreneurs act They deal with uncertainty not by trying to analyze it or planning for every contingency or predicting what the outcomes will be Instead they act learn from what they find and act again 2 They Start with a Market Need Ideas are easy I bet you can come up with 10 new product or service ideas within five minutes right now if you had to And because new ideas are plentiful they are not worth very much As with anything else if there is a glut of ideas in this case the value goes down Besides there is no guarantee anyone will buy the great idea you have come up with If you start with the idea you need to go in search of customers If you begin with the need you already have a market the people who need what you have If you can discover a market need you can make a fortune But intriguingly that is not the primary motivation of the most successful entrepreneurs and that brings us to the next point 3 Don t Set Out to Be Rich The best entrepreneurs don t have making a fortune as their goal as they start off Wealth is just an extremely pleasant byproduct Why not focus on gaining wealth Well if your primary objective is to get rich quick you are bound to cut corners short change your customers and fail to take the time to truly understand what the market needs And that is true whether you are trying to get your company off the ground or are introducing a new product or service in order to make this quarter s numbers Instead they identify the market need we talked about in point 2 and get to work 4 Marketing Psst Compete Differently The conventional wisdom find a niche zig when others zag is right but not particularly helpful It lacks to be kind specificity Far better is to describe what the best entrepreneurs do and that is compete differently How do they do it Here are some examples Make small bets Your resources are limited and starting anything new is risky You don t want to compound those risks by betting everything on one role of the dice Make those small bets quickly No you don t want to lose money But since you are not risking much you can afford to fail Get out in the marketplace fast and let potential customers tell you if you are onto something Action trumps everything especially planning Where do you place those small bets I Obviously in areas where competitors don t exist or are weak Not so obviously in places where you feel strong That confidence will help you overcome the inevitable hurdles you will face Where do you place those small bets II No customer wants to be entirely dependent on just one supplier no matter who it is Ask yourself what your competitor s customers want Better yet ask those customers yourself Let the market define you People will tell you what they like and what they don t about your product Incorporate their ideas with yours Making the world s best videocassette recorder does you no good if what people really want are DVRs Keep looking