Three Basics an Entrepreneur must not forget .

There may be very many areas that an entrepreneur must be good at. However in my stint as a coach with entrepreneurs & business people , I have noticed that there are few areas where the successful one certainly do better than those which are not as much successful. So what are those areas ?

In my opinion, there are three areas & these can be called basics, which an entrepreneur must be aware of and work consciously building them in to his way of doing business.

1. Successful entrepreneurs understand that making money and profits are functions of business. They focus instead on identifying the purpose of business. Essentially they create a vision for their business organization. One entrepreneur whom I am coaching, after almost a year of assignment signed me again recently. This time while creating goals, he defined his vision as “Creating 100 entrepreneurs”. Research has shown that people work with you and stay with you longer when they know your purpose and buy into it. Imagine the motivation of the person who works with my client when he realizes that his principal / employer is interested in his success.

Perhaps entrepreneurs need to answer the question “What is the core purpose of my business?” Each Entrepreneur who grows and achieves success has clearly a defined purpose and if one has not achieved desired level and quality of success, perhaps need to ponder on whether the purpose was defined well, shared & lived.

2. Entrepreneurs need to answer a question “How much salary will you pay to a person who does the role I am doing in my business”. If the answer suggests an amount which is lower than what you earn and take home, there are very high chances that you are an employee in your own business. You have a “job in your business”.

Successful entrepreneurs by any standards are always working on their business and not in their business. Working on the business allows the entrepreneur to start building new businesses too.

3. Entrepreneurs are always busy. They are chasing things all the time. They are making things happen. Let us face it there is always the issue of work life balance an entrepreneur is challenged with. The defined purpose of business and working on business is the key to achieve a work life balance for an entrepreneur. In one of my coaching session on “time mastery “with a Founder/Entrepreneur, I asked “what is value of one hour in rupee terms”. He thought, calculated and stated a magnanimous amount.

Then I asked him “What all do you do in a day which fetches a value substantially lower than the amount you mentioned”. He smiled and understood but what he said later was interesting. He shared that by stopping doing those activities, he could easily save 2 hours each day. This time could either be put to “working on business” or pursuing some interests like walking in mornings, reading and learning to play musical instruments.

This client did few simple things; Hired a secretary – This saved him tons of time as the secretary would screen and redirect unconnected calls to other employees, saved him time in managing logistics of travel.

Peter Drucker says “We all tell leaders to start doing new things of things differently but we never tell them to stop doing certain things”

Please write down 10 things that you will either stop doing completely and / or delegate to others. The trick is to understand value creation out of your time and if it does not it must be stopped or at best delegated. These things will help you save at least 1-2 hours each day, could be more. Imagine value of this time. Go out now and do what you wish to do but never got down to doing it.

Remember when things go wrong, it is said, go back to basics. Ironically basics are what we forget easily and soon.

So let us begin with writing down the purpose of your business.