10 Core Principles of Entrepreneurship

Know Thyself

The core of entrepreneurship: have an idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are. This way you know what you are doing correctly and what you can improve upon. Next, without passion, it is hard to achieve goals. In order to feel accomplished, you should have a drive for what you are doing. You never stop learning, and you should take it upon yourself to expand your knowledge in the field you are working to help your business grow.

Choose the Right Business

When starting your business, you have to keep in mind what is going to make you a successful business owner. The time, resources, and energy you put into your business should be thought out carefully in order to create a profitable business. Thus, there should be a good amount of research that goes into gathering facts and information about how to do so. This can be done through web research or talking to experts. Lastly, you have to understand that there is a process. You must respect this process and figure out the market to the best of your ability before jumping into things.

You are Only as Good as the People Around You

Your team should have the same values as you, and withhold your core beliefs. To enact your plans, you should look for people who have the proper skill sets. In order to keep performance up and develop a team that will provide positive outcomes, you should be conducting meetings and offering feedback that will help benefit your team. Lastly, your connections with others matter. External stakeholders that you connect with can be vital to your entrepreneurship, so forming strong relationships with customers, suppliers, investors, and advisers can be highly

beneficial.

Build a Winning Culture

Culture is something that motivates teammates and really defines a company. It is necessary to develop a culture that reflects your company and what you believe in. To make this organizational culture stick, you must constantly reinforce it and explicitly state your goals. When deciding on what you see your company culture as, it should be monitored and shaped from then on.

Define the Key Metric that Matters the Most

To achieve success, energy and resources must be applied to the right places. Once you have defined what measures should be applied to achieve this success, you must find a way to analyze performance. Evaluate the different metrics throughout the stages of maturity.

Accurately Assess Capital Requirements

Assess the good, bad, and worst scenarios when figuring out how much capital is required to be profitable. Fully understand what type of business you are involved in. Look into what type of investors you are interested in, figure out your risks, and what effects they may have on stakeholders.

Use the Right Incentives

When establishing the right incentives, you must find a balance that encourages behaviors to desire these incentives. These incentives must be enforced properly, as they can either be beneficial or destructive to a company’s values. Make sure the positives outweigh the negatives if incentives happen to generate unforeseen downsides.

Have Deep Empathy

In order to have a successful entrepreneurship, it is necessary to show empathy to those who are involved. This would increase your ability to run a profitable and sustainable business. You must be realistic, and understand how the world operates. Do not be blindsided by how you would like the world to operate. Customers are important to your business, and it is important that you understand their points of view, and try to put yourself in their positions.

Experiment in Stages

Add values for your customers and be sure to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Take everything as a learning experience. When developing a hypothesis, understand its impact and evaluate it objectively. Based off of your learning, you are able to refine your hypothesis, and from there you can grow using your findings from what worked and what did not.

Next Steps

The decision making process is not simple, but you should always have your long-term vision in mind to help you base your decisions. When you face challenges, it might be a good idea to journal. This can help you to not only break down the situation more easily, but you can reflect later if you are faced with a similar challenge in the future. Lastly, you should often think about your exit strategy. When it comes time to withdraw yourself from the business are you going to sell, pass the business on to the next generation, or go public?

Source: https://visual.ly/community/infographic/business/10-core-principles-entrepreneurship