Entrepreneurship
is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. Every
successful entrepreneur or business person has been able to identify a
problem and come up with a solution to it before someone else did. Here
are the 5 Rules for Entrepreneurial Success.
1. Find a Need and Fill It
Human needs
and wants are unlimited. Therefore, the opportunities for
entrepreneurship and financial success are unlimited as well. The only
constraint on the business opportunities available to you are the limits
you place on your own imagination.
2. Find a Problem and Solve It
Wherever there
is a widespread and unsolved customer problem, there is an opportunity
for you to start and build a successful business.
Once upon a
time, before photocopies, the only way to type multiple copies of a
letter was with carbon paper placed between sheets of stationery. But a
single mistake would require the typist to go through and erase the
mistakes on every single copy. This was enormously clumsy and
time-consuming.
Then a
secretary working for a small company in Minneapolis began mixing flour
with nail varnish in order to "white out" the mistake she was making in
her typing. Soon, people in other offices began asking for it. The
demand became so great that she quit her job and began working full-time
manufacturing what she called “Liquid Paper.”
A few years later, the Gillette Corporation came along and bought her out for $47 million cash.
3. Unlimited Opportunities
There are
problems everywhere. Your job is to find one of these problems and solve
it better than it has been solved in the past. Find a problem that
everyone has and see if you can’t come up with a solution for it. Find a
way to supply a product or service better, cheaper, faster, or easier.
Use your imagination.
4. Focus on the Customer
The key to
success in business is to focus on the customer. Become obsessed with
your customer. Become fixated on your customer’s wants, needs, and
desires. Think of your customer all the time. Think of what your
customer is willing to pay for. Think about your customer’s problems.
See yourself as if you were working for your customer.
5. Bootstrap Your Way to Success
Once you have
come up with a problem or idea, resolve to invest your time, talent, and
energy instead of your money to get started. Most great personal
fortunes in the United States were started with an idea and with the
sale of personal services.
Most great
fortunes were started by people with no money, resources, or backing.
They were started by individuals who came up with an idea and who then
put their whole heart into producing a product or service that someone
else would buy.
Action Exercise
Look for
business opportunities everywhere, develop, an entrepreneurial mindset,
and continually be open and curious about the needs not satisfied and
problems not solved.
One idea is all you need to make your first million.
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