Two years ago I started my entrepreneurship journey as a consultant and since then I have realised things that have changed my outlook not only towards buildings but also about life! Before I get in to the preacher mode, I will share the 5 most important things that I have learned.
1. Business does not require money!
One of the common misconceptions is the requirement of capital while starting a business. In fact all you need is crystal clear vision and thought process.
Today, you can get loan for assets and credit for material. Hence, the important question to answer is not about arranging resources but monetising them.
And this requires a structured thought process to create and deliver value.
2. Strengths are a mirage
Infact, I started my business focusing on my strengths of finance and management consulting but I soon realised that my strengths alone cannot get me far. Sales is my weakness but without sales any business is a fish without water.
And I had two options to focus on my weakness; either work on it or workaround it. Guess what? I chose to work around it. Because offering my strength as a service was my core value proposition and I needed to work on it enhance my value. With limited time, best choice is get a team member to compensate for your weakness.
But what I mean to say, instead of just working with your strengths, you need to know your weaknesses and find ways to work around them through your team. Also given the marginal utility increase beyond a certain point, compensating for your weaknesses can yield greater value than the excess under-utilised strengths.
Hence, while building you core team, covering up for your weaknesses is more important than amplifying your strengths.
3. Just doing it right is not enough
Consistency is the keyword here. There is mix of two things here. You not only need to do the right things right but also need to be consistent about it. Neither alone can yield results.
For instance, my mom spent 20 years waking up at 6 am to run her yoga studio but being unable to the right things right, the business never grew beyond 2 studios. Similarly there are many talented people who seem to get the right things right everytime but lack the sheet will power to put in the effort consistently.
Right things are the things that will either yield disproportionate output or enhance your state of business way more or differently than any other thing that you do. It is very important for you as an entrepreneur to recognise those right things and treat them with priority.
4. Speed is the key, impatience is the enemy
If you cant decide in 48 hours you can never decide. Infact, not deciding is a decision by itself!
As Zuckerberg says, “Move fast, break things!”
Recently we decided to implement a custom CRM (Customer Relation Management) software and from this exercise we learned about speed and impatience. We executed swiftly, from comparing product options to process design, customisation and implementation, everything was completed in a month.
We were swift but we got impatient as we wanted to move to the next item on our agenda. And amidst this impatience we missed out on the attention to details and after thought of process design which ended up consuming one week extra.
Hence, you need to be focused completely on the present to act quickly and a ping worrying about the future. Being quick is necessary as swift actions give you the time correct errors but at the same time impatience can be a cause for errors at the first place.
5. Empowering people builds wealth
Whether they are your customers or people in your organisation.
If you consider great businesses of all times like freelancer.com, shutter stock or recent ones like Uber, lyft and Airbnb they have empowered people around the globe to generate revenue. And their wealth is proportionate to the people they empowered. Also platforms like Alibaba and Amazon have empowered millions to reach more customers or innovation like iTunes made business easy for artists.
While on the customer side platforms like Shopify have helped thousands of people take their businesses online. WordPress and other forms of social media enabled millions to share their stories.
And the bottom line difference between good and great business is that good ones deliver value whereas great ones empower or enable people to generate value!
Now that you have read this far, you can know more about doing business with our course on Business Essentials.
Savvy Munshi 