13 Inspiring entrepreneurs share the advice they’d give their younger selves
Keen on starting your own business? At AMAfeed, we hear from entrepreneurs from all walks of life — and we love it. Over the last several months, we received tons of groundbreaking answers from successful entrepreneurs who have experienced many years of setbacks, frustration, and failure learning experiences before they achieve success. And as with most things in life, it pays to pick up a few tips from the people who have been there and done it. Therefore, we decided to bring together a set of their best advice they wish they had followed early on in their career. So, if you haven’t yet found your personal business guru, keep reading — these tips will help you make your dream business into reality.
So what can be learned from listening to the lessons that other people have learned the hard way?
If you are about to launch your startup, what needs does your marketing plan have to cover to be bulletproof?
When it comes to creating a solid marketing plan, there are three things I suggest:
1) Make sure you’ve covered the basics, the traditional stuff that has been proven. If it’s a website, make sure your SEO is in order. If it’s an app, make sure your ASO is in order.
2) Look at where competitors have found success. You don’t always have to reinvent the marketing wheel — look at what competitors have done that has worked, and the things that they’ve done that didn’t work.
3) Your marketing plan should be “lean” as well — never jump into a marketing strategy on an assumption. Test it on a small scale first. If you’re running ads, don’t put ads up and put your whole budget behind it — put a small bit behind it and test it, measure the success, and optimize. Just like validating a startup, a marketing plan should be validated using a Build — Measure — Learn cycle.
How do you know when a branding strategy isn’t working?
If a branding strategy isn’t working, then you’ve totally misinterpreted your audience. Building out a demographic profile about your target audience is an essential part of building a sustainable brand, but not everyone does that. Many people build brands based on assumptions rather than data points, which is also not ideal. You can start by building on assumptions, but as you collect more data from your audience, you need to tweak your branding and brand messaging accordingly. Essentially, a branding strategy should either be a success out of the gate or an evolution based on trial and error. A flat-out failure means you’ve hired the wrong people to help you!
What would you consider to be the founding elements of a good entrepreneur?
A good mentor and champion, an actual business plan that clearly shows the revenue potential and where you stand apart from your competition. The ability to do whatever takes, be every role if necessary for a while. And the hustle! The hustle is real and necessary. Always be figuring out ways to make current clients happier and chase new ones that meet your ideal customer profile.
In your opinion, what prevails when developing digital campaigns? Style? Content?
That’s a great question, and the answer is about what your goal is. If it’s a branding campaign, the messaging and creative need to be super compelling to make people notice. Like a video that evokes emotion, or a banner ad with a jaw-dropping stat that makes people stop what they are doing. If it’s direct response, the offer needs to stand out, like “Sign up for free shipping.”
Ed Challinor — CEO and co-founder of Smileworks Liverpool
Did you go through any failures when you were building your practice? What were they and how did you turn them around?
Wow. Failure. There was a lot of that. Although I hate these business owners who wear failure like a badge of honour. They have an idea and get seed funding and then waste it and their investors all suffer and they just move on as though nothing happened. To me, they are just failures.
But business is about small wins and small failures all the time. It’s highs and lows. Once I mis-read a contract and almost cost us our lease and ruined the entire business. You can imagine — being a lawyer — how that affected me. I failed to secure funding I failed to learn marketing quickly enough and I always feel like I’m failing to help my employees enough or drive the business hard enough.
We’ve faced down bankruptcy and still make big mistakes. But failure is a funny word. You make mistakes and learn from them. Failing to me is really giving up. I’d never do that. And the hardest thing is that when you are small the odds are so heavily stacked against you sometimes it’s overwhelming and you feel like giving up. Luckily, I believed my fiancee was the worlds best dentist and she believed I was the world’s best lawyer and business leader. So we always found peace and solace in one another. I don’t think I could have done it alone. I’d say get a business partner or two. That way you have support from people who understand you.
When you talk about financial clarity, how do you decide what is to be shown and what not?
Financials are the language of business. I want my staff to understand that. So everyone knows what everyone else gets paid because it’s on the board. I even give our team members lines on the P&L to look at as little projects to see whether they can improve contracts or get us better deals. I am constantly amazed how business owners think that financials are some private thing like medical records. They’re not. I am happy to discuss how much money I make because I earn every penny of it and I am happy to discuss with any employee why X gets more than Y because they do a different role with more or less responsibility, have more or less qualifications or are getting better results.
But by financial clarity, I really mean the business owner understanding how the financials in the business works. Numbers are like magic to me. They are often counter-intuitive and will always surprise you.
To give you an example. We were in a situation at one point where we could have raised our prices by 10% and afforded to lose 25% of our customers and still make a higher profit margin. It’s insights like that that can drive a pricing strategy.
I also know what my competitors are doing and how I can attack their profit centers and squeeze them. It’s like tennis. You cannot go head to head with an opponent you need to instead force them to make errors. For example, I worked hard on gaining a number one position in the search engines that forced my competitor onto AdWords. their campaign is a disaster and is losing them money. They are also telling me precisely what their biggest profit making categories are so I can squeeze them harder.
We do a better job than our competition locally so I have no ethical problems running greedy or inauthentic or poorly managed businesses out of town. That’s better for the health of the patients in the long run.
I see each patient lost to a competitor as a sad loss because I know they won’t get the treatment they deserve.
What do you think about companies being opportunistic and rallying around “hot” issues that may or may not align with their impact/CSR strategy?
