How To Be An Entrepreneur

1. Be honest with yourself, your investors, your employees and your customers.
2. Know your business better than anyone, and know your customers best.
3. Have a product or service that your customers need.
4. Manage cash flow; seek early sales and revenue; always innovate and improve.
5. Leave customers wanting more, but don’t make them wait too long.
6. Embrace failure:
• an uncompromising teacher;
• a requisite step for innovation;
• a crucible for character.
7. Work harder than anyone; and
8. Selflessly lead your team to achieve timely business goals, notwithstanding inevitable failures.

Entrepreneurs fail, sometimes early and often. Honest entrepreneurs embrace their failures, learn from their failures, innovate and improve products and services based on their failures, and take ownership of their failures, without excuse. An entrepreneur knows the business and inspires others, within the crucible of failure, to rapidly retool and redirect efforts toward success. Life and business are uncertain. However, attracting new customers, while keeping existing customers loyal and satisfied, leads to a predictable revenue growth. The sigmoidal curve, above, illustrates a statistically predictable exponential rate of growth, early, and eventually market saturation.

The slow growth during a start-up phase and exponential revenue increase during a rapid growth phase is a predictable pattern for entrepreneurial businesses. Work hard, know your customers, have products or services that customers want, deliver goods and/or services that leave customers wanting more, constantly improve, constantly innovate, concentrate on sales and revenue, and manage your cash flow. These business basics are essential to any company. To be a successful entrepreneurial company, never settle for failure. Learn from mistakes and move on smartly.

To be entrepreneurial is to embrace failure, to learn from failure, to improve and create even more loyalty among customers, employees and investors, based on constant innovation and improvement, within the crucible of failure. Entrepreneurial success is only to be gained by 100% perseverance, followed by another 100% and another and so on.