I bet this title caught your attention :-). The other day I was invited to a roundtable with a group of early stage entrepreneurs and "chew the fat" so to speak. These aspiring company builders have been using So what? who cares? why you? to shape their startup plans and I was lucky enough to be asked to sit down and hear their value propositions.
As the session moved to chit chat about company building, one entrepreneur popped THE question:
"What would you say is the single most important lesson you've learned as an entrepreneur?"
Sheesh, how does someone pinpoint one single lesson when their are soooo many pedals to push to be successful as a startup entrepreneur. Oddly enough, with some thought, I was able to land on one factor that, for me personally, is the single biggest lesson I've learned. Of course, this is a personal question and perhaps you will have other factors, but for me, it boils down to this....
YOU'VE GOT TO EXECUTE!
I've thought a lot about this since the question was posed and I come back to this in spades. During my career in early stage startups as well as in my own venture, execution is and has been the key success factor. As entrepreneurs, we should always be questioning and evaluating if we are doing enough to move the ball down the field. Every entrepreneur to the letter will tell you he/she is working 18 hour days, 7 days a week. That's normal, but is the effort applied to the right areas? It's not enough to be spending time perfecting the idea, tweaking the product, or writing the business plan. It needs to be market making activity - what are you doing to cultivate the land where you plan to sew seeds. My rule of thumb is:
50% market making activity, 30% product readiness, 20% company building.
You need to get out into your world and make things happen - make your mark so to speak. That's why I refer to it as market making activity -- what outward facing things are you doing to inspire the market - prospects, customers, partners, etc. to want to engage with you. What do I mean by market making activity? Here's some ideas to get the ball rolling:
- customer events - meetings, visits, etc.
- prospecting for customers
- customer advisory boards
- partnership/alliance relationship development
- educational seminars or audio based seminars - online or offline
- writing newsletters or articles for circulation to your industry
- exhibiting/speaking/attending targeted conferences (customer ones, not for your technology)
- develop community through a blog
- cultivating community on social networks
Take a look at your to-do list of activities for the month of June - where do they fit in the above breakdown. I like to use a low-tech device to map this out for each month - I photocopy the month off my office calendar and plot the activities taking place each week -- I use different colors for market, product and company. Very low tech, yes, but it works. When things are "out of sync", I circle back to look at why that is....and then adjust as much as possible (by the way, when it's out of sync, it's typically as I said earlier, light on market making.
If you think you can't get out from under on the company building stuff, take a close look at what you can outsource - as my own mentor pointed out to me last week, there's a plethora of service providers available at low cost to assist you with everything from managing your inbox to doing background project research.
So, no excuses....your homework today is to look under the hood of your own venture and be brutally honest about mapping your current activities into these three buckets. Then grab the calendar and photocopy June - work at getting things into balance - I've never seen a venture criticized for spending too much time developing their market.
Enjoy the Journey!
Wendy
www.wendykennedy.com
Entrepreneurial Professor
