As a first-time entrepreneur, you may feel lost or scared at the thought of starting out on your own.
Too many times, would-be business owners are dissuaded because of reasons that can be bunched into 2 main categories:
- Don’t Know Where/How to start
- Fear of Failing
I am here to narrow down or simplify the problem for you.
You see, focusing on “methods” is only going to confuse you the more you think about them. That’s why you need to focus on the “Principles of success”, not so much on the “methods”. That’s how specialists spot opportunities and capitalize on them before everyone else.
With a deep study of Principles of success, you can see into the future, and recognize the pearls from the dust.
Over time, you will see that sticking to the Principles paves the path for you, the longer you stick to it, and even your failures turn into eventual success.
I list the Principles of success that have helped me build a successful career in startups and small, home-based businesses
1) The market comes first, the product comes later.
a) Study the market you want to attack. More often than not, your instincts will tell you which market to select. Typically it is the area of deep-seated passion, something that resonates with you – never mind that you may not have any experience in that area. It is typically the domain where you would choose to work even if there was no money involved.
b) Do not worry about developing a product or service. Start with Affiliate products or sell for someone else to get a flavor even if you plan to roll out your own product.
2)Focus on building Residual Income
In the beginning, you may have to stretch a lot in order to achieve your cash-flow goals but try as much as possible to convert to residual income.
Promote a subscription product. Build a team to take on the daily nitty-gritty so that you can focus on growing the business, even if that means parting with your profits. Have your money go to work for you
3) Do not bet the bank
The big benefit of focusing on the market, whether through affiliate marketing or via Network Marketing is that you can get a flavor of success without much initial investment.
This gives you the opportunity to risk small and get inside the game.
We are living in the Information Age now, and 2 glaring truths of our post-2008 correction era are that
a) Cash is King and
b) Businesses are built on small incremental successes, with aggregation forming the basis of profit, rather than huge setups with high startup costs that do not guarantee they will succeed on the back of their size (remember the “too big to fail” companies that just failed?)
4) Start Part-time
Ashwin Sanghi writes in his book 13 Steps to Bloody Good Wealth – “Take the example of a friend’s daughter. She is a video editor who works for an ad agency from 9 am to 6 pm. But over the weekend she dons a baker’s hat and swaps her editing tools for measuring cups. Soon she set up a Facebook page, and lo and behold a business was born!. She recently went on a European holiday with the money earned from her “hobby”. The trick is to set up a successful ‘side hustle’ or micro business that provides an alternate source of income.”
That is what I love about Online Affiliate Marketing businesses or even Network Marketing businesses. They are designed NEVER TO BE FULL-TIME.
Of course, once you get enough success, you might want to amp it up and do it full-time, but the industry is scattered with thousands of success stories of people who built their fortunes working part-time.
5) Track EVERYTHING
Working in a silicon valley startup I learned that there’s no such thing as too many reports. In addition to your marketing efforts and returns, you need to track Operations, Finances, timelines to delivery, Everything.
Big companies are run by reports. So should your small business, since you’re spending your hard-earned money, energy and time on it.
You must often revisit what’s giving you a good return on your time and money, and what you need to discard. The speed of evolution must be rapid.
6) Fail early, Fail fast, fail cheap, fail often
Finally, let me address the biggest reason for never starting out, or for stopping dead in your tracks every now and then – the Fear of Failure!
The Cure for Failure paradoxically is …. more failure. However, you are trying to prevent Big Failure by risking hundreds of small, frequent and cheap mini-failures.
The Age of Entrepreneurship is the Age of Learning. After all, whatever you’ve read in books has already been tried…and commoditized over time by the ones who reached there before you.
You need to invent, execute and track a series of small innovative steps and create your own money-making machine. And I guarantee you that there will be hundreds, if not thousands of failures in doing so.
Do NOT fall into the trap of trying to prevent errors – instead, try to reduce the cost of those mistakes.
With ‘fail fast-fail often‘ there is a clear link between failure and innovation, rapidly turning small mistakes into creativity: only by failing do we learn to succeed.
This also helps understand trends better, and build calibration.
In the new book Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future, authors Leonard A. Schlesinger and Charles F. Kiefer write: “In the face of an unknown future, entrepreneurs act,”
“More specifically, they:
Take a small, smart step
Pause to see what they learned by doing so; and
Build that learning into what they do next.”
Entrepreneurs try, learn and refine. It’s not about failing fast or slow, it’s about learning how to win.
With this, I wish you the best in your journey as an Entrepreneur. See you on the other side.
If you’d like to get started with a low ticket offer (with no recurring fees or subsequent purchases), in order to perfect your skill set and make a few thousand bucks, try out my auto-replicating funnel at www.retirenow.club