Questions That Create Entrepreneurial Success
Published February 16, 2012 | 
Always Remember, that it’s Our Choices, not Chances that Decide our Destiny.
Truly successful entrepreneurs develop early on, the unique skill of incredible focus on the things that really matter. Let’s examine a few questions that you can ask yourself on a daily basis to develop, sharpen, and maintain the high-level of focus that’s so critical to navigating your journey on the road to success.
First of all, do you consider success means making lots of money? If you do, then you may want to think again.
Let’s face the fact that simple pictures of dead presidents (i.e. money etc.) have never really made anybody truly happy. And success without happiness is not, well, success. So, someone buying a lot of things and spending a lot of money may be good for a moment, but only a moment. For instance, a brand new car may really keep you pumped with emotion for a day, a week or two, and even a month, but the pride of ownership is short-term and transitory to the continuous search for the illusive moments of being happy.
Real entrepreneurial success comes from the quality of relationships entrepreneurs have and the real emotions that they experience each and every day. 
Let’s look closely at questions you need to strongly consider asking at the end of each day, and you can be guaranteed that you’ll become more successful. Ready? Here are the questions and they all start with “Have I…”
- Made absolutely sure that those I love feel loved?
- Done something to improve the world today?
- Spent time conditioning my body for more strength, flexibility and resiliency?
- Reviewed, sharpened, and improve my plans for the future?
- Maintained the same high-level of integrity whether in private or the public eye?
- Avoided unkind words and actions of a strong and lasting negative nature?
- Been able to accomplish something meaningful and worthwhile?
- Provided help to somebody in less fortunate circumstances?
- Created any valuable moments that make up future wonderful memories and recollections?
- Felt really thankful for the tremendous gift of just being alive?
Here’s the real heart of the matter. Questions that you ask yourself on a daily basis contribute to your level of focus, and the strength of your focus directly shapes and influences the results of what you do.
Simple questions like these compel you to focus on the things that are really important in your life. Learn them, pay attention to of them, use them, and the rest of your life, especially your work and your business will quickly create a place where success becomes the destiny you control. And by doing so, you will be able to both visualize and navigate a straighter path as you journey on “your road to success.”
Average Entrepreneurs Fail
Published February 14, 2012 | 
You should always watch, listen, learn, and do. Remember that there’s no way you can know everything yourself, and anyone who thinks they do is inevitably headed for the weakness of mediocrity, and failure.
Let’s face it. When it comes to business, the actual truth is that most entrepreneurs fail. And in fact, what is considered a model entrepreneur is, if truth be told, the most likely to fail. So, “Who are the winning entrepreneurs?” Those enterprising creators, who conceive, establish and build businesses with enduring staying power, which seems to go way beyond average.
Upon closer examination, the average entrepreneur seems to fall short of accomplishing the things that make entrepreneurs successful. And of course this contributes to a much higher rate of failure. On the average, entrepreneurs:
Start small and with very little capital even though start-ups that begin with significant funds and a larger staff are the most likely to survive.
Start their businesses as sole proprietorships and remain so, even though incorporated businesses have a higher success rate.
Start as part-time ventures, while entrepreneurs investing their full-time efforts into the business have higher survival rates.
Start their businesses from scratch, but entrepreneurs that purchase their businesses from someone else have higher survival rates.
Never write a business plan even though writing a business plan predicts the likelihood of gaining future capital investment.
Start businesses that intend to serve the same clientele as served by their former employer, but the most successful entrepreneurs are those who differentiate and find an ignored customer base.
Start businesses in industries with the lowest success rate, and the one that comes to mind first for most people is the restaurant industry. Restaurants have so many factors that by themselves guarantee certain failure (i.e. location, insufficient capital, etc.), it’s amazing that so many people still think they will be the exception and become a great success.
They don’t get things right in their initial stages of formation. “It gets easier over time.” Start-ups’ rate of failure declines and their profitability increases the longer the business has been around. In other words, the market appears to sort out good businesses from bad early in the business life-course.
