Growing An Entrepreneurial Mindset: How To Start Thinking Like A Real EntrepreneurAn entrepreneurial mindset is a set of skills that enables you to identify and make the most out of your opportunities. It helps you overcome and learn from setbacks and succeed in a variety of settings.
In my FastLeader show interview with Kent Billingsley, I discussed Developing An Entrepreneurial Mindset: How To Think Like A Real Entrepreneur.
You need to develop this entrepreneurial mindset to build a highly profitable, fast-growth company. Especially living in this fast-paced world that we are in now. Thinking creatively is a necessary must-have skill.
How can you begin to develop this skill? This article will discuss some of the most important points raised in my podcast episode with Kent Billingsley.
What Is An Entrepreneur?
An entrepreneur is really kind of a title or a role or maybe a tag. The real behavior is what separates the successful ones, and it’s the entrepreneurial mindset.
In my B2B Digital Marketer podcast, I interviewed on Writing Your Book To Establish Authority. It uncovered how publishing builds a name for the entrepreneur and his brand.
Tim Ferris once said, “An entrepreneur isn’t someone who owns a business. It’s someone who makes things happen.”
Anyone can own a business. Only a few can be successful at it.
Being An Entrepreneur Versus Being Entrepreneurial
I don’t care what your role in a company is. You’ve got to be entrepreneurial. An entrepreneur is a smart risk-taker and problem solver.
Creative problem solving is key. You have to know how to solve problems without spending money, burning through people, or abusing your own health.
What makes others so successful that they generate millions of dollars so much faster? It’s because they are truly entrepreneurial.
Take educated and calculated risks. Understand the risks, their scope, mitigation measures of and the risk prevention strategies.
You’ve got to be a thirsty learner forever. Not somebody that reads or takes notes or goes to seminars. Be a person that’s trying to absorb concepts, gain insights, and take action.
Entrepreneurial Mindset And The Problem Solving Attribute
A small business owner looks at a problem, sees a company doing it, and says I can do that better. When these skills have not been built, 22.5% of small businesses fail within the first year. (Office of Advocacy) An entrepreneur looks at the problem and says I can do that differently.
For me, what separates somebody from the rest that fails is how they see the world.
Whether you’re a leader or employee, you should possess an entrepreneurial mindset. So choose to separate yourself from the losers.
Be a contributor to a culture that believes in the philosophy of setting everyone up for success.
Why Is The Model of Business Today Flawed?
The flaw was that the whole philosophy was more for more. To grow bigger, faster, and to grow more revenue. The idea was to hire more, work more and add more products. Do more marketing and more training.
To get more, we had to add more. That’s the flaw that was there 25 years ago.
Harvard Business Review found out that “less successful retailers had continued to chase growth by opening new stores far past the point of diminishing returns. By contrast, the more successful retailers had drastically curtailed expansion and instead relied on operational improvements at their existing stores to drive additional sales.”
And it’s even worse today when you try to add too many of the good things. Add more revenue, you add more profit, and the consequence you need to avoid is adding a lot of the bad things. This is because you’re probably creating more costs.
I discovered there are ways to generate many good things without adding the bad things.
Entrepreneurial Mindset: Effects On Revenue Growth
This is where you’re scaling revenue against an asset. Avoid losing customers through the back door while chasing new ones at the front door.
It costs more to get new customers. According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
By keeping customers and making sure they don’t leave, I don’t have to turn on more marketing and sales. Basically, I don’t have to spend money to make money.
That’s really the premise of focusing on revenue growth. Generate more from what you already have.
That’s how you generate higher margins. If you want to succeed as fast as possible, stop trying to grow your business hastily. Learn how to create wealth by generating more from less. Instead of doing more with less.
It’s not just about adding and adding. Maximize all the sales without adding more resources.
Twenty-two Change Resistance Issues
Leaders can be barriers and roadblocks to success. I cover this extensively on the Fast Leader Show and in Call Center Coach Leadership Academy.
I have taken a great deal of time developing concepts in the course, drawing from my personal experiences of failing and succeeding.
I realized that most people are afraid of failing in coaching leaders, so they do not change.
