What I learnt in 3.5 years of being an entrepreneur

Exude passion For your service/product/experience For your customer For your employees For your community People, including leads, prospects and clients respond to passion. USE IT! YOU ARE THE GREATEST... Now all you have to do is prove it to the world. Be disciplined When I worked for other people, I used to be a guy who worked hard, but needed extenal motivation to get things done. A deadline.. A boss who checked up on me.. A client visit.. Sometimes I even goofed off on the job - the internet, email, coffee, chats with colleagues, etc. Needless to say, things got done "on time", but could have been done faster. But that changed (slowly) when I started my own business. I needed to get things done on my own. I was master of my time, but I had no clue of how to use it. Time was really money (my money!) The first thing I did was to start using the calendar program in my computer to put down deadlines - both at home and at work. I also included a reminder for each deadline one day in advance. That worked sort of - until I started making mistakes in estimating the time it took to get things done. Now I still use the calendar method, but I simply double the time I estimate to take care of external influences on the work. If I finish ahead of that schedule on one particular task, I can always start on the next task. This way, I just about manage to finish the entire project on time.. Underpromise and overdeliver I learnt this from my first bosses at a division of Emerson Electric in India. Incredibly useful advice I got. Now, for e.g., I promise a profitability increase of 5 - 10% to my customers, but my actual results are much more than that.. Which definitely is overdelivering on commitments. That is a sure first step to a follow on contract. A caveat on underpromising - don't underpromise below that of your competitors! If you do that, you won't get a chance to deliver.. This is a sad fact of consulting. A hell of a lot of customers when accepting bids from various consultants, believe the number promised. Consultants are good salesmen you know, and they tend to be able to provide good reasons for the numbers they show. Make sure you're selling unique stuff When I started my consulting business, I had a client, and I worked all hours for that client. When that contract ended, I came outside and tried to resell that work.. Well, there were a lot of barriers there. 1) It was too diffuse - product management. 2) It was too strategic - folks tend to keep strategic things in-house 3) It was difficult to explain in a short while While I struggled gamely, I met a guy in a networking event. I offered him my business card and said I work in bladibladibladibladibla. He took my business card and said

"Arun, you're saying that you work in 4 things. Which of these do you do best? could you rank these 4 out for me?" He added then "Always sell what you're doing best 'first' to a prospective client. If you get a contract and do well, you can cross sell the other stuff later on".

BIG insight into sales and business - You need to focus In another networking event, I met another guy who told me -

"Arun, you're a good consultant. But what you're doing is already being done! Where are you adding value? Make the Value add your practice.. that's how you create something unique"

BIG insight into business - Your value addition is your uniqueness. Build everything around that. Two amazing insights from two guys who probably will never meet me again. But a lesson was taught, and I hope well learnt. Focus only on what you can influence. Don't worry about the rest There are way too many things that can go wrong in life and in business. You need to analyse each of them and ask yourself : Do I have any influence on this? If you don't, don't work on it. Either find someone who does have influence on it, or else just forget about it, and leave it to chance (or God, if you're a little religious) A hell of a lot of things went wrong in my business and my life, but I'm still here! Always have a sense of humor, especially on bad days Shit happens, all the time everywhere. You're not immune. You could look at the past week and say - I actually accomplished nothing! My proposals have 'all' been put on the backburner, because of internal problems at my clients. Two scenarios: A] Depression hits. People who are near and dear tend to get it, and be equally depressed. If they try to pull you out of it, you snap and yell at them. Nothing is still accomplished, but you managed to project your frustration on someone else who definitely didn't deserve it. Remember, even prospective clients can smell if someone is depressed, needy etc etc.. :-)) B] Depression hits. You decide that there's nothing you can do about last week. Best forgotten. However you can do something about next week and you make a plan. People turn up, and you focus on what's making them happy. Try to bring that happiness to your day, and have a sense of humor about it all.. "Man I should fire myself for last week" would be a good way to start .. (Ok.. it's 11 at night, and my humor is waning. If you find this funny we should talk :-)) Know enough of what the others on your team are doing so that you understand it People around you - at client sites, or in your team do stuff. The most common way of team management is "hire stars with trackrecords" and then delegate properly, and follow up. In this manner one hopes that everything will be all right, and one's project management skills will finesse the way to success. It could work, but usually doesn't. What does work is that you discuss with every team member 1) what they are going to do (in great detail) 2) how they're going to do it (in some intermediate level of detail) 3) why they're going to do it (in basic detail) Doing this does two things a) It clarifies misunderstandings and miscommunications (a common problem in project failure or delay) b) It improves your knowledge of other ancillary areas, so that the next project you're better prepared. c) It helps you sell your services better since you get a (wellfounded) reputation of knowing what you are going to do and the outcomes that can be achieved. AT THE END ALL YOU SELL IS BELIEVABILITY.. Rigorously recruit mentors I've always learnt something from everyone I met. In this spirit, If I meet someone I think is better than me at something, I ask him about my problem, and I get an opinion. People love to teach - even busy people. You may have to meet up at another time to discuss stuff, but even then, it's still worth it. Usually you'll hear the same thing over. But there'll always be a twist in what's being told. And you're learning from that twist. Mentors are also great references for future projects and a possible source of leads. Don't ever neglect marketing I made this mistake. Bigtime. When you get a project, you try your utmost to deliver tremendously to the client - and you do (you hope) The thing is - working so hard sucks up all your time, leaving you no time to go out and get new contracts. Which means that when you finish this project, you need to go out and market yourself again. That's incredibly tough. You're out of mind of most of your prospects. It's like starting a business all over again. Don't make this mistake. Always budget at least one day a week for marketing. Keep it flexible, so that if you need to visit a prospect on another day, you can do it. You can always catch up on the work later. But communicate this to everyone waiting for you to do work for them. Since this is not a post on marketing, I'm not going to go into that subject. But feel free to contact me if you want ideas. Count your pennies This is a simple way of saying "Watch your cashflow". Remember to invoice your clients properly. Read your contract and the "terms of payment of your client" to see at what time you can get paid. Plan your own payments accordingly. You don't have to be someone who pays in advance. Pay on the last date possible. Again there is a lot of software out there that can help you do all this. Take advantage of it. Don't treat your company like a piggybank. The company is a person. Taking money from the company for fun stuff is kinda wrong. The best thing would be to take a fixed minimum amount out of your company bank account for your personal expenses. Fit your expenses into this amount.