So the lesson to be learned is that your average entrepreneur is not very strategic or well prepared to enter the market. As a result the average entrepreneur fails and the entrepreneur that sticks in our mind is the successful, not-so-average Bill Gates-type. 
Is Bill Gates representative of most entrepreneurs? Of course not, but that’s probably why he survived!
It’s hard to tell if entrepreneurs that start off with good resources and infrastructure survive because of this early endowment or if they have early resources because they are doing something else that makes them successful. The answer is most likely a blend of sufficient resources and doing the right things to successfully operate and grow the business.
The important point to remember is that most entrepreneurs never develop the level of starting resources, for whatever reason that may be, that are interrelated with much greater prospects and probability of long-term survival, staying power and success.
Ignite Your Entrepreneurial Spirit
Published February 9, 2012 | The business of a true entrepreneur has to be engaging enough to develop a passion for it, all the while with a strong element of fun, and it has to exercise and employ your most intuitive and creative senses.
Being an entrepreneur that helps entrepreneurs, each time I stand before a group of aspiring entrepreneurs, I can’t help but regularly wonder to myself, whether or not people can really learn the necessary skills and traits it takes to become a successful entrepreneur or if like many are convinced, we’re actually born into the understood skills.
As I continually do research over the years about Entrepreneurship, and blend what I discover with my own experiences as an entrepreneur, I’ve been able to conclude that people are actually born with some of the instinctive traits and distinctiveness of character one needs to be a successful and innovative entrepreneur. 
However, these characteristics can always be improved through education and experience.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be able learn about entrepreneurship, leadership and teamwork from entrepreneurial family members, close friends and forward-thinking colleagues and yes, experience. Here’s something I often share about becoming an Entrepreneur.
How to Become a Promising Entrepreneur
First of all, you have to believe in yourself and stand behind your passion if you make the decision and choose the entrepreneurial path. You have to have a strong-belief in your confidence of passion so great that you would continue to stand firm behind your entrepreneurial opinions regardless of the discouragements you will face. And understand that even though this rock-solid positive way of thinking may attract a lot of negativity from pessimists and complainers, you should never lose your aspiration and hope.
Stay in a constant state of innovation and creativity since the vast majority of great entrepreneurs rarely create or develop just one profitable idea for products or services. They’re in a constant state of discovering, creating and innovating. Because let’s face it, many times you have to come up with, and work your way through a lot of bad ideas before you finally get to the one that has market staying power. So, persistency is the name of the game, and don’t ever give up.
Stay in motion and maintain your momentum, as highly-successful entrepreneurial innovators accomplish things quickly because they have a deep understanding that time is never on their side. You may actually have that one “big idea,” but because you’re in a race against time to get it out in the market before someone else, the idea can quickly lose profitability.
Adaptable, Connectable, and Sociable Brands
Published December 19, 2011 | 
There are some important questions every entrepreneur and small business owner should always keep in mind. Is your brand adaptable, connectable, and sociable? Can it be easily upgraded? Does it act like a smart system designed for integration and bring together over-lapping disciplinary approaches and solutions? And does it keep from getting bogged down in the formulaic world of endless analytics.
It seems counter-intuitive but the Connected Age is not the Age of Data. Smart brands remain ephemeral and short-lived for they recognize that brands, despite the inundation of data at their disposal, are more essence than form, more confusion than structure, and more instinctive perception than knowledge. Smart brands are viral because they are driven by passionate people, and their passion proliferates through the connections they are able to activate.
They make lasting impressions with the ability to connect people with people, brands with people, brands with brands, people with stories, stories with brands, stories with stories, and all the while frequently developing and evolving their repertoire of interactions based on innate intuition and the faster-than-real-time responses they receive from the members of networks they join, activate, or own.
