5 Useful Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

1. Get started

A good entrepreneur is daring. In numerous ways, making the decision to become an entrepreneur and starting out on your own is scary, but it doesn’t have to be. Lots of successful entrepreneurs started their own businesses whilst working another job to pay the bills. There is no shame in starting sluggishly. Just start.

2. Be Humble and Learn

When you are first getting started out, it can be very tempting to pretend you know and have everything. When it comes to qualities such as confidence and commitment, it can be easy to put on a front and come across as a strong entrepreneurial character. However, knowledge is something that you need to have. Good entrepreneurs have enquiring minds and never stop wanting to learn or asking questions.

3. Plan out Every Day

At the beginning of each week, create an essential to-do list with realistic goals for that week. Having a to-do list helps turn abstract goals into concrete achievements. Work the tasks into a schedule, measuring due dates and deadlines measured by importance and urgency. Planning a schedule, decreases procrastination and increases productivity by achieving goals, being better equipped to handle unforeseen obstacles and ensuring there is still time for relaxation, recreation and real-life which is essential at this point.

“Don’t link your success as an entrepreneur to the success of your idea. Your job as an entrepreneur is to iterate through ideas to get to the right one. Part of that process is successfully proving your ideas are no good. Failure is part of making progress.”

– George Olesen

4. Customer Focus

If you do not have a vision of where you’re going, if you don’t have a goal of where you go, you drift around and never end up anywhere. Be customer-obsessed, do not become competitor obsessed, Focus on your customer and not your competitor, customer-focused approaches work better in the long run. Once you are the leader in your industry, and your whole culture business is competitor obsessed it is hard to stay energized and motivated. But customers will always be unsatisfied, always want more, so no matter how far you are in front of your competitor you are still behind your customers.

5. Surround yourself with experts

Your business is your baby, and it can be tempting to want your hands in everything. But, if you want to grow your business, focus on that, and let others lead and thrive. Use your expertise to your advantage, but also know when to step aside and let experts in other areas take over.

And don’t forget about mentorship. You may be the CEO now, but you can always learn from others. Keep taking advantage of opportunities to learn, whether it’s through listening to podcasts from industry veterans or technology whiz kids, or even just connecting with your team and support systems to keep yourself grounded. Other perspectives are always valuable.

7 Tips to Becoming a Successful Social Entrepreneur

Social entrepreneurship has become, in recent years, a good way to achieve self-employment, while also having a positive impact on our environment, both socially and environmentally. Its popularity has grown enormously in a very short time.

But interest in social entrepreneurship transcends the phenomenon of popularity and fascination with people. Social entrepreneurship signals the imperative to drive social change, and it is that potential payoff, with its lasting, transformational benefit to society, that sets the field and its practitioners apart.

Here you are 7 tips to start with your own social business!

  • Write a mission statement. It is very important that you think about the social and environmental impact of your actions, as well as who are the people or groups that will benefit from your social business.
  • Research the field. It is very important that you base your social business on a real existing need. Make sure that your product or service has a place in the market!
  • Conceptualize your unique offering. DIFFERENTIFY YOURSELF, it is essential to stand out in a somewhat saturated market.
  • Reach out to team members for feedback and support. Create and build a team sensitized and motivated to achieve goals.
  • Develop your business model. You have models such as the social CANVAS that will help you in this definition.
  • Identify initial funding sources. Define in your business plan where the initial funding will come from (if additional resources are needed).
  • Write an action plan (and stick to it). Plan, plan, plan. It will keep you motivated and aligned with your goals.

So… Let’s get Down to Business! We have already developed the initial research before we start developing our Hackathon training materials, we’ll tell you all about it soon!