67 Business Owners Share the Advice They’d Give to Their Younger Selves
.techDomains by Eshan Pancholi
Every entrepreneur, newbie or serial, can use valuable entrepreneurial advice when it comes to running their business or learning from other’s mistakes. Towards this, we spoke with 67 business owners, professionals, and entrepreneurs and requested them to share one key piece of entrepreneurial advice to their younger self. Read on!
1. Ben Taylor has been a serial solopreneur since 2004. His primary project these days is homeworkingclub
Entrepreneurial advice to my younger self:
The number one piece of business advice I would give to my younger self is to follow your passion, rather than money. Far too many people try to work out where the money is and form a business around making it.
For example, I managed to make myself very unhappy providing lucrative computer support for several years, despite finding it largely thankless and draining!
If you start a business around a passion instead, it’s far easier to stay motivated, and it helps if you’re “making a difference” in some way. There are plenty of very miserable wealthy people out there, and it’s far better to aim for a sustainable business that involves doing what you enjoy.
If you don’t want to get out of bed and do it every morning, you may as well get a job instead of taking the road of entrepreneurship.”
2. Toby Townrow is the Co-Founder and Communications Director at Drone Evolution
Entrepreneurial advice to my younger self:
1) What is the big vision for your product or service? How are you making things easier for people or what problem are you solving? Ours is “Making people safer and organizations better”.
This is the output of what we do, not the how. The how comes in the mission statement. But without a “Why”, you can easily get muddled and lose focus.
2) Where should your business focus? Find the way that people can understand your business and by keeping it down to one thing, you’ll get to your market much more quickly.
In our case, we could have looked at lots of different types of drones, lots of different products to develop and lots of different ways they could be used by clients.
In the end, we settled on one – tethered drones (they stay up in the air for hours). Once we hit on that, our business model and marketing plan suddenly became much easier to put together.
It was like we had been wading through treacle and now we were just running across an open plain. There was a running theme throughout what we were doing, and it became very easy to explain to investors and clients.