Hyper-connected, hyper-social, and universal, they can foresee and predict desires, sense the slightest mood shifts, anticipate and forestall knowledge, and rapidly direct attention to highly-significant events and important conversations, since at any time something happens or is even being talked about and discussed, they are already there.
Smart brands have developed to the point they are good at dealing with the unpredictability. Businesses constantly wrestle with a certain level of chaos and disarray that is fundamentally intrinsic to humankind, since when people have more freedom and greater interaction, unpredictability naturally occurs. 
And the decentralized spider-like networks that shape the substructure of the Connection Age leads to evolving properties that are naturally unpredictable. Randomness and unpredictability is the new brand consistency or “consistently inconsistent.” This isn’t necessarily viewed as a bad thing since good brands tend to remain unpredictable, and thereby help their organizations welcome the unknown.
Management performance isn’t measured by how much uncertainty it can eliminate, but how much uncertainty it can tolerate and how quick it can easily change and adapt.
Successful Business Partnerships
Published November 29, 2011 | Common Business Mistakes You Want to Avoid
Create a Winning Business Partnership
I think it’s safe to say the majority of entrepreneurs and small business owners choose a sole proprietor business structure most often when starting up. But since the road to entrepreneurship can prove quite lonely and even limiting to some, the promise of bigger and better rewards may directly result from forming a business partnership.
That’s a sentiment that’s easily understood, since partnerships immediately offer more freedom for business owners by way of shared business tasks and the significant potential to earn greater profits. Yet, only 6% of all businesses start in the form of partnerships, with the overwhelming majority forming sole proprietorships.
It can’t be stressed enough that a business partnership can either be a horrific relationship disaster or a wonderfully positive experience. So before you decide to form a business partnership, carefully consider and understand the following critically important points.
Have the same shared vision between partners to be successful, with strong agreement on the same strategic direction of the company by everyone involved. If not, and one partner wants to build a national chain of retail outlets located in small shopping plazas, while the other would just like to earn a decent living, the business will of course fail in no time. 
The needs and desires of all partners should be addressed and an agreement reached, in order to set a clearly agreed upon course for the business.
Define business roles and responsibilities for a winning business partnership that capitalizes on the identified strengths and skills of each partner. Business roles should be clearly defined and assigned according to the strengths of each individual partner.
The 50-50 split should be avoided at all costs, although it may seem completely logical and fair to split the share of business ownership into an equal 50%. However, this ownership structure can impair decision making in the future. Instead of having decisions deadlocked in a standoff, you should strongly consider a 49% to 51% split. If this is not possible, an agreed upon method for breaking a tie should be adopted as part of the agreement to keep your business from being deadlocked on decisions.
Hold a regular meeting for partners to maintain a crucial open communication relationship. Partners should meet on a regular weekly, semi-weekly or monthly basis to share and discuss issues and grievances, review roles and responsibilities, and offer productive criticism.
Create a partnership agreement that is simple to set up because no legal documents are needed. Now, because partnerships are more often than not, an oral agreement between two or more parties, potential issues and problems can be prevented down the road by simply drawing up a legal partnership agreement.
Contents of a Business Partnership Agreement
I am often asked, “What should be addressed in a good business partnership agreement?” According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the agreement should always include…
(1) The amount of equity invested by each partner.
(2) Type of business.
(3) How profits and losses will be shared.
(4) Partner pay and compensation.
(5) Distribution of assets on dissolution.
(6) Provisions for any changes to or dissolving the partnership.
(7) Disputes settlement clause.
(8) Settlement in case of death or incapacitation.
(9) Restrictions of authority and expenditures.
(10) Duration of the partnership.
When comparing the sole proprietorship and partnership business structures, building a small business can be more rewarding and profitable in a partnership environment. You should give strong consideration to a business partnership structure, especially when you have someone to not only compliment your own skill set, but add significant value to your company.
Finally, understand that partnerships can work and meet expectations, especially when built upon the right structural foundation from the very beginning.