7 steps to be a successful entrepreneur!

Entrepreneurship requires skills such as planning and organization, which can be developed with persistence and conviction.

Here are 7 steps to being a successful entrepreneur:

• Observation

Look closely at your environment, being empathetic with the problems and needs that consumers, users or customers have, according to the nature of the business you want to install. Do not make the mistake of putting your eyes or personal opinion on everything else, since that is precisely what differentiates and enhances the value proposition to be generated in business models.

Before giving up your job and launching yourself from the plane without a parachute, you need to take into account every little detail that occurs in your life, internally and externally. Your personal finances should be stable and preferably have a lot of money available to invest. Find those points that strengthen you, your ability to withstand stress, delegate, direct, sell and more; but also pay attention to everything that may affect you. Maybe you have a great idea for a business, but you do not know how the business world works, you do not know anything about administration or your power of conviction is not something that would impress many entrepreneurs.

• Change your way of thinking

Surely you are fed up with your work and want to be your own boss. You dream of that eternal vacation while others make the company work and you expect to have a lot of money to buy what you want, that's the worst thing you can do. You must adjust your thinking to a long season of sacrifices, sleepless nights, crises of all kinds, setbacks and effort. Entrepreneurship will give you character and when you realize that you are not the same as before, you will feel proud, because it means you are on the right track.

• Investigation

No matter what your business is, you can not believe that you already know everything about the people you want to approach. Make market studies, learn about their tastes, income, hobbies, ages, preferences and more. Today it is important to learn everything that happens in real life as in the digital life, because a large part of business happens on the Internet, so you need to understand the movements of your audience.

Once the opportunity of a good business is identified, it is important to start the research process of everything that surrounds the endeavor that you are looking to carry out and, thus, have clarity of the problem or need to solve and everything you are going to do . Identify your competitors, what their prices are, where they are located, what products or services they share with you, the same in relation to the segment of customers to be served, suppliers and key partners, among others. This is done to take it into account at the time of profiling and protecting the idea.

• Evaluate the risks

From the first moment you know that life is a risk, and that you will have to sacrifice many things to be the best, but this also means knowing when to stop. Investing absolutely everything and failing can lead you to bitter disappointment and never again try something new. You need to plan before moving, because the defense is the best attack. Consider how, when and where you will execute each of your decisions and never forget what is at stake.

• Initial Creative Process

Identify all the initial, tangible and intangible factors of the business, which allow the previous points to be put into practice, seeking to break molds with originality and vision of the future, as the name of the enterprise, place of installation if necessary, the key people and resources you need, the line of products or services to be packaged and marketed, the deal with customers and even the date of departure of the business. Before continuing, verify if the design of the business satisfies the essential, that is, the need observed at the beginning. If you do not, make the appropriate corrections.

All those boring classes in which they make you imagine that you have a company must bear fruit. As much as your brain has developed the idea of creating a company from scratch, give identity, mission, vision and all those things that seemed irrelevant at the time should become your new obsession. It is possible that thousands of people have the same idea as you, but you need to be clear about why your company is the one that really offers something new and innovative. From the organization chart, the database and the accounts, to the future projections, everything must be specified and know each one of the points.

• Implementation of the Business and Marketing Model

Start the sale of the product or service designed, considering accounting and financial processes, in order to measure the results obtained. It is important to know when your business will start to be profitable (Balance Point) and when you will recover the total investment. In this step, it also considers the formation of the client portfolio, identifying those that are more faithful in quantity, quality and frequency of purchases, and also evaluates the performance of suppliers.

Do not overlook marketing, there are many people who manage to open a business and start operating hoping that people arrive alone. Even if your product is revolutionary, if you do not find a way to reach people, they will not move a foot for you. Thousands of good businesses fail every year to never look for agencies or people with knowledge of marketing and advertising. If you really want to take what you do outside of your acquaintances, you need to find someone who knows where to position your brand.

• Increase

Once the recovery of the investment has been achieved, obtaining a defined and profitable structure, an increase in sales sustained over time, the identification of the existence of a market or the opportunity of a new business, then you will be at the moment of growing. It can be the integration of new products or services, the opening of a branch or new points of sale, as well as entering foreign markets that allow you to expand your business to new customers or new markets. To start successfully, it is vital to include and develop your network of key partners in your business model.

• BONUS:

Another thing that you should keep in mind is the concrete idea of your business, what you do and how it will benefit potential clients and people in general; all that you must explain in less than two minutes. It is said that if one day you find in an elevator a person capable of investing in your business, you should be able to tell everything about it while the elevator is in motion. If in those valuable seconds you managed to express everything perfectly, you already have much more possibility instead of someone who sits two hours trying to explain what you want to sell.