Category: Entrepreneurship

Millennials face a huge number of challenges in their lives. Rising rent and home costs are preventing millennials from becoming homeowner; the Gig Economy, while flexible, provides no benefits for a large portion of working millennials; and seemingly endless debt from college loans is constantly looming. Despite all of this, millennials are one of the most entrepreneurial generations that the world has ever seen, even though they face many challenges in that regard as well.

Education Can Make a Difference

While many millennials are starting to reconsider the importance of a college degree due to the debt involved in obtaining one, having a degree actually gives young entrepreneurs a huge leg up in the business world. Though the degree itself is useful, another invaluable aspect of attending college for entrepreneurs is the networking that you can do while attending college or university. The old adage, “it’s who you know” is still relevant and applicable today, and the connections you make during college can help to make entering the business world a much easier prospect.

 

One of the most obvious degree paths for the aspiring entrepreneur is to go for a Masters of Business Administration. An MBA helps with an entrepreneurial career by teaching financial literacy, how to operate efficiently, and gives young entrepreneurs the interpersonal skills they will need when they are the boss of a team of employees. College is a great opportunity for a millennial to develop the necessary business skills to become successful, and though the debt might pile up, if a millennial goes in with a driven purpose they will most likely be able to pay the loans off when their business becomes successful.

 

Becoming a successful young entrepreneur isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, like Richard Branson and Michael Dell, were initially met with skepticism when they were first presenting their ideas. While young millennials will run into their fair share of hardships on the path to success, having an appropriate college degree under their belt allows them to be taken just a bit more seriously when they are first starting out.

Maintaining Values and Passion

Millennials tend to eschew the traditional method of climbing the corporate ladder to success. Instead, millennials are an entrepreneurial generation that values independence, flexibility, and to work for or run a company that they are passionate about. While their parent’s generation was perfectly content working the same 9-to-5 job day in and day out until they received their gold watch at retirement, millennials are disillusioned with that process and desire to work towards a goal that makes a larger impact in the world.

 

Businesses that give back to their communities are especially attractive to millennials, so when they are starting up their own businesses, they tend to take corporate social responsibility seriously. However, fledgling companies generally don’t have the capital or manpower to make huge differences, and this can lead to burnout for a lot of young entrepreneurs. Keeping the passion alive for the causes they believe in can be difficult when they are faced with all of the challenges posed by starting up their own company.

 

One of the reasons millennials are so into starting up businesses of their own is that many companies fail to properly manage the millennial workspace. Millennials want empathy and open communication where they work, and far too often businesses are already too set in their ways to accomodate for a new style of management. Because of this, many millennials find themselves bouncing around from job to job, or becoming entrepreneurs themselves in the hopes of creating a business that they would like to work at.

Mountains of Debt

Probably the biggest reason that millennials have a difficult time becoming entrepreneurs is also the most obvious: A severe lack of personal savings due to debt acquired while obtaining their degree, coupled with low wages and steadily rising housing costs keeps many millennials living from paycheck to paycheck. Many don’t expect that they’ll ever be able to retire, let alone raise enough capital to start up their own business.

 

The rise of the gig economy has definitely provided millennials with the ability to set their own schedules and not be tied down anywhere. However, there can be downsides. Gig workers do not qualify for benefits from employers, so they are paying for all of their insurance and medical costs. Additionally, the gig economy doesn’t provide the financial stability required to start up a business, as gig workers only get work as it comes and things can dry up quickly.

 

Despite the huge amounts of debt many millennials are burdened with, it hasn’t stopped them from exercising their entrepreneurial spirit. They seem to find a way to get the funding and time to develop businesses that they are passionate about that also fill a need in the market. Even though the deck is stacked against them, millennials make the best out of a bad situation and try their best to come out ahead.

 

At the end of the day, millennials, Gen X, baby boomers and Gen Y are all after the same thing. No matter their age or standing, people crave success and want to make it happen, whatever it takes. Unfortunately, millennials have had it a bit harder than the previous generations, but that isn’t holding them back.

It’s a huge jump, but one that can ultimately reap you umpteen rewards (many of which are not financial).

However, taking this jump towards self-employment is one that a lot of people just struggle to get to grips with. Suddenly, the comfort of a standard 9-5 job is stripped away, and they are left with countless unknowns.

Well, before you even consider to take this leap you should take a long, hard look at your finances. With that, let’s take a look at some of the financial issues you should be raising yourself before pressing ahead.

Do you have enough savings to fall back on?

