4 questions answered by successful entrepreneurs: Part 1

One of the participants in Advice For Good, after donating an hour of time to a charity and then blogging about it on the AFG website, asked me if she could ask the list of advisors four questions to help her with her startup. What a great way to use the AFG community! Because each question has many answers, I’ll share these over time so its not too overwhelming of a blog post.

Question #1:

What is one thing you did when you were first creating your business that you think went well (i.e. what was a worthwhile use of your time)? If you have not started a business, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give someone starting a business?

− Get an advisory board! Having a group of experienced advisors that believe in you and your vision, giving you advice, is HUGE.

− Put together a board of mentors/advisors to help give perspective on decisions we were making. Their advice was invaluable both to change our course of direction as well as give us confidence that we were headed the right way even when times were hard.

− Talking to as many people as possible.

− Listen to your market.

− Finding clients before I incorporated everything made it much easier… start with clients/customers and THEN focus on the delivery/execution. Also I outsourced things that were not part of my core competence (for example book keeping and payroll).

− Making sure my spouse was 100% on board with taking the startup plunge.

− Focused on the brand, specific early goals (forget 5 year biz plans), early customers, pricing and getting my name out there (writing and speaking) also not spending money on things not needed like office space etc.

− Focusing my efforts and being very deliberate about how I spent my time.

− We wrote. A lot. About the problems our people were facing and about ways to solve them. This helped us have empathy for our buyers and work out lots of solutions before even starting to build our product.

− It is going to take a lot longer than you think to get traction and no one that you do not already know is going to invest in your company until you do.