How To Think Like An Entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurship seems like a dream, and almost everyone these days is pursuing entrepreneurship in one way or another. 

We may have seen posts on social media where a person is seen in his or her jet, sipping a glass of champagne while working on a laptop. Or someone showing off their luxury cars or expensive mansions that they bought from the profit of their businesses. Most of the time, however, these scenarios are fallacies and a ploy to sell you a course.

To begin with, you must first define what entrepreneurship really means for you. Would you like to earn a few hundred dollars on a monthly basis through a side hustle? Or do you want to build a global brand that is sustainable and scalable? Or something in between? 

Once you’ve defined what exactly you want, note down why you wish to pursue it. It’ll serve you as a source of motivation, and you’ll be more focused than otherwise.

Once you are done with the above things, you need to understand that to be a successful entrepreneur, you’ll need to work towards two things: Mindset and Skill-set. These two elements hold the center stage when it comes to business success. While skill-sets can be developed by learning various strategies and tactics, developing a business mindset can be a little overwhelming for some people. A business mindset is all about thinking in a result-oriented manner.

Below are a few tips you can follow to think like an entrepreneur and to develop an entrepreneurial mindset:

1. Set Clear Expectations

Before starting a business, you must be absolutely clear about every facet of your business. If you don’t clear the haze with certain things, it’s very likely that your business won’t give the expected returns. Make a list of all the things that your business is going to require. If your business is geography independent, it is more likely to be scalable. But if it’s location-centric, for example, a restaurant, more work is involved. Also, you should have the ability to forecast revenue and profit for each month or quarter and how you’re going to increase those.

2. Prepare Yourself Financially

Starting a business almost always requires a substantial amount of capital. Financial management is not as complex as it seems. It’s recommended that you shouldn’t start a business on a loan, because if by any chance your business doesn’t run smoothly, you’ll be under a massive financial burden. You can start saving and eventually investing in your business through a job for a particular duration. And then, once that amount grows in size, you can use it to start the business. In this way, even if you aren’t able to make the business profitable, you’d have no one knocking on your door for monthly EMIs.

3. Focus On The Problem, Not The Solution

This is probably the most common mistake that an amateur business-person tends to make. Most of the time, people have an epiphany that their idea is going to work and solve a problem in the marketplace. As a result, they pour their heart and soul into their venture only to discover that the solution they’ve curated has very little value or no value. Before pursuing your venture, do extensive research about the marketplace and then curate your offering in accordance with the demand. Also, it is always beneficial to be the first in the marketplace rather than compete with already existing players.

4. Plan A Roadmap

Building a business is definitely simple on paper, but implementing it in real life is more difficult than you may expect. Right from the development of the product to marketing to post-sales, there are many things a business requires. Hence, these things should be put into a sequential roadmap with timelines that you can follow to avoid getting burnt out. Prior to launching your offering into the market, you should consider building a prototype and testing it with a small number of your potential customers to see if they really find it valuable. If they find it valuable, it’s good to go. You can make subtle tweaks and launch them in the marketplace. But if your prospects aren’t sure if your product is valuable, you should indeed give your product a ponderous thought.

5. Plan For Delegation

Let’s say that you’ve discovered a real problem in the marketplace and you’ve also come up with a perfect solution for the same. You’ve planned a roadmap and subsequently tested out the product as well. It worked wonders, and now your business is starting to sail. To a degree, it’s only you that would be running the business, as the number of customers would be less. Initially, you’d be wearing multiple hats and performing multiple tasks at once. But as the business scales, you’ll need to have a team that can take care of the day-to-day operations. If you don’t have a team in place, you’re going to be exhausted at the end of the day. Your health will start deteriorating and it’ll directly impact your business. So, once you reach a certain level, you should take delegation into account and recruit experienced people with proven expertise that can handle specific operations in your business. While you can take major decisions for the organization and plan for growth.

Pursuing entrepreneurship is not as easy as it seems. Only a handful of businesses out of hundreds of businesses survive, and a fraction of those reach a remarkable height. Innumerable statistics have proven this, and hence it is advisable to pursue a business only to a certain extent. If, unfortunately, it doesn’t work out as per your expectations, then walking away from it is the best option. 

But if you really believe in yourself and the problem you’re solving, you should consider concentrating on your business idea. If you’re thinking about starting a business, it’s also very beneficial to talk to people who have already started a similar business and are successful. This will give you a glimpse of what works and what doesn’t work.