One Move Or Did you download the 100 tips for entrepreneurs (to master Twitter)?
Or 50 best-kept secrets for attracting customers or 99 of the best of something…?
I think being an entrepreneur today is mainly confusing.
100 tips (or ideas or sentences or something) are exactly what will not help us.
I’m sure giving 100 or 50 or 99 sentences, or tips or ideas works well for collecting emails for one email marketing list because I continually see great and successful influencers, content providers, and market leaders offering that kind of content in their social media posts, home pages, and the like.
However, I never understood what I could do with so many sentences, or ideas, or examples of something which usually is new to me. (Otherwise, I wouldn’t look for education or facts or examples on that subject.)
We are living in a time of huge quantities of everything, especially on the digital edge. A huge number of social media friends, a huge number of followers, a huge number of “likes”…
There is also a huge number of tips that entrepreneurs can use to succeed, a huge number of accelerators/incubators/startup consultants, and more.
Unfortunately, there is also a huge percentage of entrepreneurial failures.
“It’s estimated that 90% of startups fail; 137,000 businesses give birth every day or 5 million per year, as established in a recent research*, but 90% of them fail … If we do maths, 123,300 fail every day.”
Let’s try One Move ahead.
One entrepreneurial bit of advice, lesson, or example.
Don’t get me wrong; I was the first to fall into the trap. Every time I lectured, ran a workshop, or spoke on a live video, I tried to include as many tips, ideas, and examples as I could in the short time allocated.
But it doesn’t work.
Many entrepreneurs say that they are overwhelmed. Many don’t know how to start, although if you type “start an entrepreneurship” into the Google search box, you get 20,000 results. The phrase “start a startup” produces 2.5 million results, while “start a small business” leads to 13.5 million results.
I know, I know. Giving away 100 tips is very generous, and that list probably took a long time to create. It also gets many SEO results for any expression.
But it can’t help many of the entrepreneurs who aren’t sure what is right or wrong for their specific audience. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs say they aren’t sure who their right customer is.
Forty-two percent of entrepreneurs fail because “There was no market need” (17% – “No business model”, 14% – “Poor marketing”, 14% – “Ignore customers”). Actually, they can’t know if there is or isn’t a market need, There wasn’t a market need among the customers on whom they decided to focus.
They can’t know. Nobody can. Unless they check. But the majority of entrepreneurs don’t check. Many entrepreneurs didn’t have the chance to study how you can find the biggest market potential for their product or service – meaning who their customers are.
Let’s go One Move at a time.
One Entrepreneurial Move ahead.
Today’s One Move ahead:
The sure and proven way to double the success rate of any marketing activity.
I had a discussion the other day with a young entrepreneur who created a new community in the wine space and has seen fantastic results in less than a year.
This entrepreneur is a very active manager who doesn’t stop creating great offers and events for his (free-of-charge) community. He also provides great information and tips about the best promotions, discounts, free wine tours, and much more.
He told me about a special “wine packages” offer he managed to get for the group by collaborating with one of the best wine producers and importers.
He wasn’t very happy with the results, though, as he didn’t get as many sales as he’d anticipated. He also told me that more than 400 new people joined the group, which boosted the numbers to more than 3,000 members at the time of the promotion and about 2,300 new readers of his blog.
I was amazed by these numbers, which were the result of information-sharing and word of mouth (no paid campaign).
Because I knew he wasn’t monetizing (looking to make money) from the group in the first two years, I couldn’t understand his frustration.
“You just brought in almost one-fifth of your group members within a very short time, not to mention the thousands of new readers who joined your blog,” I told him. “Why aren’t you pleased with this result?”
He wasn’t sure.
So, let me tell you why this entrepreneur wasn’t happy with such fantastic results: He didn’t set any goals.
This is a very important move every entrepreneur (like any other business manager) should make:
Never, ever should any business person move ahead without deciding in advance exactly what they would like to achieve – meaning their objective and their measurable goals.
We should set goals on a yearly basis, a monthly base and for any meaningful activity. There isn’t any other way to measure results.
If this entrepreneur had created an objective and goals stating exactly how many new members and followers he wanted to reach, he would now be dancing in the streets.
I also believe that he could have gotten even better results if he had decided on his objective and goals ahead of time and then focused on this mission.
How do you set measurable goals for a new product or for an event you’ve never held before?
We’ll talk about that in the next move ahead tip. It’s easier than it seems.
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* https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-failure-rate
** According to CB insight research https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/
