13 Lessons Entrepreneurs Wish They'd Learned Sooner
Starting your own business comes with its fair share of unknowns. What will it look like in five years? Will it even make it five years? When will it be profitable? The list of questions never ends. Being an entrepreneur requires being comfortable with the uncomfortable. After all, if starting a profitable business were a sure thing, wouldn't everyone do it? Along the way, you'll learn plenty of helpful things — some of which will leave you wishing you'd only learned that lesson a few years earlier. While you can't always learn the hard stuff the easy way, you can learn a thing or two from those who were once in your shoes. To help, Seek Business Capital spoke with entrepreneurs and small business owners to find out what they know now they wish they knew earlier on. Here are seven expert tips and lessons entrepreneurs wish they'd learned at the start of their journey:
1. Start Sooner
“If I could re-do the launch of my business, I would’ve started earlier,” said Ben Watson, CPA, a personal finance expert from DollarSpout.com and founder of Fiscal Fluency. “To be honest, I put more stock in certifications and training courses as an excuse to stall my launch date, because I let imposter syndrome control my emotions. I had my emergency fund and game plan established at least three months before I finally pulled the trigger, and even after going full-time, I was too detail-oriented to really start networking until my website and business cards were pristine. Instead, those three to six months of nitpicking irrelevant details could’ve been used networking, building processes and outsourcing the items I ended up spending far too much time on in the end.”
2. Listen to Feedback
“I wish I knew how important feedback is. I would definitely go back in time and tell myself to listen,” said Libby Fischer, CEO of Whetstone Education. “It’s important to listen not only to what your customers are saying but also to what your staff is saying, too. Your customers help you understand where the market is going, and your staff helps you understand where the problems in your company are … The most important thing you can do is listen and accept constructive criticism. These pieces of advice and feedback will help you grow not in business, but also as a person in general. Seek help in your peers, customers, and advisors if you’ve hit a wall.” See: 4 Signs It's Time to Get a Business Line of Credit
3. Develop Your Emotional IQ
“Successful entrepreneurs need to exercise high emotional IQ when dealing with customers, employees and partners,” said Kean Graham, founder and CEO of MonetizeMore. “Employees will follow the leader’s emotional IQ path that they set. To have a high emotional IQ means making rational decisions, having empathy for those you work with and sympathizing when necessary to benefit the business in the long term.”
4. You Can't Do It All Yourself
“The very first business I started I tried to be as lean as possible,” said McKinzie Bean, creator and owner of Moms Make Cents. “This meant trying to do nearly everything myself, not investing in costly tools, not furthering my education on the subject matter, etc. This was incredibly detrimental to the growth of those businesses and they had a very slow start. Once I shifted my mindset and realized, sure, that tool may cost $xx a month, but if by using that tool I'm able to make or save that amount of money or more than it is worth it. Along that same line, I would have hired a team faster. Doing everything myself lead to some major burn out. If I instead had invested in team members I would have been able to scale more quickly and avoided working myself too hard.”
5. Learn From Others
"I wish I had known that a formal business education can be effectively replaced by the vast amount of knowledge available in books written by business leaders,” said Murray Seward, CEO of Outback Team Building & Training. “These are people who have actually practiced what they preach and can give real-world context to business challenges faced by everyone in business. I also wish I had known the importance of determining your company’s core values, as well as your own, and known it is possible to attract employees who not only have the skill to do the job but also share those core values of the company." Read: 7 Fears to Overcome Before Starting Your Business
6. Nurture Real Relationships
“The biggest thing I have learned from both experiences is how important it is to nurture true relationships,” said Bob Graham, co-founder and CEO of Serious Soft Skills. “You can use Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn all day long, but the bread and butter for my businesses has always been people who know, like and trust me. They may be people I have known for years or people I met and got to know more recently. They may be family, family friends, neighbors, people I meet on weekends. They want my help and they point me toward others who need my help. They are my biggest advertisers.” Read: How Does My Personal Credit Affect My Business?
7. Find Sources of Residual Income
“Residual Income is king,” said Ron Humes, vice president of operations, southeast region for Post Modern Marketing. “Traditional business models worked something like this; make one sale of a product or service, collect your check, pay some bills, and start over. This is a successful short-term strategy but does not build long-lasting income or wealth. Residual income is one of the most common phrases I have heard from entrepreneurs in a wide variety of industries. It is also a trend seen in most of the major business models we see in about every aspect of our world today … Pick an industry and look at the ways the business models have changed and continue to change towards long-term memberships, leases, maintenance, and residual income.”
8. Don’t Be Scared to Outsource
“Back then when I was just starting out my business, I was so concerned about spending money,” said John Jonas, founder of Onlinejobs.ph. “If I could do that job myself, I would do it just to save money. I was spending so much time on business tasks that don't make money, I was starting to lose money. I didn't have enough time for profit-generating activities anymore. I was working [more] but making less. When I started doing the math, I realized it made more sense to hire somebody else to the jobs I hate so I can focus on profit-generating activities. When I started doing this, I became more productive and I started making more money. And it didn't cost me an arm and a leg to hire someone. All I needed to do was to outsource the work to a virtual assistant. It was cheaper. They did great work. And I could outsource practically any job I wanted.” Related: 7 Fears to Overcome Before Starting Your Business
9. Collaborate
“I wish I knew the power of collaborating,” said Aristide Basque, co-founder and CEO of SH1FT. “There are a lot of young entrepreneurs who want to make it on their own, but learning how to collaborate [and] leverage everyone’s strength is definitely the fastest way to grow your company. Invest in people, find a business partner, take care of your employees, learn how they function ... This is what made me feel the most fulfilled and also grew my business the most.” See: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting a Business
10. Just Go For It
“Going for it is the biggest step — I wish someone had told me that,” said Joanna Jozwik Serra, owner of Birdy Boutique. “Instead, I took so much time to plan the entire business out when I should have just gotten started. That's what separates those that start and those that don't; we all have ideas, but acting on them is the difference. After that, it's all about your mindset and planning your day. I have found that focused time, especially after becoming a mom, can be so much more productive than working with a child seeking your attention.”
11. Don’t Go It Alone
“I am a business owner and have owned several ventures over the last decade, and I wish I would have known when I first started out that I know now [is that] I can't do everything myself,” said Kristin Marquet, founder and creative director of FemFounder.co. “I need to outsource the mundane and tedious work that doesn't generate a positive ROI. I learned to trust others to do the work that I hired them to do. Being a control freak doesn't produce positive results. It's critical to trust others to help with your workload to help scale the business.”
12. Time Block
“Each night, I develop a plan for the next day and do my best to stay on task,” said Serra. “If my time block is to answer emails, that is what I do. It is essential to limit distractions and stay focused. One ‘drawback’ of being an entrepreneur is often the guilt of working so much because as a business owner, you know that the sky is the limit so you want to put in all of those hours. However, you have to have a realistic cut off time, and that can be a challenge.”
13. It’s OK to Evolve Over Time
“Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint-hearted. It takes a lot of hustle, but boy is the pay off worth it,” said Megan Close Zavala, CEO of Turn the Page Book Coaching & Editorial. “My biggest advice to business owners who are starting out is that being fearless doesn't mean you're never scared; the point is to not succumb to those fears. Not everyone's professional path has a single destination, and what works for you at 23 may not work for you at 33 or 53 — and that is 100 percent okay. While you want to find your niche, be prepared for your business to evolve over time.” Read This: The Best Books for Entrepreneurs More From Seek
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