Insights to Turn Your Passion into Success

Despite the research, tests and tools that sophisticated companies use to evaluate employees, many of us entrepreneurs think hiring is nothing more than using a little common sense and trusting your gut. For some reason, hiring is just one of those areas that we don’t identify with the need for expertise—just some good “people skills.”

Most entrepreneurs are in a state of chaos. Everything needs to be done at the same time. Financing, people, product, customers, business models, technology, operations, finance, cash and the list goes on. Entrepreneurs are in a constant state of hole plugging because you lack financial and human resources. That is the nature of the beast. But what you can change is how you manage the overlapping tasks that are demanding to get done.

The best companies develop core values that impact their company culture, brand, and business strategies — making them quite unique. Most entrepreneurs adopt the perspective that culture is a luxury rather than a critical foundational element of a strong company. Regardless of your stage, you must set core values that are non-negotiable. When your organization lacks guardrails and guidelines, which most early stage ventures do, you need to construct boundaries to guide behavior.

When an idea or product is unique, it is new to the market. This may be what makes it sell, but it is also what makes the market slow to comprehend and adopt your innovation. So, one of the perspectives we must develop is the ability to clearly judge how ready the market is for your solution.

There will be a day when you have a full staff of employees. But as you are building your company from the ground up, you have to make the most of every dollar you have. One of the ways you can do this is to take advantage of the vast network of freelancers - both in the United States and throughout the world - to help you with various parts of your business.

When you are getting started, you know you need help but often don't have the money to pay employees. Every entrepreneur faces the question of how to pay employees during the startup stage when money is tight and the business has yet to prove itself.

As a business grows, pitching becomes increasingly important. As the business seeks investors, new clients, or even new employees, a business owner must repeatedly reveal details about the company to others. Idea theft is an ongoing concern for entrepreneurs. A competitor could snatch the idea. An investor could take it and fund it. While this behavior happens less than you would think, it is worth taking some basic steps to protect yourself.

Think of all the email, text messages and other communications that fly back and forth throughout the day. Not only is it hard to keep track of it all. It is even more difficult to make sure that the information and messages that are coming through are consistent with the messages you want to portray. While communication may not be at the top of your list, it certainly affects everything you do.

How many times a day do things happen and your initial reaction is that of raw emotions without much thought to the consequences? That's normal occurrence for entrepreneurs because our days are full of pressure, passion, pleasure and pain. We don't have time to think how certain words, phrases, remarks in the middle of a jam packed day effect people around us. The expectation is that if you're working in an entrepreneurial environment, you've got to be tough-minded and thick-skinned to deal with the ups and downs of each day. Not exactly.

Knowing your current and potential customers is a foundational piece of information for you to create your unique offering. In the process, not only do you see where you stack up, you learn how competition acts, whether it be how they approach a market or communicate a message. A competitive analysis is a key step to understanding how you can win in an increasingly competitive world.

When you start a business, you spend a lot of time alone with your thoughts. Even if you’re not a solo operation, there may be very few people that you confide in or talk openly to. You probably have your inner circle. It may start with a circle of one—you—or maybe your small team. To get your business moving, you develop relationships with a select few people who are helping you get ahead.

Being an entrepreneur is not a job, it's an identity. Our very existence for the most part lies in bringing our vision to life. We live, breathe and obsess over every detail of the business 24/7. It's our baby. Our business and personal life becomes one life. A problem develops, however, when we have the expectation that anyone associated with our venture wakes up with the same visceral desire to see it come to fruition as we do.

Cutting through the clutter of information that is presented to consumer and business buyers is a challenge. Doing so requires us to hone in on the exact customer that we are looking to serve. Marketers talks to finding your "customer avatar" - a fictional character that represents your ideal prospect. When complete, it will help you understand the motivating beliefs, fears and secret desires that influence your customer's buying decisions. Creating a buyer persona helps you hone in on this ideal customer.

The term “hunter” is used to describe the type of sales rep who is focused on closing deals with new customers. Once one deal wraps up, hunters aggressively move on to the next prospect and try to close another new deal. This energetic focus on deal-making and capturing new “prey” (sales) makes hunters a tempting option for technology startups. The drive for transactions often stems from the commissions they can earn.

How do you get a buyer to view you not as someone selling them something, but a trusted resource that they value and look forward to talking to? There are various communication and related techniques that will move you closer each day to holding this coveted place in a buyer's mind.

Goal setting and aligning and tracking those goals through actions and results are critical to greater business execution and, as a result, greater success. Most organizations see a dramatic increase in employee and business performance when they effectively set goals and closely tie them to the company's overall strategy.

As a small business owner, you might be a born entrepreneur, but you’re less likely to be a born accountant. So it’s possible that you’ll find bookkeeping a tedious distraction, especially when your focus lies with building your brand and growing your business. Even with this limitation, current small business accounting software can make it easy to manage all of your financial activity.

There are many hands in the pot during the investment process. Even when you hire a finder, broker or advisor who uses their relationships to bring investors to the table, it is hard to get a sense of who is working for who. These advisors you hire in the investment process - such as brokers - have an interest in the process and may not have your best interest at heart. Having an independent advisor can keep everyone in the process honest.

The way you present and the way you or your team interact with investors tells a lot about how the company is run. Is it thoughtful, well planned and collaborate or quick, disjointed and dominated by one person. You get the picture.

The type of investment you take in your business will have implications for many years. Investments are generally broken into three types: equity (in which you receive capital in exchange for ownership of your company), debt (in which you receive capital that you have an obligation to repay but do not give up any ownership in your company) and convertible debt (which is the same as debt but is converted into equity based on some triggering event).

When it comes to selling to businesses, one of the issues that creates cash flow issues is the need to wait until contracts are signed to receive payment. For decent sized companies, even when a company has communicated that they have decided to use your company, it can take another 60 to 90 days to get a contact signed - and even more time to receive payment.

Understanding the different types of investors is an important part of the investment process. The basic concept is that the type of investor that you seek should be the right one for your stage of business (pre-revenue, revenue, growth stage) and for the amount of money you are seeking. We outline the major types of investors and the general rules for what stage they are best for and how much they look to invest. While these are not hard and fast rules, they should help in your investment process.

Employees, investors, vendors, consultants, and Board members all want something different, something specific to them. To unify these often-competing needs and perspectives, emphasize that decisions will be made in the best interest of the business.

You're the CEO, so you think you know more about the business than anyone and for the things you don't know - you'll figure it out along the way. After all, you've got a business to run, so you have to move quickly and aggressively. Not quite actually. it is a blessing to acknowledge when you come across something you don’t know, not a curse.