What Is The Secret To Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur?

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who has a seven figure business in Nevada and we were talking about what it was that allowed him to be so successful and what were the traits of a good entrepreneur. While the answer was very accurate, it was also very simple and straight forward. He said “Scott, the answer to being a successful Entrepreneur is simple, you learn what a successful person does, who is doing what you want to do, learn from them and do the same thing”!

At the end of the day he is exactly right. But as always the challenge is being willing to stay the course when things get difficult. Anyone who has ever thought about going into business for themselves has heard about the, over 90% failure rate of Thomas Edison, or the number of times that Abraham Lincoln lost elections before he became president. So the one caveat that I would add to my friends statement is that you really, really have to do it if you want to be a successful entrepreneur.

The road to success is littered with people who wanted to become entrepreneurs but who were unwilling to do everything it took to get them there. If you look at most of the stories of those who made it, you very rarely here about how in five months starting from scratch they were making gobs of money and there business was taking off. Many of them, like Sam Walton, started from humble beginnings, worked hard all their life, with many set backs before they found success.

So before you start assessing your options and trying to figure out what type of business you want to get involved with, what you want to start or invent, make sure you have the internal fortitude, sticking power and financial ware with all to become that successful entrepreneur that you say you want to be.

Successful Entrepreneurs Need More Then An Idea

OK, so you decided you are determined to make a go of it and you have an idea and maybe some cash to get it off the ground, you even know how you are going to produce it. But before you spend a lot of money trying to get production up and running, you need to figure out if there is really a market for it.

Last year I was speaking about how to acquire venture capital at a Nanotechnology event. All these brilliant technologist who wanted to be in business were coming up to me afterwards with their great inventions, but none of them could describe how that technology would apply to the real world.

I could see how many of these products would have practical applications, but none of them had even begun to explore those ideas to figure out

1. How big the market was,
2. What problem would they be solving,
3. Was there anything else out there that solved the problem as well and better (there almost always is),
4. What were the other products costing and
5. How were they marketed and distributed.

After asking some of these questions to these budding entrepreneurs, I would suggest that they find themselves a business partner who understood marketing or go back and put the same effort into determining the viability and marketability as they did when they were developing their concept.

So even though it may seem obvious, most people fail at this point and if the work isn’t done here and done correctly then everything else will fail. It’s like having a faulty frame builder for a house, it may look good built, but the chances of problems down the road are serious and may not be fixable. Bottom line, if you don’t do your homework, you aren’t going to be a very successful entrepreneur.

So How Do Successful Entrepreneurs Market Their Business’s In The 21st Century?

You have decided you are serious and you now know that there is a market for your product, but what marketing method works best to generate business for your company? The answer is simple, it depends! It will depend on a lot of things,

1. First and foremost is how your market likes to buy,
2. What type of budget you have and
3. What will give you the best ROI.

Starting with the third part of this,  a successful entrepreneur knows that you have to find enough margin in your product to ensure that you make a profit after all costs. If you make $20.00 on the sale of your product, and your advertising costs are $27.00 per sale, you have just created a solid recipe for rapidly going broke. It doesn’t matter what marketing method you use, if it costs more to market then you make either you have to reassess your marketing plan or reassess whether you have a product that can make you a profit at all.

Knowing how your market buys is also a critical factor. You should have determined this when you were researching your market. This is an article all in itself so I will save the details for another time, but if you determined how your market buys and the costs to advertise that way doesn’t make you a profit then refer back to the last paragraph because you are not likely going to be a successful entrepreneur if you follow that strategy.

I also am not going to try and advise you here on budget, but suffice it to say that you will need a solid plan and know how you are going to make your money and your profits before you start.

One last point about marketing in the 21st century, somethings never change, it is still and will likely always be about how to help your customer solve a problem and what are the best ways to get the message out. But the one thing that has changed is the option of using the internet to build and grow your business.

If you plan to be a successful entrepreneur in the 21st century you need to know how to utilize the internet to your benefit or at the very least be willing to pay someone who knows how to use the internet to market  your products. This is a full blown topic as well and I will cover it in additional articles.

Scott Schreiber is a retired businessman who has over 30 years of successful management of turn around projects, Mergers & Acquisitions, Venture Capital work and senior sales and marketing management. Scott’s current mission is to help small business owners and entrepreneurs learn how to compete, grow and succeed in our current economy. He is also the founder of The Entrepreneur Success Team.

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Here are some additional sites that I have found to be helpful to entrepreneurs. Thanks for visiting The Entrepreneur Success Team!


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