12 Tips for Entrepreneurs to be Successful

Are you an aspiring entrepreneur who is oozing with great business ideas that can make a difference in your life and in the lives of other people? Entrepreneurial success is easier thought than done. That is why even though a person is fundamentally smart, he or she should still be prudent, courageous, prepared, and be a person of consistent actions to triumph in entrepreneurship. To guide you in achieving your entrepreneurial goals or objectives, here are 12 tips for entrepreneurs to be successful.

 

1. Calculate risk and justify confidence

An entrepreneur should be a risk taker. However, it doesn’t mean you should be reckless and just take any risk as long as you see a reward on it. The entrepreneur that succeeds is one who calculates the risk first, and then overcome it. In other words, successful entrepreneurs are calculated-risk taker.

 

2. Don’t just innovate products, but also innovate people

Entrepreneurs are innovative people. But when we talk of innovation, it doesn’t only mean innovating or modernizing the products that we sell to our customers. Innovation means improvement, and it can also mean improving our management style to develop the people in our workplace, who may be our employees. Innovation also means improving our customer service to enhance the relationship we have with our customers or clients.

 

3. Copy, experience, and reflect wisdom

Achieve entrepreneurial wisdom through copying, experiencing and reflecting. Copying means reading books and other materials on business and entrepreneurship or listening to your business mentor. Experiencing means practicing those pieces of business wisdom that you have gathered from different sources. And thirdly, achieve wisdom through reflection – the process of realizing what you’ve known and what you’ve experienced.

 

4. Don’t just find your passion, but find your life

Passion is one of the most important keys to entrepreneurial success. That is why we have to take time to discover and ask ourselves “what really our passion is?”. But there are people, who even though have found their passion, still don’t succeed in business and entrepreneurship. The reason for their failure is that they don’t preserve this passion and make it a big part of their life. If you have found your passion, you should stand for it and defend it for life.

 

5. Defy yourself

There are many tough problems that an entrepreneur will encounter in all stages of entrepreneurship. These challenges include lack of financial resources, dealing with difficult clients, and even natural calamities. But the toughest challenge you will face is not among them, but it is the challenger that is found within yourself – YOU. Yes you – your own negative attitudes and habits are your worst enemies. Hence, you have to overcome yourself. You need to defy your own bad qualities, like laziness, procrastination, greed, and the like.

 

6. Assemble a powerful team

Learn how to leverage the power of teamwork. In business startup, it happens that you will start as a one-man enterprise. But teamwork is not only for enterprise that has employees. Even if you are only the one who is running your business, you can also utilize human resources which may be composed of business partners, outsourced professionals, friends in your network, and even your own customers. Remember that your satisfied and loyal customers can become your own marketers. Hence, be people oriented.

 

7. Leverage technology

Most businesses our now moving online, utilizing the Internet and social media for marketing, advertising, and promoting products to online audience. If you want your enterprise to be successful, then you should learn how to maximize the power of the Internet marketing, in which may involve creating a website or blog, optimizing it for the search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Bing), promoting your products and brand in the social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Google+), and managing your online reputation.

 

8. Be fit and healthy

Work-life balance is vital in entrepreneurship. That is why you have to learn how to invest on your health. Investing in a healthy mind and body has a lot of benefits. It will help you save money from future medical expenses. It will also make your body fit for work in any circumstances. Remember that a healthy enterprise needs a healthy entrepreneur. Check out my 20 health tips for entrepreneurs here.

 

9. Motivate yourself everyday

Most successful entrepreneurs of our time have developed their enterprises through personal development. That is why they possess wisdom and we can learn a lot of lessons from them. They are also inspiring and motivating because they have first successfully inspired and motivated themselves. If you want to be successful like them, you should also have a strong motivation inside you, and you have to keep this motivation everyday.

 

10. Learn how to pay the price

In every thing we want to achieve, we have to pay something to get it. If you want to earn profit, you have to pay for the cost of labor, goods or materials. If you want to have loyal customers, you have to pay attention and dedication to them. And if you want total entrepreneurial success, you have to pay the sum price of that success, which include sacrificing your time, money, energy, and even your other personal interests. So don’t expect success if you are not even paying anything.

 

11. Be humble

Why should entrepreneurs choose humility over pride? Simply because humility has many benefits that will help them become successful entrepreneurs. These benefits include avoiding conflicts with other people, earning more respected friends, having peace of mind, and having the opportunity to learn and improve more. Being humble will also make you an effective and trusted leader.

 

12. Take a break, but don’t quit

If you have made a good plan and you know that you are targeting the right goal, then don’t quit until you hit the bullesye. Focus yourself and stick to your plan. Know your distractions, including the distractions that disguise as opportunities, and learn how to overcome them. To achieve consistency and persistence, entrepreneurs should also learn how to take rests for rejuvenating themselves and staying in the entrepreneurial game. So give yourself the time to recover for continuity.

 

I hope the tips above have helped you boost your entrepreneurial spirit. As Vince Lombardi says, “the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary”. Therefore, you’ve got to work with all your might to achieve the entrepreneurial success you want.