As a Young Entrepreneur, you must Train your Mind to Focus
Fluid communication, a solid and sustainable plan, and a strategy can enhance your vision and ambition.
As a young entrepreneur and leader of a company, you are responsible for the development and execution of a work plan and strategy that require continuous monitoring and adjustments to ensure the effective use of your human, relational, and financial resources.
Being young and ambitious is a virtuous characteristic common to many entrepreneurs, but it often becomes a source of distraction and conflict. Experience and our learning curve help us acquire the strength we require as leaders of business or ONGs without falling into reckless actions that put the survival of our initiative at risk.
Next, I will describe how to avoid unnecessary distractions and risks in four stages:
1. Clarify, frame, and place.
The important thing in our first step is to gain a greater understanding while limiting the scope of further analysis to the essence of the proposal.
One way to proceed is by asking questions like:
- Is the proposal aligned with the vision and objectives of our plan?
- Do we see possible conflicts of interest with the purpose of our initiative?
- Does it generate a tangible benefit for our NGO, SME, or emerging company?
- Could it represent a sustainable competitive advantage? And if so, could we quantify the cost-benefit relationship?
The answer to these questions will allow us to prioritize the proposal.
2. Investigate, confirm, or rule out.
Once understood and with a rough estimate of the resulting costs and benefits, we move on to a research stage in which we must include the business model. We evaluate the competitive environment and its degree of differentiation or disruption, additional resources (human, relational, and financial), the financing of those resources, the possibility and convenience of an alliance with a third party, and the difficulty of scaling benefits at a local or national.
3. Reflect and decide on the next steps.
So far, we have used few resources. An analyst or two have supported us in searching for information and quantifying potential revenues and their associated costs.
At this stage, we consider the convenience of incorporating the new proposal into the existing plan. We must evaluate the risk it represents, and this varies depending on the type of resources required and our experience and recognition in the market.
Most failures in the early stages of developing a new product or service are due to needs that arise and that we still need to address. We find ourselves in an unsustainable situation if we do not have a favorable record of growth, customer satisfaction, and debt payment.
4. Act with empathy.
If we are at this stage, we have decided to incorporate the proposal into our business or service model and, with this, invest additional resources to achieve the new objectives. Even when we only change our plan — without incurring extra costs — we must contemplate the natural rejection that every team experiences towards a material change without a why, what, and how we will act and the changes materialize.
We need to use empathy, to put ourselves in the place of our team members and share our justification, with its tangible benefits, the risks and what we have thought to mitigate them, the possible alliances, the means of financing, and what we would gain in experience and new developments.
