Entrepreneur

Building Your Business From Start to Success

Lars Tvede, Mads Faurholt

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119521235
• eBook ISBN: 9781119521259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Emprendimiento

Build a world class business with a clear blueprint to success

Entrepreneur: Building Your Business From Start to Success is your guidebook to achieving entrepreneurial success. Whether you're an existing business owner seeking to increase your reach, or a budding entrepreneur ready to take the next step, this book provides invaluable guidance from experts who have made it happen time and time again. A simple step-by-step process will help you translate your ideas into effective business plans, raise the capital needed to start and grow your business, build a winning team and leave the competition behind. Drawing upon their experience founding more than 30 companies, the authors share their entrepreneurial wisdom and reveal the real-world techniques that lead to success.

With a pragmatic and personal approach, the authors explore the personal characteristics that are vital to achievement; managing stress, withstanding heavy workloads and coping with potential health concerns are subjects often overlooked in the pursuit of business achievement. Addressing the link between business concerns and personal welfare, the authors offer suggestions on how to most effectively reconcile entrepreneurial drive with personal well-being.

• Build or revitalise a business with proven methods from two globally-recognized experts in the field
• Develop an effective business plan to maximise your probability of success
• Understand funding markets and raise capital necessary to start or grow your business

• Grow your business by beating the competition and dominating your market

Providing invaluable insight into real-world entrepreneurial methods that work, this book arms current and future business leaders with the skills, knowledge and motivation to create the organization of their dreams.

PART 1.
ABOUT ME AS AN ENTREPRENEUR

• 1. My entrepreneurial role
• 2. My personal effectiveness
• 3. My public impact
• 4. My face-to-face impact

Do you want to own your own business? Become an entrepreneur? In this section, we describe the many alternative roles as self-employed and/or entrepreneur: why and how to learn from practice before possibly taking on the harder and more ambitious tasks.

We also look at how entrepreneurs can tackle the huge workload and a high risk of stress and health problems. It is all about efficiency – ‘work smart, not hard’, as one might say. Or at least smart if hard.

But how do you do that?

In the third chapter, we move on to study aspects of your ability to make a personal impact and break through when it really matters. People who work in large, well-renowned companies do not always have a big personal impact – they work well within the shelter of a powerful and well-known organization which can sometimes make the impact for them. But in start-ups you often need to get noticed and force your will through, even though your business is small and perhaps rather rickety. So how do you make an impact in everything from sales meetings and negotiations to public speeches, media interviews, on social media and more? We share some practical tips that can help you with this.

1.
MY ENTREPRENEURIAL ROLE

Being an entrepreneur is about creating something new, moving into the unknown and maybe starting on projects where you can really foresee neither the outcome nor the financing. Many ‘self-employed’ people are ‘entrepreneurs’, but you may be one without being the other. For instance, a self-employed dentist is probably not an entrepreneur, and someone running a wild new project within Google might work as an entrepreneur but not be self-employed.

We believe it is important for anyone who has a dream of becoming an entrepreneur to understand which entrepreneurial roles exist and what they entail. In this chapter, we study various entrepreneurial roles and personal traits that increase the likelihood of success with start-up projects. We also consider the risks and benefits that are likely to occur when selecting the entrepreneurial life.

‘I want to become an entrepreneur.’ That's what both of us would say often when we were young students.

But what does that mean? When we were 15 or 18, we thought it meant only one thing: getting a brilliant idea and starting a company to pursue it. However, life has since taught us that there are many other ways to be an entrepreneur. And while there are many ‘hows’, there are also many ‘whys’, so let's start with those.

Why do people become entrepreneurs?

Statistics show that most entrepreneurs are highly motivated by:

• money: hoping to achieve financial freedom
• freedom: hoping to gain control over their lives and work.¹

But there may be many other motives. For instance, quite a few people start their business as a result of frustration in their former job. Perhaps they were irritated by stupid bosses or unambitious co-workers. Possibly they felt that they didn't fit into the ‘system’ and were fired for exactly that reason.

For some entrepreneurs, the decision to start their company was a matter of self-image. Where their parents perhaps dreamed of owning a house, the next generation can dream of getting their feet underneath their own table.

