Simple Recipe for an Entrepreneur’s Success

To achieve success as an entrepreneur, it takes Ambition, Commitment, a Plan, and a Product people will pay for. If you have the first two, you can work out the others.

I was thinking about all the successful entrepreneurs I’ve known and had a couple of thoughts. They aren’t necessarily the smartest people, the most innovative or inventive people I’ve ever met.  One thing is common: ambition, the drive to be successful, to push through tacklers and keep their eyes on the end zone, knowing they will get there, and the passion to keep working on the process.

The most common other characteristics I have seen are commitment and confidence.  Confidence is fired by positive feedback, but also by the willingness to ask for feedback, and the strength to know what to do with negative feedback. The lack of stubbornness and closed-mindedness seems to help, too. All have a clear vision and a definitive goal.  Most are eager to prove the validity of their product by listening to customers—if customers don’t see value, they don’t buy. Most successful entrepreneurs are willing to listen to other points of view and sort out which ideas fit their vision and which don’t. Most understand that success doesn’t happen overnight and that they have to give the effort the time it needs. Commitment takes all of this into account.

A plan is the roadmap a successful entrepreneur lays out. They know that everything builds from something else, and that there’s a logical order of tasks.  You can’t do step 12 unless steps 10 and 11 are fully satisfied. It takes commitment to be able to follow the steps and not play with step 12 because it’s more fun than step 10.

And then there is “a Product People Will Pay For”.  Obviously, this is the single most critical component—if you don’t have a product people will pay for, no amount of commitment or ambition is going to generate revenue.  So, the building block, the foundation stone, of any business lies in developing your product so it can display a “perceived value” such that it creates a buying motivation in the mind of people. Prospective customers must have the problem you think they do, have an urgent need to solve it, and see in your product a compelling value.

The process of proving that your product idea has a sufficient value perception is defined and hard. Going through the process takes commitment; keeping the vision alive takes ambition; the path you take to go through it all takes a plan. The message is this: if you have ambition and are willing to commit, you CAN achieve success.