First and foremost, you need to make sure you are in a strong enough financial position to move forward with your dreams. Let’s not forget that this is going to be the period where your regular pay check goes out of the window, and you effectively enter the unknown.

Ultimately, there will be months where you might not have any income. It is for this reason that you need to put together something of a nest egg; you need sufficient money to fall back on in case you struggle to turn a sufficient profit in the initial months.

This might mean boosting your income through a second job, or even something like trading. In relation to the latter, technology has unquestionably made this a lot easier over recent times, with the likes of the Meta Trader 4 demo account meaning that you stand a much bigger chance of turning a profit and ultimately increasing the size of your savings ahead of your self-employment move.

Have you cut out all unnecessary expenses?

This next point is quite self-explanatory; after all, nobody needs unnecessary expenses.

However, this suddenly becomes a lot more urgent as you move into the world of self-employment. After all, as we have already alluded to, this is a period of the unknown. You don’t quite know what expense or even income is around the corner, so you need to cut back wherever possible.

Take a look at your finances and scale back, just to give yourself a bit of breathing space and alleviate some pressure.

What is your mortgage situation?

This next question is quite interesting. Now that you are self-employed, your borrowing situation becomes much different. Quite often, lending providers will require three years’ worth of accounts before considering lending you money, and obviously this is a stumbling block.

Ultimately, if you are thinking of remortgaging or getting another mortgage in the near future, this is something to be aware of. It might mean that you are handed a much higher interest rate than you may have been expecting.

Have you looked at possible help from the government?

Finally, it doesn’t have to all be bad. One of the wonders about starting your own business is that you can tap into a whole host of different grants. Many of these directly target start-up businesses, so sift through them and see if you can get some extra help along the way.

Business success demands that owners and managers hone their skills to promote the growth and health of their organization. Unfortunately, this challenge can be a difficult one. Given the competitive nature of the business landscape, leaders with a few bad habits can destroy a company’s probability of success.

1. Lack of Flexibility and Vision, Related to Business Model Changes

A technology-driven economy changes at breakneck speed. What many many business owners are failing at, which can dramatically impact a company’s ability to thrive in the future, is their ability to adapt. To the extent that leaders are not flexible or open-minded to making drastic business model changes necessary to adapt, an organization can cease to exist. A good example of this type of nearsightedness might be a reluctance by business owners to acknowledge and embrace the need for new software solutions that would benefit employees and customers alike.

Merely modifying a business model is not always enough to meet the future’s demands. Business management teams must be capable of serving both today’s customers while developing future customers. Since one of the most difficult challenges any management team faces is to address current needs while also serving as a visionary for the future, many businesses lose their competitive advantage when they fail to juggle the present and future needs of a business.

2. Micromanaging Employees

Employees resent being micromanaged because it feels like the manager or owner does not trust them to competently do the job they were hired to perform. An effective leader must learn how to delegate tasks and trust they will be done.

Any company that expects to grow has to hire competent employees and then have confidence they can do the job, not look over their shoulder and double check everything they do.

3. Lack of Interest in Team Members’ Well-Being or Personal Growth

As the contributors of an organization, employees are the heartbeat of any company. Leadership must show genuine interest in the welfare of their employees if they expect to attract and retain a loyal and committed workforce. Whether it means investing in ergonomic chairs, state-of-the-art training or safe Bluetooth earphones, these types of investments prove the management staff’s interest in investing in their staff members need to be part of strategic human resource policy.

4. Poor Market Analysis

Data drives the market and must be considered carefully by entrepreneurs and managers if they want to remain competitive. They must create systems that can capture accurate information in a timely manner. Without timely report analysis, it is impossible to adjust policies and procedures to overcome challenges.

Keap reports that it is especially critical that entrepreneurs analyze the marketplace as they launch a new business. Many businesses fail due to insufficient oversight and an inability to accurately “see the writing on the wall,” about serious operational problems.

5. A Lack of Respect for Other People’s Time

A pet peeve for many people is timeliness. As busy as the management staff may be, they need to always honor their commitments and meeting times with staff members. In case they are always late, they risk sending the message that the subordinate workers’ time is less valuable than their own. This rule is simple: To earn respect, you have to respect others too.

There are always exceptions to any rule, but a pattern of not being punctual sends a clear, and a very negative message – that you are either not interested, or the meeting is just not important to you. In a tight labor market, such actions can significantly impact your bottom line. Bosses who neglect their team members run the risk of losing team them.

6. Unwilling to Take Necessary Risks

Industry leaders take risks. The status quo will only take you so far. An unwillingness to take risks can limit a business’s ability to make important breakthroughs that lead to growth. The business landscape is unpredictable and demands that entrepreneurs adapt policies, procedures, and even business models at times if they want to continue to compete.

