Tuesday 4 March 2014

Scott Assemakis: 5 Principles of Successful Entrepreneurs. You Will Love #3

As Scott Assemakis says, daily habits are an essential part of an entrepreneur’s life – one that can make the difference between success and failure. As a self-employed person you have to be able to motivate yourself, since there will be no one there to do it for you. This calls for a strict set of principles.

As Scott points out, what you do daily creates and shapes your business. This is why today we will look at the 5 most common principles and habits of successful entrepreneurs.

1. Successful Entrepreneurs Don’t Make Up Excuses

Successful entrepreneurs are aware of how the human mind can sabotage our thinking and make us believe in our own excuses for not getting important work done.

Efficient entrepreneurs immediately recognize the unjustified excuses that their mind makes up, and then they crush those excuses by changing the way they look at the problem.

Lack of finance, for example, is one of the biggest excuses aspiring entrepreneurs have before starting their own venture. Experienced entrepreneurs, however, know that you don’t need a lot of money to start.

Thinking that you need a lot of money to start your business is dead wrong and limiting. In the modern era of internet, a business can be started with as little as £100 – the cost of basic website design and hosting.

Besides, even if you need more than that, there are infinite ways of getting finance support these days. As long as you have a genuinely good idea that truly provides value to your market – and are committed to making it happen – you will eventually find a way.

Moreover, if you can’t start a business that requires a £1000 investment and make profit from that, then why on earth would you believe that you could run a £100,000 business to begin with?

Making a £1000 business profitable is, from many points of view, the same as making a £100,000 business profitable. The most important difference is that, with the latter, you will risk a lot more – and you can’t afford to do that when you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur.

Start small instead. Achieve success. Prove yourself that you can do it, and gain some experience in the process. Only after you were successful with your small venture should you start thinking about building big.

2. Good Entrepreneurs Trust Their Team: Scott Assemakis

Good entrepreneurs hire smart people – actually, they often times hire people who are more intelligent than themselves.

Then, when they face a problem or have a question that they know they aren’t the most qualified to answer, they turn to their team for assistance.

They seek the counsel of the people around them, and trust the judgement of their team.

Successful entrepreneurs know that, by trying to do all the thinking and decision making by themselves, they severely limit the potential of their organization. Generously rewarding these smart people for the real value that they produce is also essential. By compensating the people that work for you properly, you make sure that they are focused on the organization’s goals, as opposed to being worried about their continued employment.

Trust the people around you. Hear their opinion, and keep an open mind. You might be surprised of the great insight and ideas you can get from your team.

3. Successful Entrepreneurs Don’t Complain About Problems

They simply don’t waste time doing it. Instead, they use this time to find solutions.

Successful entrepreneurs are on a constant lookout to provide real value to the world.

Where other people see problems and crises, entrepreneurs see business opportunities and challenges that they’re looking forward to.

Moreover, entrepreneurs specifically seek to find these problems that people have, and only once they had found a persistent problem, do they go on to develop a solution.

Even famous inventors thought this way. Thomas Edison once said: “I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.”

And this stays true today more than ever. Dane Maxwell, a popular multi software business owner and entrepreneur, has developed a system he calls the idea extraction process.

This is basically a framework he uses to find common problems that people are struggling with in different industries, and then coming up with software solutions for those problems.

However, Dane is not a programmer himself, nor is he a computer tech savvy – so how does he do it? Often times, he manages to get payments upfront for a certain product, from people whom he knows want a problem solved in their businesses. He then uses that money to hire programmers and develop the actual product. Thus, he delivers huge value to other businesses by simply using his problem solving ability and mind-set – without any self-funded investment at all.

Find a problem, develop a solution. Deliver real value, and you will get paid for it.

4. Don’t Stress About Money: Scott Assemakis

Stress is one thing entrepreneurs continually put up with. You have to know how to handle this stress in order to stay rational and make the right decisions.

Cash-flow issues are common, and there is no guaranteed way to be in total control of that as an entrepreneur. To keep financial stress to a minimum, however, you have to face the problem directly.

If you don’t have a permanent solution, be satisfied with a temporary one until you can find something better.

Eliminate the features of your products and services that you or your business don’t specifically need, and focus on its existing strengths instead. Keep doing this until you build up the revenue to sustain additional features.

5. Efficient Entrepreneurs Commit to Useful Habits

They establish routines and stick to them. A huge part of working smart is knowing how to handle the limited human ability to motivate oneself.

Transforming temporary energy bursts into permanent habits will greatly improve the quality of your life.

This, in turn, will reflect on your business and the quality of work that you do for your business.

As humans, we have a limited reserve of motivation at our disposal every now and then. Instead of using that to get one-time activities done, we can be much better off using it to form long-lasting habits that will serve us tenfold better.

Once a long-term habit is formed, you won’t need to use any of your limited motivation to keep getting it done. Instead, you will be doing it naturally and as part of your daily routine – much like brushing your teeth before going to sleep.

Developing your morning routine is a great way to get started experimenting with long-term habits. Decide on one thing that is important to you and you want to be doing every morning from now on.

Is it writing? Or maybe exercising and stretching? Set a single goal. Don’t try to start with multiple habits at a time, since this has been shown to not work.

Then stick with that goal for at least 21 days. Studies have shown that it takes three weeks of daily practice for an activity to become a habit.

For the next 21 days, do that activity at the set time no matter what. If you miss as much as one day, the chances of it becoming a habit will fall drastically.

More Great Tips From Scott Assemakis

Did you enjoy reading about the principles that successful entrepreneurs share?

Scott Assemakis is an experienced entrepreneur and definitely one to know about habits and how important they can be in one’s pursuit of success – you should definitely connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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