The essence of entrepreneurship

The essence of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is about putting ideas into action. It's about building something. The process is the key to the success of your business. The problem is that the entrepreneurial process is poorly taught in universities and in business schools. It’s sometimes not even taught at all!

There are scant resources for entrepreneurship and business development. And many businesses are not even able to understand how their ideas will ultimately be put into action.

Entrepreneurial programs exist in many countries around the world. But they tend to be very limited in their scope. They therefore offer very few practical tools to help entrepreneurs attain a certain level of success.

This is a shame, because entrepreneurship is a process which has the potential to provide tremendous growth to a nation's economy and bolster employment levels. This in turn results in an improvement in aggregate demand.

Run with it

Our advice is to start with a simple idea that solves a user problem and run with this. Don't bother spending top dollar on an MBA from a top business school. Rather invest that money into building your first iteration of a product which you can take to market as an MVP and test it's efficacy before heading back to the drawing board to iterate and deploy again. This is a repeatable process which can be done many times over until you have a product which users will purchase without hesitation or recourse. Also known as product-market fit.

There are an infinite amount of business ideas out there that would be very beneficial to a particular market segment. The reality is that the easy part is coming up with the idea, but the hard part is being able to execute on that idea and actually turn into a viable business. Apple, Microsoft and Tesla all started as amazing ideas, but if it was for the entrepreneurs behind those brands they would never be the behemoth technology companies they are today.

Build, measure, learn is the advice given by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. We unequivocally endorse that business methodology. Yes, it most certainly does pertain to every business at some point in its lifecycle every business is a startup. But above all if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur you need to possess two key attributes - Motivation and resilience.

Two key entrepreneurial attributes

You need to be motivated enough to be able to work at maximum velocity all the time. Unlike the corporate world where you can have your down days. Your slower days. The life of an entrepreneur is fast paced and high octane. If you don’t think you can manage that then most think carefully whether starting your own business is right for you.

Secondly you’ll need to have a ton of resilience. There will be plenty of highs and lows and sometimes the low will appear to go on for an eternity. It’s during these challenging times that you’ll soldier on and pull through on the other side. No time for self pity or sorrow. It’s chin up and forge ahead.

Conclusion

Finally, always remember to have fun along the way. Being an entrepreneur is a journey, and like any journey, the destination is only one small part of it. It’s the places you stop at along the way that complete the journey. Enjoy the ride, remember to savour the great moments as they happen and learn from bad experiences as they will also happen. All the best and good luck!