When we embark on the great adventure of entrepreneurship, it is often a great leap into the unknown. Certain main principles must be understood beyond the general knowledge that affects the business of the company so as not to find oneself confronted with difficulties or to know how to make decisions that will be useful for the future.
Know your associates and yourself
While we often think we know each other well, carrying out a personal assessment is often the first step in entrepreneurship. It is above all a question of knowing if the “job” of entrepreneur suits you and if you will be able to manage in particular the stress which it implies. Beyond knowing yourself well, you must also look at who your employees are, beyond the technical skills they can provide you. The first thing to do with them is to identify what they want to do later in the company, to understand their vision or their desires. The conflict of associates is not to be taken lightly because it is one of the main causes which leads to the death of the company.
Know what the competition is doing
It may seem obvious, but if you want to get started, you might as well know your competition. It certainly has weak points that you have surely identified and which leave you a niche to get started, but they also have strengths. You may need to adopt some of their best practices in order to provide all the service that your future customers want. Identifying your competition above all allows you to showcase what you add and what you have that is different. It is a question of answering the question “Why do you buy yourself rather than your competitor?” “. If you fail to highlight relevant benefits, it may well be that you quickly find yourself in difficulty.
Train and learn
If there is one profession where you learn a lot in a short time, it is that of an entrepreneur. Why ? Quite simply because you are going to touch everything since you are the one who supervises everything and makes decisions. You will have to inform yourself or even train yourself. You can educate yourself on information sites and you will certainly do so when setting up your business on concepts likeauto entrepreneur, SAS, SARL … You will most certainly make mistakes and you will have to learn from them. They are an excellent source of learning. Do not hesitate to do some training if you do not understand certain elements, if you do not have management skills or if you have trouble getting organized.
Roder son pitch
If the Business plan has become commonplace, it is not uncommon to meet entrepreneurs who do not know how to talk about their project at all. Some do not even manage to understand their context. You may have the best idea in the world, in many cases it can be useful to be able to talk about it whether it is to your banker, to funders or simply to your future clients. This is especially true if your idea is very technical. Breaking in an effective, hard-hitting pitch that lasts less than a minute is not useless. Otherwise, you risk quickly losing the attention of your interlocutors.
Do not neglect the commercial and confront your project
A large number of them hide behind the improvement of the service or the product, never to launch the product. We can no longer count the entrepreneurs who create business plans and who ultimately never launch anything. The best way to check if your project is working or if it is attractive enough is to confront it with your future customers. Even if everything is not perfect and you will certainly have to improve certain functionalities or even work on your service, confronting your customers allows you on the one hand to check the real adequacy of your project with a need, to see if you have the ability to sell yourself or even just understand what you need to improve or why they are using a competitor’s service.
Take a step back
We can never say it enough, but the entrepreneur often ends up doing only the operational, which prevents any perspective on his activity. Structuring moments to take a step back from your activity is not a luxury. Feel free to create moments and plan them with your employees to discuss the future of the company. Know how to take a step back from your daily work, if only to find a way to save time or to verify that you are going in the right direction. Sometimes small changes can save you a lot of time. Sometimes it is even a matter of wasting time in order to gain it.
Quickly structure its management
It may seem obvious but it is not when your activity will be successful that you will have the time to look into software to edit your quotes, your invoices or even to manage your sales. More generally, the automation of management remains a priority to prevent it from becoming too time-consuming because it is. In addition, having tools can quickly allow you to better control your outstandings, manage your cash flow or even consider what you can launch in the future or not. The sooner you do it, the more familiar you are with software and how to impute data. It is not when the rush arrives that you will be able to automate all of your procedures or that you will have the time to look into the matter.
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