Begin an Entrepreneurial Journey on the Right Foot (Part II)

By Tej Kohli, a Guest Contributor

If you look at the stories behind the world’s successful entrepreneurs, each is unique in how they overcame obstacles and grew their business. However, there are a few common traits that budding entrepreneurs need to be aware of and learn from to help ensure success in the global market. These are the next three.

Build a team of the best people: Analysing what you are good at will help you to build a team that will enable you to succeed. By having a team of the best people, you will be able to delegate time-consuming tasks, enabling you focus on the important role of growing and managing your business. Furthermore, fresh, new ideas brought in by experienced experts can provide surprising new opportunities.

Ensure you can fund success: One of the biggest hurdles entrepreneurs face is getting funding for their business. After the initial start-up funding, serious amounts of money are needed to develop your business and take it to the next level. This is where there is a risk of failure. To ensure success, plan ahead and anticipate when you will need to borrow money and organise funding before you reach that point. The worse day to negotiate a renewal of a facility is the day it is due to expire. With recent development in the alternative finance industry, there is now a wider choice of sources of funding beyond traditional banks, including crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending. It is essential that you explore what is available well in advance of the need to deploy the capital. With this in mind, you will also need to plan for gathering the evidence lenders will require of your business’s performance.

Be open: For any start-up business, raising funding depends on the confidence of investors and this means trust in the management team. Transparency is the key word here: investors must be fully informed of not only your progress, but also set-backs and how these are being addressed.

Finally, it is important to know when to move on. Most entrepreneurs thrive on developing and growing their idea. However, when a business has grown and matured, it is best to trust it to a professional management team and move on to the next project. The business world is unfortunately littered with the tragic consequences of entrepreneurs hanging on too long and getting bogged down in running a company when it would perhaps be better to let a professional management team run it. So, play to your strengths and move on to create the next new business success story.