Others may be primarily driven by a passion for motivating co-workers, or for delivering excellent products to the clients, working with cutting-edge technologies or trendy new styles.

There may also be more professional motives. Entrepreneurial work is very all-round and therefore offers a high degree of responsibility and a palette of different challenges that is almost impossible to find in normal jobs. An entrepreneur in the early stages can thus be sales, marketing, product and HR manager at once. Some will find this extremely stressful, but others – great entrepreneurs – will find it extremely fun. Some would also like to sit at the top of the pyramid and feel that the way to the top seat is shorter if they create the company themselves.

Some are attracted to the challenge and hardship – they almost regard entrepreneurship as a sport, if not a test of manhood (this includes women). These are the people who love to test themselves and find out where their limit is. ‘How far can I go?’ they might think. Let's face it: there are probably some adrenaline junkies among entrepreneurs, though others might rather end up as hobbits on their reluctant way to Mordor.

What kind of entrepreneur?

If you recognize yourself in any of these roles, the next question is: what kind of entrepreneur do you want to be?

In many people's imagination – and in our own, too, when we were younger – it is probably quite simple. You get a brilliant idea in the shower one morning. ‘Bingo!’ There it was! Then you persuade a bank to lend you a few million. A few years and a lot of work later you sell the company. And then … off south to the beaches!

Now we have become older, but none of us has seen such a course of events. Why not? First, brilliant ideas rarely arise out of the blue and in an instant. They evolve over time, in fits and starts. Second, a bank will not lend you money to implement your idea unless you pledge full collateral for it. Because why should they? To potentially earn 5% interest but risking a 100% loss if the company goes down, as it very well might? And third, we have never known entrepreneurs that settled themselves on a beach after they sold their first company. Maybe it happens every now and then, but as far as we can see, the typical successful entrepreneur loves work and immediately starts the next project as soon as there is time available.

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What if I want to become an entrepreneur but lack the great idea?

Start-ups with great ideas need all kinds of profiles early on. Perhaps you are not the idea man but still have the passion to pursue the entrepreneur life. All start-ups are looking for help and resources and appreciate any approaches they receive. And lots of people have become entrepreneurs by joining others’ start-up projects early on.

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It has become easier!

For sure, being an entrepreneur is typically very hard, but in our opinion, conditions for entrepreneurs have improved in important ways in recent decades. It has become a lot cheaper and technically easier to start new companies. Certainly, the amount of red tape may have increased, but overall costs of setting up a basic operation have dropped massively. For instance, software and hardware have become significantly cheaper, as have flights, and you can now use video conferencing free of cost. Furthermore, there is access to plug-and-play tools, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, focused and thus inexpensive advertising opportunities, global payment systems, effective logistics services, smartphones, tablets, etc., all of which are easy and inexpensive to use. Therefore, a lot that was previously expensive and cumbersome can now be dealt with cheap or for free. Overall, we believe that with the exception of salaries, running costs for many types of start-up have declined by as much as 90% over the past two decades.

Moreover, network effects sometimes can help start-ups to create huge value very quickly. In the entrepreneurial environment, the word ‘unicorn’ is used to describe companies which achieve a market value of more than $1 billion. In the 1990s and earlier, it took typically at least 20 years for the greatest winners to get there, but since then it has go...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION BY PETER WARNOE
• PART 1. ABOUT ME AS AN ENTREPRENEUR
• PART 2. ABOUT MY COMPANY'S IDEAS AND FUNDING
• PART 3. ABOUT MY TEAM AND MY CORPORATE CULTURE
• PART 4. ABOUT MY COMPANY'S GROWTH, STRATEGIES AND CHALLENGES
• PART 5. ABOUT MY EXIT AND WHAT COMES AFTER
• APPENDIX A: 116 BUSINESS STRATEGIES FOR ENTREPRENEURS
• APPENDIX B: 46 TYPICAL CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS IN START-UP COMPANIES
• APPENDIX C: LIST OF USEFUL WEBSITES, APPS AND WEB-EXTENSIONS FOR ENTREPRENEURS
• GLOSSARY
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT