As an entrepreneur, it can often at times be an up and down journey, one moment you are basking in success and profits and everyone loves you. The next moment, you’re failing, losing money and the haters are all in. That said, there are some keys that you can focus on and truly invest into so that your odds for success go up. The keys are to focus on developing a business idea, product or service that provides better value in a different way than anyone else in that market currently gives their customers. Persevering through adversity is a must and finding good people, read below for real stories of how to put this into practice.
As Mark Cuban says the great thing about being an entrepreneur is you only have to be right once. The Entrepreneur’s Journey is a lot like a roller coaster, the key to succeed is to maintain a laser focus on your end goals and then work towards them purposely each day, week, month and even year. Think about how incredible that fact is, in reality you could fail over and over again and if you can just get it right one time, then overall you will win and that one win will overcome and compensate for the failures you may have had previously. The ultra successful have all had failures, some of them big and some of them small, but they never looked at them as failures, just as part of their journey to success.
Look at the story of the Colonel, what an entrepreneur’s journey he had, that’s right our good ol boy from Kentucky, Colonel Sanders. For the majority of his life, he largely failed and had terrible timing. He opened up stores in different areas and events outside of his control like the great depression derailed his dreams. At the age of 60, he finally started to think about franchising his fried chicken recipe and concept. He went back to the one thing that he did better than anyone and that was to make some really good fried chicken. His spices that he put on chicken were unique and simply better than the competition. Because he only had to be right once, we all know about KFC. I’ve read that he nearly committed suicide, before starting up KFC, but fortunately he did not give up, he persevered and eventually succeeded.
Having gone through similar failures in business, I can tell you that maintaining that belief and that vision that you are going to persevere and figure out how to bring incredible value to the world with your product or service is what has kept me moving forward during tough times. This is what the Entrepreneur’s Journey is all about.
A year ago, we had a fledgling business with two employees doing 20k a month in sales and now fast forward a year later and we have 20 employees and we’re surpassing $200k a month in sales. I think the reason we’ve succeeded against the odds when we were working in my kitchen is that we created a product with more value than our competition provides. I think we also have been fortunate to find the best people. Human capital is the key to exponential growth, there’s no way you can do it by yourself, you need great people who are an extension of your business and idea. I truly love the people at our company. It especially takes great leaders, our executive team has been so dedicated, relentless and focused on finding solutions and making sure we are progressing each day. At the end of the day, there is nothing quite as powerful at growing a company like a positive company culture that is conducive to productivity. So fight like a Lion and make your dreams into the truth and never, ever give up!