This article is also published on ChangeTheCompany.com
An entrepreneur is someone who organizes and operates a business. Often, they take on a great amount of personal and financial risks. Broadly speaking, there are four types of entrepreneurs.
Some run small businesses and startups. Others are larger and run organizations and community fundraisers. There are also those that run large businesses, and those that run community fundraisers and organizations. No matter which of these four types of endeavors one might wish to partake in, the road to success is often long and hard.
Despite the lengthy road, the journey is made up of only five easy steps. In this list, we will go through each of those steps and the challenges they require to complete.
1 – LOCATE
If you’ve determined that you want to be an entrepreneur, great! Now you need to locate an idea that you can make into a business. It sounds simple, but there are some caveats. For one, it must be an original idea, brand new. Paradoxically, it also must build upon an existing idea.
Ultimately, you’re asking what existing problem you can solve. After all, why spend the time to fix a problem that doesn’t exist? Think about the invention of the cell phone: it didn’t pop out of midair, it was an extension of the existing invention of the telephone.
2 – PLAN
Planning is the best thing an entrepreneur can do. Are your ideas feasible? Do you have enough capital to start your endeavor? Where are you going to get that money? And most of all, how will you market your idea to an existing audience?
Making a plan of attack is vital. Try to be as specific as possible with what you will need and what you might need. See where others have failed, so you can avoid their mistakes and pitfalls. Above all, look to see if your plan is legal. No endeavor is worth going to jail, and no endeavor will grant you enough money quickly to make potential legal costs worth it.
3 – NETWORK
The key to everything is networking, and entrepreneurship is no exception. If you lack sufficient funds but have a great idea, finding the right investor might be the key. In fact, down the line, you might even need to expand your business. Having a group of ready investors will help you reach new heights.
Remember the old adage: “Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends.”
4 – SELL
Let’s take movies as an example. A film might cost three million to make, but it will take another three million to market. It’s an old hat in Hollywood that however much a film costs, double it for marketing. After all, if you have a product but no way to market it, then you don’t have a product: you just have a really expensive thing to decorate your house with.
This is where your plan will come in handy. When making that plan, develop a clear marketing strategy. Are you selling to stores that’ll house your product and sell them to customers? Or are you selling directly?
Keep in mind that word of mouth is good, but it’s no guarantee. People don’t live in a commercial world where they talk endlessly about products they like. It is up to you to know your target customer and why they want it. You might need to think outside the box here. For instance, if you’re selling baby products, your customer base isn’t babies: it’s parents.
5 – KEEP YOUR BUSINESS AFLOAT
Even after success hits, there’s no guarantee that it’ll last. Disasters hit. Pandemics rage. Running a business isn’t just about keeping the lights on; it’s about finding out who might usurp you.
Take Disney as an example. They have plenty of money, yet they still market their products exhaustively and take a whopping seventy percent (in some cases) of ticket sales from movie theaters. Why? Because they are always thinking one step ahead..
Unfortunately, charity doesn’t make a business thrive. While I don’t encourage anyone to be as ruthless as Disney, keeping the business alive means keeping people employed, and the entrepreneur’s responsibility is to ensure that their employees have a future at their company.
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash