What does it really take to achieve entrepreneurial success?

From my experience as a business development consultant and entrepreneurial coach, I have seen two different schools of thought on this issue.

 

1.   It Takes WILL To Succeed As An Entrepreneur

The first school of thought believes that entrepreneurial success is a matter of determination –WILL.

The underlying assumption is this; if you are determined to succeed, you will succeed. This underlying assumption is built around the belief that the sheer doggedness of an entrepreneur largely contributes to their entrepreneurial success.

To this school of thought, success is achieved so long as you don’t give up. Entrepreneurial success follows this pattern; the longer you work, the harder you work and the tighter you hold on to your entrepreneurial dreams, success will be yours eventually.

 

 

2.   It Takes SKILLS To Succeed As An Entrepreneur

The second school of thought believes that entrepreneurial success is a matter of education –SKILL.

The underlying assumption is this; if you are committed to continuous learning, you will succeed. This underlying assumption is built around the belief that the extent to which an entrepreneur acquires relevant business skills, largely contributes to their entrepreneurial success.

To this school of thought, success is achieved so long as you keep improving your knowledge of business. Entrepreneurial success follows this pattern; the more you learn, the smarter you work and the clearer your entrepreneurial dreams become, then success will come!

Entrepreneurial Success: WILL or SKILL?

From my own story and from personal experiences; both the ‘will’ and the ‘skill’ matter when it comes to succeeding as an entrepreneur.

The will is what got you started on the entrepreneur’s journey in the first place. The will is the passion you carry that you want to translate into reality by building a business that matters. The greatest calamity that can befall any entrepreneur is thinking that passion and determination [will] alone is all you need to make your entrepreneurial dreams a reality.

Beyond passion, beyond determination is education [skill].

Your passion, your determination and motivation needs direction. And that’s where education comes in. No matter how passionate you are about your business, no matter how determined you are about success, nothing will happen until you begin to take informed actions.

And the only source of informed action is education.

Informed action is the difference between entrepreneurs who succeed and those who fail in business. Trying to pursue your entrepreneurial dreams with only passion, determination and motivation –WILL, is what I call; “doing business”–hustlepreneurship.

It’s very counterproductive. Why? Because it is a business powered by energy, rather than strategy. Your energy can only carry you so far, sooner or later; you will run out of energy. Then what happens?

Your energy [will] is limited. There’s only so much you can do alone. That’s why you need strategy

, to make sure that your energy is properly dispensed to achieve optimum results. The more you align your energy [will] with strategy

, the more entrepreneurial success you will achieve.

EXECUTE your WILL with a SKILL

 The will to prepare is the greatest secret to entrepreneurial success. The difference between entrepreneurs who dream and entrepreneurs who achieve their dreams is this; the willingness to prepare.

Your willingness to prepare, to acquire the relevant education, training, or information required to achieve your entrepreneurial dreams; is the secret to entrepreneurial success. Your will [energy] needs to be executed with a skill [strategy].

Without the right skill [strategy] to execute your will [energy], your entrepreneurial success is a gamble. You will keep trying and failing. Eventually, out of frustration or old age, you will give up the hustle.

It’s no use beating around the bush and hoping that your energy will carry you through. That’s the definition of entrepreneurial foolishness. As an entrepreneur, you need to be strategic in ALL that you do regarding your business.

And being strategic is all about alignment.

• You have to be CLEAR about where you are GOING –vision, goal, or objective.

• You have to be DELIBERATE about what you are DOING –execution, action or activities.

• You have to be KNOWLEDGABLE about how to DO it –education, information or training.

Conclusion

Entrepreneurial success is a double-sided equation of both willingness and skillfulness. You cannot succeed with only one side of the equation. Your willingness [energy] is the fuel for the journey and your skillfulness [strategy] is the map for the journey.

Without fuel [willingness], you’ll be stuck half-way and without a map [skillfulness], you’ll end up lost. In other words, you need business skills as well as a personal will to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurial Success = Willingness [energy] + Skillfulness [strategy]

 What’s the one thing that gives an entrepreneur the unfair advantage over others?

 

Time freedom.

The fact that you own 100% of your time is your greatest advantage as an entrepreneur.

While others have to give up their time in exchange for salary, entrepreneurs make use of their time to create products/services that makes them money. I’ve previously written about this; how entrepreneurs create wealth in their spare time.

For an employee, there’s a limit to their income potential because there’s a limit on their working hours. For an entrepreneur, you own and determine your working hours and also get to choose the activities to devote your time to.

However, knowing that you have this advantage is not going to automatically make you a successful entrepreneur. Having 100% ownership of your time is only the beginning, a greater part of success depends on how well you make use of this time and on what activities you engage in with this time freedom.

So what are those critical areas you absolutely need to be focusing the bulk of your time freedom on as an entrepreneur?

The Key To Unlocking The Entrepreneurial Advantage

I partially answered this question in a previous post about how entrepreneurs should be spending their time. I identified 5 highly effective activities that you can focus on as an entrepreneur; I referred to them as the 5Cs of time management for entrepreneurs.

So in a way, this is a follow up post to that article as I will be sharing 9 key drivers of business according to Jay Abraham that you need to devote your time on regularly.

But before we dive into these 9 key drivers of business, I want to quickly talk about the key to unlocking the entrepreneurial advantage in your business.

The key to unlocking the entrepreneurial advantage of time freedom is to focus it on building your business rather than doing business.

This distinction is very crucial and needs to be clarified, if you spend all of your time freedom doing business, you will eventually end up as a worn out self employee. Your business will further entrap you instead of freeing you. The bigger it grows, the tighter its grip on your time and eventually your life if you failed to focus on building rather than doing.

Here’s a previous post that sheds more light on the need to build rather than do business; the paradox of business. You should read it!

 

Jay Abraham’s 9 Drivers of Business for Unlocking The Entrepreneurial Advantage

There are obviously a million things you should be focusing on as an entrepreneur, but not all of them will give you high return on time invested. But the following 9 areas have been tested and have been found to generate the highest possible leverage for your business by one of the greatest business minds alive; Jay Abraham.

While these 9 drivers of business may not be foreign concepts to you, the underlying mindset here is to spend your time freedom on continually improving and fine tuning them. The keyword is improvement. This is essentially the crucial difference between building a business and just doing business.

Click here to download the full ebook for free!

1). Marketing

This is your number one priority as an entrepreneur because until you can consistently find, attract, convert and retain a profitable customer, you are not yet in business. You knew that already right?

But here’s the winning difference according to Jay Abraham;

“…if you can get people who were selling 1 out of 7 prospects to sell 1 out of 3. The sales leverage available to you is profound. If you can get sales letters that were pulling 0.5% to pull 4%…if you can people who were buying $250 to now buy $400…if you can get people who were buying once a year to buy once a quarter or once a month…if you can get people who weren’t referring anyone to you to start referring five new customers each a year…the combined effect of that kind of marketing leverage is exponential growth.

That’s exactly how you increase your business, your revenue, your sales, your profits, your wealth, and your net worth by factors of ten times or more. That really is.”

But how do you improve on your marketing to unlock this unfair advantage in your business?

Again, according to Jay Abraham, the answer is pretty simple;

“First thing you do is you do an internal marketing audit and inventory. You identify all the marketing activities, processes, and elements going on and then you start looking at the best performing ways to improve upon it. How do you find them?

There are three approaches:

• Look within your organization and see who else does what you want to do better. Model, codify and replicate the highest performing people in your company doing various selling or marketing processes. And get everyone else in the organization to start applying it or adding its best elements to their previous method.

• Go outside your company. Look at other enterprises in the same field outside your market (or even in your market) that have better ways of marketing, of selling, of lead generating, of conversion, of re-selling and of up-selling¾and borrow their success processes.

• Go outside your industry, to related industries, and look at their best practices. Look at the spectrum of opportunities out there that other people have found, uncovered, discovered, refined and are using each and every day with massive success¾to either identify prospects, sell direct, run ads that pull great response, make better sales presentations, get appointments, or attract people to trade shows.

Then borrow, adapt, adopt, and directly funnel and apply those processes and approaches to your business and start doing this exercise as a regular on-going process in which you measure, monitor, analyze, quantify and figure out how many different things you can add to your current success approach by either adding new additional elements or replacing the underperforming ones that are not justifying their time, their effort, their opportunity cost or their existence.”

2). Strategy

Marketing without strategy, according to small business guru, John Jantsch of Duct Tape marketing, is the noise before failure.

Here’s how Jay Abraham defined it;

“Strategy is the master purpose your business is all about. It’s different than your business model. Strategy is literally the explanation of the entire operating approach your business is following and why and how every element of it integrates, advances and deploys the big picture outcome that you’re after.”

 

But how do you improve on your strategy to unlock this unfair advantage in your business?

Jay Abraham identified 3 key steps you need to take;

“1.) The first thing is by understanding that you do have strategy you are currently following even if it’s a reactive one. You’ve got to adopt, first and foremost, a proactive long-term strategy.

2.) You’ve got to figure out what it is you’re trying to do, accomplish, build and sustain with your business.

3.) You’ve got to figure what big operating approach will get you the greatest outcome you want in the fastest period of time on the most sustaining and enduring basis. Once you figure that out then you’ve got to think through your tactics.

These are the actions or vehicles that help deliver the strategic result you’re after. What actions, what activities, what concepts, what approaches will deploy your “big picture” strategy best. Meaning what are the best moves and maneuvers to achieve the big outcome you are after.”

For more tips on strategic marketing, read this unusual article; The Idiot’s Guide To Strategic Marketing.

3). Capital

I’m sure the first thing that came into your mind as soon as you saw capital was money, right? Well you are half right, but that’s not the only capital we are referring to here.

According to Jay Abraham; capital also includes your human capital, your intellectual capital, and yes, your financial capital.

• Human Capital:

These are basically the people working for you. If you can get everybody performing higher you’ve got incredible leverage. How do you do it?

Training.

Every dollar you spend in training will produce 20-200 times return annually in yield. So, do you train your people? If so how often or frequently?

• Intellectual Capital:

This is one of the hardest things for any competition to copy in business. It refers to the sum of all the knowledge, skill, talent and experiences of all the people in your company. So what do you all have between your ears?

• Financial Capital:

Are you questioning the yield you’re getting on the money you’re spending¾on the people you’re paying (both staff or contract services), on your marketing expenditures, inventory and technical services? It all ties in.

It’s your responsibility to question the capital expenditures you’re making and the ROI (Return on Investment), the ROE (Return on Effort), the ROP (Return on People), the ROA (Return on Activity), and the ROO (Return on Opportunity).

4). Business model

The business model is different from strategy. It’s basically the means you’re using to affect or achieve your strategy. It’s different than tactics. The model is the whole integrated approach.

The business model you follow can make all the difference in your profitability and there’s enormous leverage here because you can change one element and it could change everything.

Here’s an example by Jay Abraham;

“Let’s say that your business, basically, is a one-shot business. And your business model is you advertise or direct mail market to get leads. You convert them to a one-time sale. You do nothing else with them after they buy or even if they didn’t buy and that’s your business model.

Well, if you added one more dimension to it, after the people that didn’t buy from you and you figured out how to do something else with them for other products and services that are complementary to the need they came to you originally to help them solve or fill. And for the people that do buy, you figure out how to sell them other people’s products or services afterwards. You’ve just added two new dimensions, elements, or layers to your business model and that simple shift in thinking could triple or quadruple your profit.”

5). Relationships

As an entrepreneur, time spent developing your professional network is a huge opportunity for potential growth.

According to Jay Abraham, these are the different sources of relationships available to entrepreneurs;

• Business Relationships: people you met during the course of doing business; clients, suppliers, employees, partners, etc.

• Professional Relationships: people in the same field as yourself; colleagues,

• Collegial Relationships: people you attended school with; course mates, school mates, etc.

• Mastermind Relationships: brilliant minds, mentors, business coaches, fellow entrepreneurs, you brainstorm together.

So what do you do with these relationships?

Jay Abraham says;

“If I were you and I had relationships in any kind of other business in any field of endeavor, I’d tap into it regularly. Anybody who, knowingly or otherwise, could be a vessel for you to gain greater expanded understanding or hone in on better performing approaches, strategies, etc., I would first and foremost start picking their minds.

I’d ask them questions. I’d tell them your problems. I’d tell them your goals. I’d ask them questions of whatever their area of skill was, what the highest performing thing they did to accept or solve the issue or objective you’re intent in learning about, what was the secret to be successful at it, what they saw, find out what their company or their employer or their industry did best that you don’t do well and learn how to improve from the discussion.

I’d ask them a myriad of questions that would expand my knowledge base proficiency and perspective. I’d write them down. I would record them. I’d add it all to my current operating system. I would keep borrowing the success processes I learned from these activities, from all kinds of different people I know, and apply them to my business opportunities or challenges.”

 

6). Distribution channels

These are the various means through which your products/services get into the hands of your target customers.

According to Jay Abraham;

“You have a number of unrecognized distribution channels you don’t fully maximize and there’s enormous leverage in them. For example, let’s say that you distribute your product through five hundred retailers. Well, that is a distribution outlet for all kinds of other products.”

By spending more time to maximize the value of your distribution channels, you open up your business for more growth. For example, if you are a retailer with a physical outlet and you decide to take your business online through eCommerce, your capacity to sell to more customers will be significantly maximized.

There are basically two ways of leveraging your distribution channels;

• Increase your distribution channels: this is quite obvious, just like the example above. If you have only one distribution channel, adding more will increase your company’s capacity to grow.

• Offer more products through your existing distribution channels: this is less obvious, and if well executed can increase your company’s growth potential with less investment on your part. Here’s a fantastic case study from Jay Abraham;

“We had a company that had two products in the athletic clothing field. They were doing about $2 million and making half a million in profit. They came to me because their products were starting to slow down. They wanted me to give them a breakthrough idea. I looked at their business and I saw that their real assets weren’t their two products. They had accounts with 5,000 retailers. Amongst them all were Nordstrom’s, K-Mart, Target, JC Penney and Parkway and Hosiery.

I showed them that all they had to do was secure the rights to other people’s athletic products then give those people a royalty for their clothes design, start having those products manufactured for my client, put their licensed products through the same distribution pipeline and they’d make ten times as much selling these other products through their distribution channel as they did from their main products. They did it and I was right. They made a fortune.”

7). Products and services

How many other places could you take your existing product, service or combinations or variations of them and apply it to other fields or other regions or buying groups. Or could you license other people to use it?

Could you package it in different ways sizes or combinations? Could you package other people’s things with it? Could you package your products or processes and make that a product or service? How many new products or services could you come out with that are your natural extensions, embellishments, top of the line premium versions, higher performing versions, or stripped down white label versions? Just by adding one or two or five different components you can create an entire new product and penetrate new market niches.

8). System

Every business mechanism can be broken down into its driving processes and sub processes. Once you figure out what the processes driving an activity are, they can be measured, they can be quantified, and they can be vastly improved.

When you figure out how your given processes currently perform, (which is nothing more than a function of analysis, monitoring and measurement), you can then find other people in your organization or other people in your industry or other people doing the same function outside the industry who are doing it much better, faster, easier, safer, more productive, more effective, more profitably. Then simply adopt it to your business.

9). Ideology

If you’re very introspective and you’re anti-social, you’re not going to be able to go and build mastermind groups and pick people’s minds and borrow success processes. If your ideology is: You only like what you like; you’re not going to be able to travel outside your comfort zone and study other people, other business philosophies, other mindsets, other ideologies.

You’ve got to figure out what your ideology is, what your belief system is, what your whole value system is and how it either helps or hampers your current business activities. Then it needs to either be strengthened and fortified and connected to and or replaced, based on your current business model and your strategy.

You also need to study other people’s ideology to compare how yours is better, different or worse and what elements of other’s you can borrow and add and what elements of yours you could teach to others. When you do that, you’re going to expand your capability and your sense of what’s possible.

Conclusion

The entrepreneurial advantage is time freedom and the key to unlocking it is focusing on building rather than doing business. We’ve identified 9 key drivers of business according to Jay Abraham that can help you fully maximize the entrepreneurial advantage of time freedom at your disposal.

The nine drivers discussed above are excerpts from Jay Abraham’s ebook, you can download the full version here.