Entrepreneaurship

If you are going to succeed in your business you will need to think and act as an entrepreneur. A great thing about running your own business is that it makes you think as an entrepreneur and because your thinking develops in this way; looking for opportunities and working out how to use them becomes second nature.

You become single minded, you give your business everything. Because you are going to succeed you dedicate yourself to your business and particularly in the early days you will work prodigiously. You will succeed and hard as those early days seem you will look back on them with some satisfaction.

You will learn to ‘think laterally'. Things do not always work as planned, your business model may not be working, keep changing it until it does. Be flexible, you will then find away.

Don't be too proud to ask for advice. You will have discussed your new venture with your friends, colleagues and others. There are many people who you can turn to including your local Chamber of Commerce, Local Business network and the bank manager - keep him/her on side.

I have a friend of 30 years standing who has started two successful businesses. The second was a larger version of the first involving considerable amounts of start up capital. Over many months in the start up phase we met regularly mostly at his instigation on a Friday night in the pub. I thought he was just being sociable, friendly and trying to relax.

This went on continuously for months and intermittently for years. We always discussed issues relating to the start up business. Some years later when the business was established and successful I realised from some chance word that I had been giving away free consultancy because my friend had been drawing on our discussions to help him with his problems. He's still my friend!

This is what friends are for and his business is a now market leader in it's sector and I am so pleased that he had the for sight to use my ‘free consultancy'. So talk to other entrepreneurs.

As you go on in your business treat every failure as a learning experience. Think carefully about what went wrong, understand it fully and use the information to understand your strengths and weaknesses. Take remedial action and don't take failures personally.

If being a successful entrepreneur was easy every one would do it. There are no rules, there is no right and wrong way round most issues. There are just problems with a number of ways of solving them and turning them into opportunities. Be flexible, you will solve them and then you are on to the next stage,

Tip:

Never ever be too proud to discuss your problems, and if your are a consultant you probably enthuse about your interests and communicate them freely, beware giving of free consultancy - ‘even to friends!'