Most people think that the change resistance issues are big on the outside or someone else’s problem. Actually, they’re bigger on the inside—your inside (mine too).
The greatest one of all, what kills most sales careers, what kills most companies is they’ve had success doing it the old way. It creates a bias. Most leaders are living off the paradigms from the end of the last century coming into this century.
A lot of the paradigms worked. E.g., aggressive marketing. That was a wonderful best practice in the 1960s.
Today, if you’re aggressively marketing, you’re making so many mistakes. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it is.
First of all, you’ve got to learn how to create demand today. And you’ve got to leverage your whole enterprise doing it. And number three, the marketplace doesn’t care about you and your services. They only care about the impact.
So you’ve made three major mistakes right there.
Blueprinting Optimization
“Companies with dynamic, adaptable sales and marketing processes report an average 10% more of their salespeople meet their quotas compared to other companies.” (CSO Insights)
It’s about consistently transforming your business to stay ahead of the curve. That’s the reason for being. That’s the reason it comes into existence.
However, literally, every Fundamental Marketplace Problem (FMP) evolves, changes, or goes away. How does your business take down the Goliath or the dominoes? It’s about solving the problem in the way the market wants it today.
You have to build that into your model forever. Because FMP’s evolve, they come back in different fashions.
When the industry becomes overwhelmed with the competition, you need to roll out other products. Enhance your product line. Evolve by continuously tracking the market.
Look at the marketplace and start to predict where it’s going. Don’t get satisfied and lazy.
You have to evolve because the market will leave you.
Entrepreneurial Mindset: Relationship With The Fundamental Marketplace Problem (FMP)
67% of sales and marketing costs and expenses are a total waste of resources and time. And it may actually be damaging your brand.
Therefore, two-thirds of what you’re doing or spending on sales and marketing is not going anywhere.
Unproductive communication costs employers roughly $26,041 per employee on an annual basis. (Grossman Group, 2015)
The problem is you’re not connecting with why anyone should care. Your whole reason for needing to be anchored or tethered to something that people really care about.
FMP is something in the marketplace people care about that is either broken or is underserved. It’s your opportunity.
There are More FMP prompts today than ever. The trick is how you frame it.
Ask yourself if it’s a want or a need. People will pay you to fix what they need.
You’ve got to work through the process and build a unique model to solve it differently than anybody else. Then focus on how to make money doing it.
According to Forbes, 83% of companies believe it’s important to make customers happy and experience growing revenue. Is this a want or a need?
The entrepreneur has the seed and the idea. Think of the FMP as the soil. It takes both the soil and the seed and then the nurturing to bring it to life and grow and scale it.
That’s where you unlock wealth because you have a serious value proposition. FMPs need to be part of your value proposition.
FMPs should result in better products and opportunities to get more revenue share. Meet the market where it is today.
Talent Optimization
It would be best if you had talent at all employee levels. Talent is about being able to get things done and making it look easier.
The misguided definition is that they are Maverick. However, that is rather prima donna thinking.
Talent wants to work within a team construct. They want to be part of the system. And they do want to be optimized.
They want to be put in systems where they can flourish and grow—organizations where they can show their worth.
Finding Talent
In the words of Katrine Switzer, “Talent is everywhere. It only needs the opportunity. You have to know how to attract people. Create a system where the talent wants to come work for you.”
Talent is never available. Talent always has a job. You have to go either pick them off or steal them. That is how you dominate the marketplace.
Conclusion
To be entrepreneurial is to own the market. Know customer needs better than you know yourself and constantly blueprint improved optimization methods together to solve them.
You have to get to a point where your competitors don’t show up to your bids or presentations. You can stop discounting but still win many times more.
To further develop an entrepreneurial mindset, read the book Entrepreneur To Millionaire: How to Build a Highly Profitable, Fast-Growth Company and Become Embarrassingly Rich Doing It.
Watch My Interview With Kent Billingsley On Developing An Entrepreneurial Mindset
Please Comment
- What is the difference between an entrepreneur and being entrepreneurial?
- What are the benefits of an entrepreneurial mindset?
- How can you overcome change resistance issues?
