How To Get Ready To Be An Entrepreneur

Great advice, Mike. I’ll add one from my side…

160. Learning by doing: The secret of running a marathon is preparing for one first, beginning with 5K races. Entrepreneurship is one of those things in life that you have to experience by yourself. You’ll never know what its like and how it works until you experience it first hand. The example of marathon that I just mentioned, you can plan, diet, and exercise but you don’t stand a chance to finish the race let alone winning unless you’d already run miles and miles first to prepare for the big race.

Start with something small and make the best out of the learning experience.

Good compilation! I teach “First Steps for Starting a Business” at UW-Madison and would add these Key Questions need to be answered before launching your biz:
1. What kind of business/industry will you be in?
2. What product of service will you sell?
3. Who will your customers be? What do they want/need?
4. How will you stand out from your competition?
—and most importantly:
5. What do you love to do and have expertise in? This is key to success!

Admittedly I only scanned the first 100 but nobody said the most obvious: have an idea, project or product with value worthy of the effort. Not value as you define it or how your friends do but people who don’t know or care about you. At least half the prospective entrepreneurs who contact me don’t have that.

It’s NOT fair but with everyone wanting to be an entrepreneur these days, competition has raised the barre. As a mentor, I want to talk about what you’re doing (beyond branding and networking, please, it’s so over done) and making and how to improve that; not what you plan or want to do particularly if you haven’t followed the advice you’ve already been given. Clean your plate and then you can come back for seconds. This isn’t the Golden Trough (Corral).

They have the branding down, logo and the whole nine yards with nothing but “vision” to paste it onto. It’s like an “etch a sketch” business (nod to Keillor). Not to say logos aren’t nice and sometimes useful (maybe when I’m not so busy, I’ll consider getting one too).

A universal problem seems to be an over emphasis on business plans that consist of near perfect examples of confirmation bias conjecture and rely on investor funding to implement the very first step. Hours spent poring over a template business plan does not create value. Create a prototype I want to buy and THEN you can begin to write a plan that describes how you think you need to move to the next tier. That is what excites people and makes them want to become involved. As I said, with everyone starting a business these days, novelty has become increasingly rare. Build it first, then talk about it.

This is the most thorough and informative information I have found. I really enjoyed it.

Great collection of advice, my favorite being in order to start a business be prepared to spend money thus get ready for ramen noodles. I like ramen noodles anyway, with a slice of bacon and boiled egg, you can’t go wrong with that.