Great question. It’s definitely a slippery slope for companies to jump in and rally around hot issues before doing their proper due diligence. I would recommend that they take their time to learn how their business intersects with the particular issue and whether it would be advantageous to weigh in. Regardless, business has great power to help drive positive change so it should consider to not sit on the sidelines when it can play a role that our government is not providing.
What is a sure way for a new idea or project to get necessary funding? Do you have a checklist of items that must be present to impress investors and convince them that they should take a chance on you?
There are certain topics or areas that become trendy for investors. For example, AI and blockchain are very “sexy” to investors at the moment. That said …. a lot don’t have a terribly deep understanding of either. So there is an opportunity to ride that wave, but hopefully, everyone around the table knows what they are talking about.
In terms of materials to have before having conversations with investors:
- A deck is a must
- A pitch (paragraph)
- A team
- An MVP — minimum viable product or some proof this works/is a good idea
- A good lawyer and a term sheet
After that, it’s a lot of sales!
What are a few of your success stories regarding your journey as an entrepreneur?
I can share a couple of success stories that come to mind:
- The first one was when I went to Austria a month ago (our current building under construction) and I saw our model apartments during our first open house. Everybody loved them. The fulfillment of all those months of hard work was worth the wait.
- Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference. We spent all of last year implementing our Enterprise Resource Planning software, Netsuite. We wanted to get rid of our Excel-based databases and reports to reduce errors and improve efficiencies. We finally accomplished our goal. Now, I feel a sense of achievement each time I pull up one of those reports on demand.
- We are designing our next office project and it is almost ready. It took many iterations but we were finally able to achieve the concept we wanted, along with the internal distribution and a design we are proud of.
What channels do you use for marketing? Do you market yourself or have an agency do that?
We do everything ourselves. We’re so early that we’re still feeling out the shape of our market and testing things constantly. I never feel comfortable outsourcing something until I have a good understanding of it myself — a good marketing person is a multiplicative force, but if you aren’t pointing them in the right direction it’s going to be a lot of wasted effort.
When it comes to marketing and growth, diversity is very important to us. We’ve actively developed all of these channels: SEO, social, brand, invites, content marketing, ASO, press, and cross-promotion.
What topics or themes does Purcado’s blog focus on and what are the benefits of having a blog for one’s startup?
Purcado’s blog focuses on shoe trends, fashion advice, how-to guides, and deals posts. If we’ve found an awesome price on a popular shoe, we’ll tell you via our blog or Deals page. We round up stylish content, like must-have shoes for the season, and we tell you where to find the best price.
A few of the benefits of having a blog for a startup is that it allows us to publish content that is engaging for our users and allow them to spend time on our site. This content will not only engage them early on but they will want to return to read more at a later time. With that, you can also use this as a lead generation strategy. If the user likes our content then we may be able to capture their email address to send them similar content and market to them via an email marketing strategy.
Two other benefits to corporate blogging is having content that we can share via social media. Having great content to share via social allows you to draw more users to your site and create more brand awareness.
Additionally, the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value behind our content is an incredibly valid reason to utilize blogging for a start-up. From an SEO side of things, writing great content can help build our Organic Traffic by ranking for keywords/topics on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This leads to other important pieces of building the Domain/Page Authority for better rankings.
How do you help a new employee understand the culture of your organization?
Fantastic question. We start by explaining expectations early in the hiring process. We strive to only hire those who are already representing our core values, so it’s not something they need to force. After that, it’s a lead by example situation. I work with them and teach them how to best communicate, our processes, and ensure they know my door is always open.
What is one mistake you witness leaders making more frequently than others?
I’ll give you two!
First — Spending money, time and resources chasing after trends and fads. It’s more important to develop a rapport with your audience, truly know what they want and give it to them.
Second — Not asking for help. There are so many out there like me; Individuals that delight in and are restored by helping others. Don’t be afraid to reach out! We succeed together.
Why should a PR business or company invest in some kind of social media platform like Facebook or LinkedIn?
As a PR consultant, I see social media as a free marketing tool that should be used. I do highly recommend to invest time and creativity into a selection of social media channels to promote your business or establish yourself as an opinion leader in your industry. Nowadays it is part of the branding activities such as creating a website and business cards for your company.
How much would you say luck plays a role in the success of a business? What are some things you can do to raise your chances of shooting off?
Luck is absolutely critical, but as the waying goes, luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.
I’ll give an example. We were certainly ‘lucky’ that Facebook apps started when they did in May of 2007, as were didn’t have much cash left to stay in business and Facebook was our turning point.
However, our strategy, instincts, and foresight, are what propelled us to go all in on Facebook. We knew the current strategy would not succeed in the long run, so we drastically reduced our burn-rate in order to live another day while we pursued our ‘growth rocket’.
Also, our philosophy of building and rapidly testing and iterating on MVPs to validate/invalidate as many ideas as possible (known as Lean Startup Methodology), and commitment to analytics, enabled us to quickly test and understand the magnitude of the opportunity on Facebook.
So, yes luck was certainly important, but you definitely create your own luck.
In your opinion, what is the mindset that every entrepreneur should have?
Every entrepreneur should really be passionate about what they set out to do. Understand that failure and mistakes are also part of the process. This is one thing I learned today that answers your question:
“It’s better to be ready and not have an opportunity than have an opportunity and not be ready.”
Read, Read, and Read some more to learn and be ready.
Written by our genius blogger Tina based on advice from our great Hosts in #StartupAMA and originally published on www.AMAfeed.com
