Yesterday I was challenged on the blog to do a 'Think like a woman..." post but in the interests of my marriage I decided against it!
Today I am going to try and get inside the head of an entrepreneur - how do they think?
Firstly a trip to Wikipedia to find out what the definition of an entrepreneur is:
Wikipedia = “An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.”
I think this is a little narrow as many entrepreneurs are not owners or managers when they start - they may become them when they finish but this is the destination rather than the starting point.
Entrepreneurs focus on opportunity - and when I say focus I really mean focus! An entrepreneur is someone who can spot an opportunity and unlike most of us who find all the reasons why it can't be done, will focus on making it happen. As an employee of a company we focus on resources such as money, people and time and thinks "I can't do it, because I don't have the money." A person who thinks like an entrepreneur will say "Let's just get on with it and find the money later."
So lets break this style of thinking down into its component parts:
- Discovery - the first thing to do is to spot the opportunity. Now most entrepreneurs don't spend their lives looking for them but when they turn up they have the mind set to capitalise on the gap in the market or the new idea.
- Development - The next thing they do is to develop the idea. It might be that they dont have all the knowledge to undertake this themselves but they are probably well connected through services such as Linkedin and Facebook to find someone who is.
- Design - To maximise the impact of their idea, and to get the required funding, a good entrepreneur will design a good story - something that will engage people in his/her idea. This will be coupled with a marketing and communications strategy.
- Dig-Deep - Yes the dreaded funding question. Many entrepreneurs have such a strong feeling about their idea that they self-fund - or ask friends and family to help. An entrepreneur will get the money and overcome any barriers no matter what. This can lead into all sorts of trouble, however!
- Deploy - The final stage of the idea is getting the idea out into the market - whether that be a pilot first or just a full blown launch. For the entrepreneur this can be the most or least exciting bit of the whole journey - depending on what has been the driving factor.
Throughout all of this activity the one guiding principle has been focus - focus on the end point, focus on getting things done, focus on solving every problem that emerges, focus on success!
Hopefully you can see that this way of thinking translates into business quite easily - the only real difference is the attitude and single mindedness the entrepreneur brings to the party.
Where do you sit on the scale of 1 - 10 of being an entrepreneur (10 being the most like)?
