6 Tips to Remember About Entrepreneurship

“Say it with me, En- tre- pre- neur.”

This is how one of my college professors jokingly introduced Entrepreneurship to our class of undergraduate entrepreneurial business majors. Once we said it aloud, we played a guessing game to see who could be the first to spell it correctly.

The word you quickly learn is fun to say and is hard to spell. Even now, I still have a tough time spelling it.

Business majors who specialize in entrepreneurship are given all the foundational tools needed to successfully run a business. The majority of the teachings consist of hard hitting business management techniques and processes. Here you learn everything from finding the net present value of a firm, to managerial techniques formed by Mr. Drucker himself. The capstone for graduating is starting and running your own business. I ended up opening two very small businesses and was able to exit financially ahead of the game by the thinnest of margins.

After college I was lucky enough to land a job with Vistage International which facilitates advisory boards for CEOs, executives and business owners. Working for Vistage has enabled me to continue learning from entrepreneurs and has been some of the best entrepreneurial training I’ve received yet. I often call my career here, “My Vistage MBA.”

While I wouldn’t trade my college degree for any other, my Vistage MBA is where I have been given access to some of the finer points of entrepreneurship and business management. The following is a list of some of the more valued items I have learned from my continued studies of entrepreneurs:

1.      “Slow Down and Focus On What Matters.”

Picasso didn’t paint while checking emails. Michelangelo said, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so masterful at all.” I often marvel at the thousands of hours it must have taken Michelangelo to gain his mastery. We each are granted with thousands of hours as well, the question is if we are choosing the right activities to spend them on?

2.      “Make Things Easy For People.”

Each day we all combat enough pressure in the world today. In Itay Talgam’s TED talk, Conduct Like the Great Conductors, Itay talks about how great Conductors create an environment that allows their orchestras to make the amazing music they do. To loosely quote an idea from his talk, if your team intends to make something fly, then find a way to remove gravity for them.

3.      “The Dazzle Is In The Detail.”

The little details are sometimes what separate great products or services from good products or services. Think about an experience you may have had at Disneyland or Disneyworld. A Disney park is imagineered to hit every one of your senses. From the sounds of a Dixieland band to faux conversations between 1930s housewives down main street alleys. Disney intends to please your eyes with color and thoughtfully planned architecture and foliage, your nose and mouth with smells and tastes of cooking candy and your body with exhilarating rides. All these details help Disney park guests create the brain chemicals that make them want to be there, stay there and come back for more.

4.      “Face Reality.”

It’s easy to take our beliefs as facts but this may not always be the case. To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, “there is no verb that means ‘I am currently believing falsely’, and if there were such a word, the world would be far better off.” Taking inventory on ones beliefs to see if they are true and helpful or if they are false and limiting can be a very rewarding exercise.

5.      “Rules, What Rules?”

The only hard and fast rules we have in this world come from physics; everything else is possible. Throw a coin up and it falls down, one can’t get around that. I’m not suggesting going out and breaking laws, but think about the constructs you have created in your mind and about how the world works and operates. Do things and think about things that have never been done before.

6.      “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

This WWII advice has gotten popular in the past year. In life and business, difficulties will pop up. How one reacts to these issues can make all the difference. Longtime former Vistage Chairman Pat Hyndman once helped me learn this lesson over lunch one day while talking about when things go wrong. He said, “Don’t automatically get angry. When you automatically get angry you automatically lose. Instead seek to understand, then move in a direction.”

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