We’ve all been there. Perhaps we have a passion that we’d love to make into a lucrative career. Or maybe we have a specific skill that could easily be transformed into a marketable business. Whatever the case, starting your own small business can be exciting – and scary. Having the stamina and “thick skin” to sustain yourself through successes and failures is paramount. Staying motivated to persevere is the fuel on which your business runs.
In his book, If at First You Don’t Succeed: the Eight Patterns of Highly Effective Entrepreneurs, Brent Bowers – a former small business editor for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal – takes a look at the familiar traits shared by successful small business owners. One of Bowers’ key themes is that most entrepreneurs – who ultimately become successful – will inevitably fail on their first try. Bowers notes, “Some entrepreneurs brag about their bloopers. As one of the experts I talked to told me, they consider making a mess of things practically a badge of honor so long as they take stock of what went wrong and learn from it.”
Ultimately, Bowers posits that these failures are a necessary and natural part of the journey. By transforming challenges into opportunities for learning, small business owners can create their own customized learning process and eventual path to success.
Bowers structures his chapters around exploring the eight key patterns he considers critical to entrepreneurial success. These include:
• The ability to spot and seize opportunities
• An overwhelming urge to be in charge coupled with a gift for leadership
• The flexibility to come up with creative, out–of the–box solutions to problems or obstacles
• Incredible energy and tenacity in the pursuit of their goals
• Unwavering faith in their business
• The ability to take smart risks
• The ability to bounce back from setbacks and see failure as just one step on the path to ultimate success
Bowers goes on to cite examples of many successes who, at some point, experienced the embarrassment of defeat. One example is James Poss, who spent his childhood dissecting, repairing and creating gadgets. He later founded the Seahorse Power Company, which makes solar-powered garbage compactors. Bowers also writes of Cameron Johnson who started in business at nine years old selling greeting cards online, then made $1,000 auctioning his sister’s toys on eBay, before earning up to $150,000 a day while still at school by selling Internet ads.
Bowers’ work is an important tool for entrepreneurs looking to improve upon their strengths and weaknesses by gleaning insight from others’ experiences and challenges. Its lessons are relevant for everyone, whether you are just starting to pursue an entrepreneurial career or a small business veteran.
“The gift for detecting - and grabbing - unique moneymaking opportunities that have somehow eluded everybody else lies at the centre of entrepreneur’s mental universe,” notes Bowers.
Related posts:
0 Responses to “If at First You Don’t Succeed...”