With careful analysis, managers and business owners can limit the amount of risk they take. But at some point, after careful consideration, you have to take a leap of faith and make some bold moves.

Wrap Up

Owning and managing a business is a risky and challenging proposition that guarantees failure for entrepreneurs who sport bad habits. Such habits lessen their ability to lead and change when necessary.

The good news is that smart leaders can identify problem areas and make a commitment to improving. While self-evaluation can be painful, it is necessary for any person who wants to grow in order to fuel their company and give it what it needs.

Understanding the predictable bad habits above that can harm a business is a good first step towards avoiding these issues. As the saying goes, knowledge is power. Everything possible should be done to identify and eliminate bad habits that can ruin your business.

Jasmine Williams covers the good and the bad of today’s business and marketing. When she’s not being all serious and busy, she’s usually hunched over a book or dancing in the kitchen, trying hard to maintain rhythm, and delivering some fine cooking (her family says so). Contact her @JazzyWilliams88

Entrepreneurship is about creating and growing a business, but don’t let that concept consume you. If you want to be an effective entrepreneur, boss, leader, teammate, and visionary, you can’t be content to only make changes and spark growth in your business—you have to make changes and spark growth in yourself as well.

Your personal growth is what’s going to equip you to carve a path to success:

• You’ll gain knowledge to make better decisions.
• You’ll develop skills to expand to new areas.
• You’ll earn experience to apply different perspectives and engage your creativity.
• You’ll transcend your business, so that when your business is sold (or when you depart some other way), you’ll be able to do even more in your next venture.

That being said, you can’t just say you’re going to grow—you have to work to achieve that growth, and it isn’t always easy or straightforward. When you’re ready, you’ll need to adhere to the following five principles—at a minimum—to be successful:

1. Meet as many people as possible. As people, we are fundamentally limited in how much we can learn and how much we can develop by the people around us. If you spend time, personally or professionally, with the same three people over the course of a decade, eventually your personalities, beliefs, thought patterns, and abilities will all meld together and become indistinguishable. You’ll teach each other everything you have to teach, and you’ll reach a plateau where you’re unable to draw any new information or experiences from one another. By contrast, every new person you meet—whether it’s a new hire or a stranger on the street—is going to be better than you at something, and is going to have different ideas than you do. I guarantee it. The more people you meet, the more you’ll stand to learn, and the more you’ll grow as a person.

2. Listen to advice and feedback. Listening is an oft-neglected, but fundamental skill. Too many people focus on what they’re saying rather than what everyone around them is saying—but you can turn this around. Go out of your way to earn advice and feedback from the people around you, including people above you (like investors and mentors) and people below you (like employees and people outside the industry). You don’t have to necessarily take or incorporate all this advice, or any of it, but you have to hear it, understand it, and consider it. It’ll open you to new perspectives.

3. Always have a book. Yes, book-reading is a bit old fashioned in this advanced digital age, but it’s still one of the best ways to gain—and more importantly, retain—information. Depending on what you read, you’ll learn new skills, gain new insights, learn new strategies, and sharpen your linguistic skills and vocabulary, all of which are positive steps. You should always have a book you’re currently reading, so whenever you finish one, you’re onto the next. The minute you stop reading, you stop learning, so keep a full queue of books to read and delve into them whenever you have spare time.

4. Question everything, including yourself. It’s dangerous to become a slave to your assumptions, and many people do without ever realizing it. If you want to grow, you’ll need to challenge those assumptions. Try not to treat anything as sacred—even if there’s a news source you like, don’t trust everything it publishes. Just because you’ve held a belief for years doesn’t mean it’s absolutely and objectively true. When you operate under the assumption that everything is flawed and there’s no such thing as perfect or objective reasoning, you’ll open the doors to more information, and the ability to learn and adapt.

5. Never be satisfied. If you want to achieve positive personal growth, you have to want to grow. This seems obvious, but there’s an important principle you have to accept before you can truly desire that growth; you have to avoid the temptation of satisfaction. When you become content with yourself, or satisfied with the level of growth you’ve achieved, you’ll have no reason to continue moving forward, and you’ll become stagnant. Resist that eventuality by refusing to be too satisfied with yourself. Continually work on improving yourself, improving the content you publish, and improving the way you promote yourself (and your content, such as through a strategic link building campaign).

