Starting Up on the Right Foot: What Newbie Entrepreneurs Need in Place From the Outset

We all make mistakes when we are starting out. In terms of business practicalities, there is a lot to consider. But when you are trying to step up to the plate and be an entrepreneur that can see a business through its difficult first 12 months, you need to have the right mindset and tools to ensure that you can deliver. Here are a few things you can benefit from understanding.

It Won’t Be Perfect, So Stop Aiming for Perfection

The problem a lot of entrepreneurs have is thinking perfection is pivotal. Anything less is a failure. Nothing is ever perfect, so we should not waste time striving for perfection. The reality is that when we are attempting to make things perfect, we invariably work on the smaller functions that, in the long run, will have no bearing on the final outcome. Yes, there is a place for refining practices and processes to make you more productive, but when you are attempting to exert control over something by smoothing off certain edges you are not tackling the problem at hand. Remember the Pareto Principle: 80% of the outcomes will stem from 20% of the effort.

Know Your Weaknesses

When you start to recognize what you do worse than everyone else you can then outsource these problems. Beginner entrepreneurs try to do it all, but the reality is that you’ve got to be focusing your efforts in the right place. This is where someone like a virtual personal assistant can help you organize your life more efficiently. You also need to understand your weaknesses because it gives you a short shock dose of reality. When you understand what you cannot do, it makes you more humble, but it also ensures you get to the root of the problem quickly. So many entrepreneurs skirt around the issue, trying not to show themselves up as failures in anything. These are people that will fail in the long run!

Be Malleable

We need to understand that as things change, we need to change along with it. Being malleable to changes in the market, changes in working practices and changes in yourself will guarantee that you are going to fit the mold of an entrepreneur. It’s a tough thing to do because we’re used to being so rigid in our lives. People talk about structure as being critical to human beings. This is true, but in business, we can get curveballs on a regular basis. Malleability is such a critical tool that only the best entrepreneurs make peace with the fact that the ground beneath can move constantly. It’s about ensuring that you are ready for change but also embracing something that comes your way. View every change as a challenge. Rather than feeling a sense of dread when something new hits you, look at it and assess what it can do for you in terms of your growth.

Always Be Learning

Ensuring that you develop a growth mindset is about looking at everything as a learning opportunity. Learning should be the default setting for any entrepreneur because it means you have a more inquisitive nature than your contemporaries. Entrepreneurs can get stuck in the practice of just focusing on their business, but it’s also about the things you do outside that will inform how you deal with challenges. It’s not just about learning changes in the market or how to streamline your practices, but about ensuring that you can develop a more appropriate mindset to deal with regular and irregular business challenges.

Develop Your Resilience

The most important tool any entrepreneur can have is the tool of resilience. There are so many ways to build resilience that we have to start and recognize that running a business will involve so many challenges, but if we start to view each new task as something stressful this will not do us any favors in the long run. People burn out because of entrepreneurial stress but you can start by developing your resilience in little ways. A cold shower in the morning can be a very simple thing and is very likely going to be the worst thing you will experience that day. When we are developing resilience, we think that it’s a tool so we can avoid failure, but instead, we need to be resilient because we should understand that failure is part of life. We can’t avoid failures. The first 12 months are critical and you may try to avoid wide-ranging failures, but the fact is that if you don’t have the right attitude or mindset, this is what can cause a business to go south.

Starting Up on the Right Foot: What Newbie Entrepreneurs Need in Place From the Outset