LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman once famously remarked, “An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.” His observation perfectly encapsulates the raw ambition and learning that is required in every entrepreneurial journey. The hallmark of an entrepreneur is the ability to seize an opportunity for change. Regardless of success, any attempt to drive change at scale offers a lifetime of lessons.
I started my entrepreneurial journey around 10 years back. A combination of native faith, freedom from dependencies and a strong desire for entrepreneurship helped me start early. I would like to share five lessons that I have learnt as an entrepreneur over time:
Prioritise ruthlessly
It is necessary to plan each week in advance and sort out your priorities. If you’re not prioritising, you risk spreading yourself too thin, with little progress to show ultimately. Consistent progress demands ruthless prioritisation. You may come up with a hundred good ideas, but only a few may stand out. Prioritisation should be more than a mere cosmetic exercise. It must be a consistent discipline where you and your team actively take time out to periodically review the importance of each task on your list.
Also, an entrepreneur’s priorities should evolve with different stages of business. Early-stage entrepreneurs need to focus on developing a solution to a real problem, using the minimum resources possible. At the next-stage one must focus on measuring, and sustaining customer satisfaction with a product or service, i.e. a product-market fit. At a later stage, one needs to focus on growth, profitability, and sustainability. Depending on which stage you’re at, it helps to identify a few goals and prioritise them.
Build a culture of diversity, trust, and strong communication
Diversity is the staple that makes a great team. It’s being talked about a lot but I have experienced first-hand that bringing together different perspectives in a room, be it different genders, experience levels, domains, and industries, helps improve decision making. Good entrepreneurs recognise the value in diversity and choose to leverage it to their advantage.
Also, as a startup grows, it organises itself into different functional teams and each team tends to develop its own priorities. With this being the case, it can become difficult sometimes when different teams work together since each one may value its priorities over the others. But a common set of goals regularly communicated by the founder can help these different teams function well together. Additionally, it is of paramount importance that a founder makes time to engage with team members regularly. This goes a long way in fostering a sense of belonging. A founder’s daily checklist should not impact his responsibility of leading a team.
Seek the help you need
An entrepreneur wears many hats. Be it product development, sales, marketing, HR or fundraising, you need to develop all functions of your business to make progress. You can hire professionals to fill these roles, but no matter how talented your team, it may not always be possible to solve every challenge internally in a fast-growing startup. At times you may not even have the resources to hire more talent to help you. On these occasions, it helps to look outside for guidance. It always helps to do your homework and familiarise yourself with the problem at hand before you approach potential advisors. Once you’ve received their advice, you need to do some more work in order to efficiently implement the solution internally.
Engage with your customer
No matter how busy you get as your startup scales, and no matter how much you think you already understand, your customer is always changing and it is vital to keep engaging with them at every stage. As an entrepreneur, you understand your business in a way that your team can’t, since you have access to the entire spectrum of your company’s operations on a daily basis. In addition to keeping a tab on the company’s operations, it is crucial to keep grasp of your customer’s evolving needs and his or her experience of your product or service.
For a long time I was investing most of my time in building teams, product development and scaling operations without regular interaction with the customers. But over time we realized that a lot of time our efforts don’t match the outcome and that is because we were losing our customer focus. Since then I have made it a point that we would meet with our customers regularly and it has helped us immensely in the decision making. Successful enterprises know that customer is king. A good case in point here is Amazon and its subsidiaries like AWS, which don’t compromise on their customer focus even after being the biggest in their respective domains.
Keep learning
Change is the only constant when it comes to business. As an entrepreneur, you need to stay curious to the core and always keep learning to find better ways of doing things. The startup journey is a story of growth for both the founder and the team. As an entrepreneur, you must also invest strongly in nurturing your team’s skillset since growth is a factor they strongly seek.
Learning is important, and the best learning happens through failure. Failure is inevitable in any startup journey and it is important to develop a positive attitude towards it for you to eventually succeed. Failures are good, but only if you learn from them and move forward. It could be a flop product idea, bad hiring, poor marketing strategy, tracking wrong metrics or an unsuccessful partnership, if you are willing to learn from these failures then they would make you a better entrepreneur over time.
I have been extremely fortunate to have learnt these lessons during my entrepreneurial career. But I also know that I have only scratched the surface of my learning. Yesterday’s lessons are only the seeds of tomorrow, and I certainly hope to add to this list in the future.
Author’s Bio: Shalabh Singhal has more than 10 years of experience across Finance, Technology, Sales and building startups. He is the Managing Director of ZipLoan, a fintech NBFC incorporated in 2015 with a mission to provide Indian MSMEs easy access to credit.
He previously founded Credence, a CRM(Client Relationship Management) product company serving clients in Education, Finance, Hospitality, Health care and Real Estate sector.He started his career with Goldman Sachs, New York. During his stint with Goldman Sachs he built financial products for Goldman’s Institutional clients like GE and IBM. He completed his graduation in Electrical Engineering from IIT-BHU where he was among the top 10 rank holders. Shalabh is a CFA(USA) Charterholder and part of the Indian Association of Investment Professionals.