With these five principles in the back of your mind at all times, you’ll be well-equipped to advance yourself as much as you advance your business. When you’re the best entrepreneur, and the best professional you can be, you’ll make better decisions, open your mind to more ideas, and achieve a broader and more developed set of skills and experience to harness. Encourage all your partners and teammates to adopt the same mentality, and you’ll have an entire team of self-advancers who remain on an upward trajectory.

We all know that entrepreneurs are really busy individuals and they always have to do something or other, and most of the time it’s really something very urgent. The plight of an entrepreneur is constantly like moving pieces – leading initiatives, organizing activities,implementing the planned stuff in the right order, etc.

Entrepreneurs always spend their time on important things which are really understandable, but some more critical tasks should be done. They do not come under the ‘urgent’ category still; they are something vital.

In the midst of the busy schedule, creating time for these not urgent but essential tasks is really very difficult. But they can be managed with the little shift in mindset. However, for a better dream, create and thrive as an entrepreneur we need to shove the very urgent tasks a little bit and make room for the less urgent activities.

Brainstorming for your next business

It is essential that every entrepreneur should be loyal to the business. As an entrepreneur, you have lots of opportunities and chances for adventures. So, why not explore when you have the opportunities in your hand? If you always spend time in extinguishing the plans for your current business, you will never get a chance to plan for the next business. Don’t ever limit your potential or prevent things from taking place. Just keep on brainstorming about your next business moves and see what happens.

Planning for your next product

The main factor is introducing new products into the market. The better product you can develop the more sales you can expect.

Let’s take a small example – you are successfully running the business accompanied by a strong customer base. You are planning to serve your customers better by providing them with the new unique product. And this is the right thing that you should do as an entrepreneur because it will help you to grow your business.

So you have to plan cautiously and accurately to launch your next product. You have to keep on adding something new to your product line in order to hold the attention of your customers. You can never expect to keep a hold on the market share with your existing line of products.In fact, if you need any sort of extra fund for that, you can make plans and approach for the various fundraising methods. To know more about this you may visit fundraising sites.

 

Mentoring someone

If someone has ever mentored you, then you would definitely understand the power of entrepreneurial mentorship. There are lots of people who would like to learn from you. If you come across someone, then don’t hesitate to mentor him. He can be your co-founder, employee or a friend. Always try to spend some time with such people who want to learn from you. Remember, mentoring always serves a two-way purpose. You can get to learn a lot of things as well as you will have someone with whom you can actually think aloud.

Strategizing your business move

It is not possible to say that every entrepreneur has been a born market, but one can say that every entrepreneur has some exclusive marketing ideas up on the sleeves. As for the studies, it has been found that some of the eminent entrepreneurs in the world are not skilled at technology, business or products, but they are simply excellent in only one factor, i.e., marketing.

In reality, if you can innovate the process of your marketing and spend time in dreaming and brainstorming, you can also get to experience the same success level as Steve Jobs.

Studying the human behavior

Every entrepreneur should learn how to study the human behavior. The time which you will spend on studying the motivation psychology, development, behavior and cognition of people – will never be wasted. You will able to understand your customers better and serve them exactly in the way they expect from you.

You will able to understand what they want from your organization and how you are you going to provide them with it. You will able to understand how to make selections and take decisions in the right way. Last but not the least, you will learn how to face conflicts as well as the accurate procedure of mediating the same.

Networking

As a businessman, you cannot strive in the market without networking. Although the term seems to be little artificial and smarmy, still it is something which is really essential for establishing a strong business. You need to establish a strong connection with similar people in your field for striving in the market. You must have heard that no business can strive on an island, so you will have to make connections and be social. There are several ways of networking and today; social media plays one of the best networking channels for everyone, including entrepreneurs.

Taking off time

This activity is really not an activity and of course, does not fall under any specific business activity. But it is equally important like the above business activities, which I have already discussed. Take some time off in a week or month. On these days or specific hours, simply switch off your phone and stay away from any sort of business activities. You need some time to unwind and unplug yourself and do something different. When you actually take some time off for yourself, you can get time to think for some creative ideas that can ultimately help you in your business. You can even learn something from the experiences you can have on these days, which can add to your business insight for being a better entrepreneur.

Final thoughts

You have tons of things to execute but finding out time for the essential activities which are must for being a proper entrepreneur is really essential for thriving in the long run. When you can manage to take out 10 minutes from your busy schedule to read this post, I believe with a little shift in your mindset you can also get to manage some time in your hectic schedule for these little less urgent tasks. Always keep in mind, it’s all for your benefit. It is you who will be benefited and not someone else. So, ultimately you are doing everything for yourself!